Norton Disk Doctor finds problems on C drive

[Jane]

I have a Dell computer. It's about 4 years old. Right from the
beginning Event Viewer showed that there were bad blocks on my hard
drive. Dell said I should swap out the disk before it crashed. They
said I would have to reinstall everything from scratch.

I'm handicapped and the thought of doing that was just too much for
me. Instead I bought an external drive and run Norton Ghost backups
periodically.

Four years later and nothing has happened.

Today I bought Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton System Works.
System Works comes with Disk Doctor. When I ran it, it found the bad
spots on the disk. It asked me if I wanted them to be fixed. I said
no.

What should I do? Should I leave well enough alone? Exactly what
will Disk Doctor try to do?

I would love to defrag my hard drive my can't because of these errors.

 

[R. McCarty]

All disk drives ship with spare clusters. Whenever a cluster is
marked as "Bad" the drive remaps the defective cluster to one
of the spares. So if Cluster 150 becomes unreliable that cluster
gets remapped.

Instead of Disk Doctor making changes you'd be better off
getting the manufacturer's Disk Analysis tool. Usually it's a bootable
..Iso that you use to create a Diagnostic CD-R. Most have both
a Quick and a Full/Comprehensive test.

Disk Doctor is a "Legacy" application from Norton - I'm not
sure that it has been properly updated over the years to work
with later NTFS formats. Since you have Images the risk of
repair is less but I wouldn't trust Disk Doctor with making them.

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

Contact Symantec Support.

 

[Bob Harris]

Try running the Microsoft program "CHKDSK" from a command prompt. This
comes free with XP.

The format will be CHKDSK C: /R

When it asks if you want it to do this on the next reboot, say Yes, that is
type Y.

Then, reboot.

This will check and fix many file-system problems, and it will also check
the unused space on the disk.

However, it may take over an hour to complete, so be patient.

There is a quicker from of CHKDSK using the /F parameter, instead of the /R
parameter. It also requires a reboot, and fixes fewer things.

Finally, there is the fastest form without any parameter (that is CHKDSK
C, which check the disk, but does not fix anything. After the initial
repair (/R or /F), run this form. If it does not report any errors, you do
not need to runs the other forms.

As for Disk Doctor, as far as I can tell it does no more than CHKDSK; it
just looks fancier. Worse, my version of Disk Doctor occasionally says
that it finds a problem, but CHKDSK finds none, rerunning Disk Doctor finds
none, and the PC has worked fine for almost 6 years. Thus, I conclude that
Disk Doctor is prone to false positives.

Another way to handle bad blocks is to format the disk (i.e., long format).
WARNING: That will destroy all data. But, it should lock-out current bad
blocks. Then, use GHOST to restore the disk form an image you made just
prior to the format. But, I would save this as a last resort, and I would
have multiple GHOST images, and I would test the GHOST restoration process
using bootable media, at least as far as the point just before the actual
restore. WARNING: Some versions of GHOST offer an option to restore from
within Windows. That will not work after a format ! Be sure that you are
comfortable with GHOST bootable media (floppy for 2003 or earlier, CD for
later).