How to clear bad sectors on a new harddrive?

[David]

I have a laptop computer that developed a bad sector on the hardrive (NTFS). The scan disk program recovered it and marked it as bad. Past experience suggests that the drive should be replaced before further damage occurs. I made an image using Drive Image 7 and then copied that image to a new but larger drive. Everything went fine, but there is one cluster marked bad on the new disk. I suspect the copy operation moved the metafile information such as $badclus to the new drive and the file system thinks the sector is bad. Is there a way to reset this? I know one bad cluster is a miniscule amount of space, but it would be nice to have some way to retest the clusters and correct the table. chkdsk /r does NOT do it. Any thoughts?

David

 

[CS]

I have a laptop computer that developed a bad sector on the hardrive (NTFS). The scan disk program recovered it and marked it as bad. Past experience suggests that the drive should be replaced before further damage occurs. I made an image using Drive Image 7 and then copied that image to a new but larger drive. Everything went fine, but there is one cluster marked bad on the new disk. I suspect the copy operation moved the metafile information such as $badclus to the new drive and the file system thinks the sector is bad. Is there a way to reset this? I know one bad cluster is a miniscule amount of space, but it would be nice to have some way to retest the clusters and correct the table. chkdsk /r does NOT do it. Any thoughts?

David

The older versions of Norton Utilities came with a disk editor,
however, they were for FAT and will not read NTFS. What you need is a
disk editor that will allow you to read and edit NTFS. Here's one
that has the ability to recover bad sectors:

(Not inexpensive though = $69.00.) Supposedly the download trial
works.

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/...tilities/Runtime_s_DiskExplorer_for_NTFS.html

Watch the URL word wrap.....

You may be able to locate a less expensive disk editor by doing a
Google search.

 

[Menno Hershberger]

I have a laptop computer that developed a bad sector on the hardrive
(NTFS). The scan disk program recovered it and marked it as bad. Past
experience suggests that the drive should be replaced before further
damage occurs. I made an image using Drive Image 7 and then copied
that image to a new but larger drive. Everything went fine, but there
is one cluster marked bad on the new disk. I suspect the copy
operation moved the metafile information such as $badclus to the new
drive and the file system thinks the sector is bad. Is there a way to
reset this? I know one bad cluster is a miniscule amount of space, but
it would be nice to have some way to retest the clusters and correct
the table. chkdsk /r does NOT do it. Any thoughts?

I know the feeling, but you'd probably be better off to leave well enough
alone...
I suppose you could "copy" (not clone) everything to a clean drive, format
that one again, and then copy it all back. But that's not very easy to do
with a laptop. There may be some kind of disk utility that would fix it,
but I've never heard of it.

 

[R. McCarty]

SpinRite 7.0 from Gibson Research can do it. However the program
is somewhat expensive to repair/unmark a single bad cluster. Have
you tried running a Chkdsk C: /R on the partition ?

 

[Uncle John]

David,

You wrote
"I have a laptop computer that developed a bad sector on the hard drive
(NTFS). The scan disk program recovered it and marked it as bad."
Scandisk can not be run on an NTFS system. If you are running ChkDsk with
out the /f switch you may well get reports of bad clusters that are
spurious. Within Windows the Chkdsk syntax is
chkdsk [volume:][[Path] FileName] [/f] [/v] [/r] [/x] [/i] [/c] [/l[:size]]

If you believe you have bad clusters run with /f /r switches and Windows
will autocheck at your next reboot.Any bad clusters will be recovered and
you will not see them anymore. However be warned that chkdsk with the /r
switch may take a very long time , several hours on a 100 GB disk. So you
would well advised to run with the /f switch first which will fix any files
system errors.

If you are really keen to make sure that you have recovered everything ever
on the disk there is a utility called Spinrite. Version 6 works with NTFS
systems that will do the job. You will find it at

http://grc.com/spinrite.htm

I think it costs about $85.

I have used it in the past and it works well but again a full recovery takes
an extremely long time!

 

[da_test]

I have a laptop computer that developed a bad sector on the hardrive (NTFS). The scan disk program recovered it and marked it as bad. Past experience suggests that the drive should be replaced before further damage occurs. I made an image using Drive Image 7 and then copied that image to a new but larger drive. Everything went fine, but there is one cluster marked bad on the new disk. I suspect the copy operation moved the metafile information such as $badclus to the new drive and the file system thinks the sector is bad. Is there a way to reset this? I know one bad cluster is a miniscule amount of space, but it would be nice to have some way to retest the clusters and correct the table. chkdsk /r does NOT do it. Any thoughts?

David

See this web site:
http://www.bodden.de/misc/ntfsrecovery/body_bad_sector_recovery_on_ntfs.php

It talks about using a Linux self-contained (runs directly from
the bootable CD) system to repair the NTFS $badclus.

Dave

 

[David]

I am the original person that posted this message.

Original message repeated here:

I have a laptop computer that developed a bad sector on the hardrive (NTFS). The scan disk program recovered it and marked it as bad. Past experience suggests that the drive should be replaced before further damage occurs. I made an image using Drive Image 7 and then copied that image to a new but larger drive. Everything went fine, but there is one cluster marked bad on the new disk. I suspect the copy operation moved the metafile information such as $badclus to the new drive and the file system thinks the sector is bad. Is there a way to reset this? I know one bad cluster is a miniscule amount of space, but it would be nice to have some way to retest the clusters and correct the table. chkdsk /r does NOT do it. Any thoughts?
David

After reading the responses so far, I am content to leave 4000 bytes out of 60GB unavailable. There seems to be no combination of switches in chkdsk that will recover a cluster already marked bad by an NTFS file system. I think Microsoft should have something simple to use, but apparently they do not. Powerquest (now Norton) does not even mention this issue in their FAQs for Drive Image, or Ghost. It is not worth editing the metafiles manually and royally messing up the entire file system. I thank all who took time to reply.

David

 

[da_test]

I am the original person that posted this message.

Original message repeated here:

I have a laptop computer that developed a bad sector on the hardrive (NTFS). The scan disk program recovered it and marked it as bad. Past experience suggests that the drive should be replaced before further damage occurs. I made an image using Drive Image 7 and then copied that image to a new but larger drive. Everything went fine, but there is one cluster marked bad on the new disk. I suspect the copy operation moved the metafile information such as $badclus to the new drive and the file system thinks the sector is bad. Is there a way to reset this? I know one bad cluster is a miniscule amount of space, but it would be nice to have some way to retest the clusters and correct the table. chkdsk /r does NOT do it. Any thoughts?
David

After reading the responses so far, I am content to leave 4000 bytes out of 60GB unavailable. There seems to be no combination of switches in chkdsk that will recover a cluster already marked bad by an NTFS file system. I think Microsoft should have something simple to use, but apparently they do not. Powerquest (now Norton) does not even mention this issue in their FAQs for Drive Image, or Ghost. It is not worth editing the metafiles manually and royally messing up the entire file system. I thank all who took time to reply.

David

As gar as I know you are right.
MS does not provide any documented tool to do this.
I did a similar partition recreation as you and also suffer from
the carried over $badclus.
One of these days I'm going to back up the system and run
the Linux procedure
cheers,
Dave

 

[Amanda Wang [MSFT]]

Hi David,

Thanks for posting.

Based on my knowledge, this should lie on the image tools and backup tools
which have copied the sector information from the old disk.

Therefore, we suggest that you use Windows backup to backup and copy the
files to another new drive and then to check if the issue still exists.

Hope that helps. If there is anything unclear, please feel free to let me
know. I'm very glad to help you.

Thanks & Regards

Amanda Wang [MSFT]

Microsoft Online Partner Support

Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security

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[Steve N.]

David,

You wrote
"I have a laptop computer that developed a bad sector on the hard drive
(NTFS). The scan disk program recovered it and marked it as bad."
Scandisk can not be run on an NTFS system. If you are running ChkDsk with
out the /f switch you may well get reports of bad clusters that are
spurious. Within Windows the Chkdsk syntax is
chkdsk [volume:][[Path] FileName] [/f] [/v] [/r] [/x] [/i] [/c] [/l[:size]]

If you believe you have bad clusters run with /f /r switches and Windows
will autocheck at your next reboot.Any bad clusters will be recovered and
you will not see them anymore.

CHDKSK /R does a surface scan and attempts to recover data from bad
sectors not previously marked bad, not recover bad sectors. It will do
nothing to sectors already marked bad.

However be warned that chkdsk with the /r
switch may take a very long time , several hours on a 100 GB disk. So you
would well advised to run with the /f switch first which will fix any files
system errors.

CHKDSK /R implies /F, this is totally unnecessary.

Steve