I cant fix bad sectors

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve
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Steve

When I run the scan disk or(errer checking) I get 48 kb's
in bad sector how do I fix that?
 
When I run the scan disk or(errer checking) I get 48 kb's
in bad sector how do I fix that?
Click to expand...
If this is an NTFS volume and those sectors are marked as bad in the
MFT, I don't think there is much you can do.
I would download a diagnostic utility from the maker of the
harddrive and see what that has to say...
Dave
 
Bad sectors are not fixed.. the system will flag the bad sectors and avoid
using them..
 
Bad sectors are not fixed.. the system will flag the bad sectors and avoid
using them..
Click to expand...
That's what I thought... but then why does windows 2000 mark them
as permanently bad in it's mft file, and then never unmark them.

This happened to me once. There were a couple of read errors.
Win2k marked them as bad. I ran the IBM diagnostic tool which
detected them, did something under the covers, and magically,
no more bad sectors.
However, windows 2000 still has a record of the two bad sectors,
and nothing will free them up.
I eventually copied this partition as-is to a brand new
bigger harddrive, everything worked great. But guess what?
the MFT still points out every time a chkdsk is run that
there are two bad sectors.
Dave
 
How did you copy the partition ?

If you used a disk imaging too such as partition magic, and did a physical
copy, then thats exactly what you got, an image of the partition including
the master file table which would have contained the flagged bad sectors.
You should have done a logical copy.

Paul
 
How did you copy the partition ?

If you used a disk imaging too such as partition magic, and did a physical
copy, then thats exactly what you got, an image of the partition including
the master file table which would have contained the flagged bad sectors.
You should have done a logical copy.

Paul
Click to expand...
Yes I did use partition magic. I see what you are saying, but
win2k should provide a tool to reset those "bad sectors"

What do you mean by logical copy?

Dave
 
There is a way to reset them, your reformat the disk which recreates the
mft.

A physical copy doesnt care about individual files on a partition, it just
starts at the first block and copies in order to the last block, this will
include empty space, the mft as is, and the target disk will contain the
same level of file fragmentation as the original.

A logical copy, copies individual files, so it starts at the first file in
the mft, gets the cluster addresses, goes and gets all the pieces of a file,
sorts them in order and copies them, and then moves on to the next file in
the mft. This is what a normal backup does. It doesnt include free space so
its faster, it defragments files in the process and doesnt copy bad sectors.

Paul
 
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