Jan said:
A few days ago my backup software wouldn't work, it gave a message:
"Failed to read from the sector 63 of hard disk". I ran Windows
Chkdsk and it found no problems. The software worked until three days
later and it had the same problem. I ran Chkdsk again, still found no
problems. Then it worked again until two days later, when I got the
same message.
Is the HD about to go bad? Will formatting it help? Or it is time to
get a new HD before it dies?
Just for chuckles, download HDTune and use the Error Scan tab. Each block on
the screen, will represent many megabytes of data. See if any blocks
are non-green, implying something happened within that chunk. Since
the disk is scanned raw, every block should be tested. It is not a
partition based scan. I like the fact I get visual feedback while
it is running, and that it can be stopped if all I wanted to see
is the health of the first gigabyte of the disk.
http://www.hdtune.com/download.html (ver 2.55 is free)
Everyone else seems to be quite comfortable with your symptoms,
but "sector 63" bothers me. The CHS geometry of my disk, uses
what looks like 63 sectors per track. Sector numbers start at
zero. "Sector 63" is the first sector of the second track.
My partition table shows, sector 0 is the MBR, and the rest
of the first track is not used (at least, I don't know what is
hiding in there). My very first partition starts at sector 63.
That may not contain actual user data or a file. The partition
boot sectors are stored up in the front of the partition. There
is a primary and a backup boot sector in there. In fact, that
might be the primary boot sector. If that was unreadable, wouldn't
your OS be un-bootable ? I don't know whether the OS is smart
enough to access the backup boot sector or not. When I looked
at mine, what impressed me about my setup, is it doesn't look
like the backup boot sector is valid.
http://www.ntfs.com/boot-sector-damaged.htm
The program TestDisk, has the ability to "dump" the boot sector
section of a partition. I'm running the Windows version at
the moment.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
To navigate there, start the program. Use "Create" to create
a log file (a don't care for now). Select the disk to be
examined (I have two, and I'm looking at the first one.)
I used "Proceed" at this point. Then "Intel" for the partition
setup type.
That brings you to the main menu. Select "Advanced".
Cursor down to the partition you want to examine the partition
boot sector on. If you have only one partition, there should
be just one entry showing. At the bottom of the screen, "Boot"
should be highlighted, if there is a boot sector present (maybe
it detects the signature bytes). Hit return to go to the Boot
sub-menu.
The right-most option at this level, is "Dump". This will show
the primary and backup boot sectors. When you hit return while
selecting "Dump", that will read the partition boot sectors.
In your case, I'm expecting the sector shown on the left of the
screen, will be the contents of sector 63. If sector 63 was
really busted, then that sector should not be display-able.
You can select the Quit options, and Quit all the menu levels until
the TestDisk program closes, or press control-c to just make
the program quit completely. The control-c option is good for
levels of the program that don't seem to have a quit option.
If you just use the "Dump" option, that shouldn't do anything
to your disk. The above sequence should only have been reading
things.
The amount of data shown, is 0x600 hex. That is 1536 decimal or
three 512 byte sectors worth. So the "boot sector" area displayed,
is actually two chunks of three sectors each. But offset zero on
the left hand side, could well be the "sector 63" your backup
program is complaining about. And I can't help but feel that is
no coincidence. It is a pretty funny sector to be reported as
being fried, of the millions of sectors on your disk.
This might not make any difference to your desire to replace the
disk. I frequently replace my disks, before they show signs of
being on their last legs, so I don't have a problem with you
changing out the disk. It makes your current disk the "backup"
or "snapshot" in a sense, which is a good thing. I'm just
curious why the backup program chose to complain about sector 63,
and nothing else.
To examine your primary partition table (stored in sector 0),
you can use this. That will show the same kind of info that
TestDisk was showing, but with a little less cursor based navigation.
This tool is part of some older version of Partition Magic. Unzip this.
Then double click the PTEDIT32.exe to run the program. What you're
looking at, is the place where the up-to-four primary partition
entries are stored.
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PTEDIT32.zip
(Screenshot of PTEDIT32 viewing a Dell boot disk)
http://www.vistax64.com/attachments...n-partiton-recovery-dell-xps-420-dell-tbl.gif
Paul