Need help clearing and retesting a sector/cluster erronously marked bad by WinXP's chkdsk?

[Rocky]

How do you clear and retest a sector that is marked bad by WinXP's
chkdsk with NTFS? I have found out that the information about what
WinXP thinks is a bad cluster/sector is stored in a hidden file named
$BadClus that is part of the metafile group in NTFS. How do I view and
edit this file? Is there any other way to have the cluster/sector
retested? Partition magic will retest bad sectors only on FAT systems
and not NTFS. Are there other utilities that can handle NTFS? I have
run the disk manufacture's diagnostics several times and the SCSI
controller's surface scan several times and there is not a problem
with the drive. I know if I reformat the drive and reinstall
everything that will clear the false bad sector but I don't want to
have to do that. The determination of a bad sector is at the whim of
the Windows XP operating system (chkdsk).

I have tested the drive several times with the manufacture's
diagnostics and with other third party drive testing utilities
including the SCSI controllers surface scan many times over and over
and there is no error. I suspect that it may have been some sort of
glitch when chkdsk was running.

Thanks for any help.
Rocky

 

[Ken Blake]

How do you clear and retest a sector that is marked bad by WinXP's
chkdsk with NTFS?

An NTFS cluster is 4K. With disk space today selling for under a
penny a megabyte, 4K is a meaninglessly small amount of space,
worth a tiny fraction of a penny. Regardless of whether you think
the cluster is recoverable or not, it's foolhardy to run the risk
of using a cluster if there's any chance at all that it's truly
bad.