How do I run scan for bad sectors first?

[Guest]

I have a drive D: with perhaps millions of bad "file segments." When I run
chkdsk /f /r d: from the command prompt, it always starts by verifying the
file system, and reports, forever to the end of time, that there are
unreadable file segments. I need to bypass this portion of chkdsk and go
straight to the search for and repair of bad sectors, as I think this will
help solve the problem. The file system check could run afterwords - or is
this a bad idea?

I have tried using the check boxes on drive D to no avail. I get an error
message that chkdsk cannot complete, but no option to request one on startup.

Any help here would be appreciated.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

You don't need to use the /F switch with the /R switch. /R implies /F. However, it must check the file system, before it can try to recover bad sectors. Start it, and let it run.

 

[Guest]

Thanks. Do you have any idea just how long this will take? It does about
700-1000 unreadable segments per hour. There are thousands that are bad, if
not hundreds of thousands. I have no idea how a file segment relates to a
file or a sector.

Ned

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

If your hard drive is trashed, or the file system is seriously damaged it may take quite a while.

A sector is one block on the disk, usually 512 bytes. A cluster is one or more sectors in a contiguous group. The default cluster size for XP on an NTFS system is 4,096 bytes, or 8 sectors. FAT32 varies the cluster size in relation to the drive size.