Corrupt HD / CHKDSK

[Guest]

Running Windows XP Home, SP2. A week ago I started having problems that I
tracked down to a bad block on my HD that mostly seems to affect the
c:\Windows directory. It manifested itself as a broken DLL that stopped me
from opening Wordpad. I fixed that be re-installing the DLL from the
installation disk but ever since the system has been unstable and keeps
hanging. The latest problem is one of the WMP10 codecs is broken. I've
tried using CHKDSK /F 3 times but the each time when I check the disk the
problem is still there. That's the background , so I have 2 questions:

1. can anyone recommend another program that might do a better job than
CHKDSK of fixing the disk and

2. will re-formatting the drive and re-installing WinXP do anything that
CHKDSK /F doesn't (I don't mind doing this if I know it might work)?

Any suggestions appreciated.

For info, this is what I get when I run CHKDSK:

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows found problems with the file system.
Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these.

20972857 KB total disk space.
12758648 KB in 89614 files.
28124 KB in 6198 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
139325 KB in use by the system.
32784 KB occupied by the log file.
8046760 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
5243214 total allocation units on disk.
2011690 allocation units available on disk.

 

[Bob Harris]

Try running CHKDSK C: /R. The "/R" option fixes more than /F, and also
checks the whole disk for bad blocks. You will need to reboot, since CHKDSK
can only fix things on the system partition from boot mode, not from within
the desktop mode.

Alternatively, you could run CHKDSK with /R from the XP recovery console,
which is available on the XP CDROM. Here are some links about the recovery
console.

http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm

http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm (near bottom)

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_rec.htm

 

[Guest]

No joy with CHKDSK /R. I ran it twice and it claimed to fix 4 files the
first time but when I run CHKDSK again it still finds errors (now I have
several thousand kB of bad blocks that I didn't have before). May be a
physical problem with the drive itself, rather than just data corruption.

Thanks for your suggestions.