Bad Sectors... Are They Recoverable?

V

veloman

Hello,

Running Chkdsk on my computer tells me that I've got 20KB in bad sectors on
my drive. I don't know how or why this suddenly occured but I'm hoping
there is a way to recover them. Is it possible to recover bad sectors on a
disk? If so, how? I'm using a Western Digital hard drive on an Abit NF7-S
v2.0 motherboard. The drive uses an IDE interface but I have it connected
on the SATA 1 port using the Abit provided IDE to SATA (Serillel) converter
which has for many many months proven to be stable and problem free for me.
Here is an example of the CHKDSK report after looking it up in the
Application Event Viewer via Computer Management console within Windows:

Event Type: Information
Event Source: Winlogon
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1001
Date: 10/21/2003
Time: 4:47:26 PM
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.


A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 28 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 28 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 28 unused security descriptors.

117210208 KB total disk space.
70648604 KB in 58895 files.
18736 KB in 3176 indexes.
20 KB in bad sectors.
149812 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
46393036 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
29302552 total allocation units on disk.
11598259 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
4f 39 01 00 82 f2 00 00 12 5a 01 00 00 00 00 00 O9.......Z......
56 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 e2 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 V...............
62 f2 27 06 00 00 00 00 06 0a d6 1e 00 00 00 00 b.'.............
b0 91 ac 07 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 04 fd f2 33 00 00 00 00 ...........3....
99 9e 36 00 00 00 00 00 0f e6 00 00 00 00 00 00 ..6.............
00 70 0c d8 10 00 00 00 68 0c 00 00 00 00 00 00 .p......h.......

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.


For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
 
O

Opinicus

veloman said:
Hello,

Running Chkdsk on my computer tells me that I've got 20KB in bad
sectors on my drive. I don't know how or why this suddenly occured
but I'm hoping there is a way to recover them.

One thing my 20-odd years of experience of working with hard drives is that
when a hard drive suddenly starts showing bad sectors, the first thing you
must do is back up all your data to a secure medium. (In the Bad Old Days it
was 5 1/4 inch disks then 3 1/2 inch disks then (re)writable CDs. Today it's
a Pockey.) Have you ever seen a sock come unraveled when one stitch goes?
That's what the surface of a flakey HD is like.
 
K

King George John

veloman said:
Hello,

Running Chkdsk on my computer tells me that I've got 20KB in bad sectors on
my drive. I don't know how or why this suddenly occured but I'm hoping
there is a way to recover them.

I was always under the impression that when a disk scanning utility marked a
sector (or cluster) as bad it already has moved (or has made a good effort
to move) the data.

IOW: that the utility will make a good effort to recover the data by
rereading the sector(s) MANY times until it gets a valid read. (The
hardware encoding detects errors.)

SO: Am I wrong?

EMWTK
 

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