Repairing Bad Sectors

[Guest]

I have a dual-boot system, both OS are XP Home / SP2. The secondary OS, which
resides on my d: drive (200GB Seagate HDD), recently got corrupted. My real
problem though is that since then, that drive (d shows ~47GB in bad sectors
and as a result the free space on d: is 47GB less than what it should be.

- I ran diagnostics on the disk, (using Seagate and XP utilities), and the
disk seems to be fine physically.
- Did Chkdsk /R, which ran without reporting any errors
- Can’t tell if the bad sectors contain any data – all of my user data on
the drive are OK, so all I want is to reclaim these bad sectors as free space.

Any ideas/suggestions?

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, SLA.

Is that 200 GB HDD supported by your mobo/BIOS? As you probably know, "Big
Drives" over about 137 GB require 48-bit LBA support, and some not-very-old
mobos can't handle this. You may need to update your BIOS.

If the drive or file system really is corrupted, then you may need a utility
like R-Studio, which recovered "lost" files on a HD for my a year or two
ago. You can check it out at www.r-tt.com. I have no connection with the
company except as a satisfied customer.

RC

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Seagate should have a diagnostic utility available off their web site. Be
warned: if there is such a utility, it may erase data off the drive being
tested. If it reports too many bad sectors, then you should not be using
the drive. Also check with the store you purchased it, or with Seagate, so
as to see if it may be under warranty.

 

[Steve N.]

I have a dual-boot system, both OS are XP Home / SP2. The secondary OS, which
resides on my d: drive (200GB Seagate HDD), recently got corrupted. My real
problem though is that since then, that drive (d shows ~47GB in bad sectors
and as a result the free space on d: is 47GB less than what it should be.

- I ran diagnostics on the disk, (using Seagate and XP utilities), and the
disk seems to be fine physically.
- Did Chkdsk /R, which ran without reporting any errors
- Can’t tell if the bad sectors contain any data – all of my user data on
the drive are OK, so all I want is to reclaim these bad sectors as free space.

Any ideas/suggestions?

47 GigaBytes?!? Jeez Loiuse! That's nearly 25% of the entire disk! What
reports that figure of bad sectors? What does the CHKDSK show exactly
for a bad sector count?

Steve

 

[Guest]

Here's what chkdsk gives me:

Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

195358400 KB total disk space.
97468620 KB in 86835 files.
28092 KB in 3624 indexes.
47420896 KB in bad sectors.
204024 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
50236768 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
48839600 total allocation units on disk.
12559192 allocation units available on disk.
=====================================================

 

[Guest]

All of my user data are fine on the drive - there may be some correpted
system data from the second XP I have on this drive, but I do not have much
use of it.

Thanks for the recommendation for a file recovery app - I'm using Active
File Recovery, and am as happy as you are with R-Studio.

Thanks -Nathan
=========================================

 

[Kenny S]

No no no....

Your hard disk is not working correctly because its bigger than 137 gb,
making the
rest seem like bad sectors.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013





How to Enable 48-bit LBA Support for ATAPI Disk Drives [Q303013]
(10-18-2001)
SUMMARY
This article describes the Windows XP 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA)
support for ATA Packet Interface (ATAPI) disk drives that can enable the
capacity of your hard disk to exceed the current 137 gigabyte (GB) limit.
NOTE: You must have Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) for the client installed
before you enable 48-bit LBA support in Windows XP Home Edition or Windows
XP Professional. If you do not have SP1 installed, potential data loss may
occur if you enable 48-bit LBA support.
MORE INFORMATION
Windows XP includes 48-bit LBA support for ATAPI disk drives that can enable
the capacity of your hard disk to exceed the current 137 GB limit. This type
of
support is new technology and Microsoft has only tested a limited number of
these disk drives.
By default, Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional do not have
48-bit LBA support enabled.
You must meet the following requirements to use 48-bit LBA ATAPI support:
- You must have a 48-bit LBA compatible BIOS.
- You must have a hard disk that has a capacity that is greater than 137 GB.
- You must have Windows XP installed.
- For Windows XP Home Edition or Windows XP Professional, you must enable
the
support in the registry by adding or changing the registry value,
EnableBigLba, to 1 (DWORD) in the following registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters\
NOTE: If you attempt to enable the 48-bit LBA ATAPI support by editing the
preceding registry setting and you did not meet the minimum requirements,
you may observe the following behavior:
- The registry value, EnableBigLba, is disabled:
If you have a 48-bit compatible BIOS that can support a hard disk that has a
capacity that is greater than 137 GB, only the first 137 GB of the hard disk
are addressable. The remainder of the hard disk is not used.
- The registry value, EnableBigLba, is enabled, but you do not have a 48-bit
LBA compatible BIOS and the capacity of the hard disk does not exceed 137
GB:
If you enable the 48-bit LBA ATAPI support by editing the registry setting,
but you lack both a 48-bit LBA compatible BIOS and a hard disk that has a
capacity that is greater than 137 GB, you have not changed the system. The
hard disk continues to function as a standard hard disk.
- The registry value, EnableBigLba, is enabled without a 48-bit LBA
compatible
BIOS, but you have a hard disk with a capacity that is larger than 137 GB:
If you enable 48-bit ATAPI support in the registry and you have a hard disk
that has a capacity that is greater than 137 GB, but you do not have a
48-bit
LBA compatible BIOS, only the first 137 GB of the hard disk are addressable.
The remainder of the hard disk is not used.


The problem is that the drive can be seen, but when you hit that 137GB
barrier, and then exceed it, you get "wrap-around," which means that the OS
starts counting disk blocks at 0 again!

 

[Jim]

I have a dual-boot system, both OS are XP Home / SP2. The secondary OS, which
resides on my d: drive (200GB Seagate HDD), recently got corrupted. My real
problem though is that since then, that drive (d shows ~47GB in bad sectors
and as a result the free space on d: is 47GB less than what it should be.

- I ran diagnostics on the disk, (using Seagate and XP utilities), and the
disk seems to be fine physically.
- Did Chkdsk /R, which ran without reporting any errors
- Can't tell if the bad sectors contain any data - all of my user data on
the drive are OK, so all I want is to reclaim these bad sectors as free space.

Any ideas/suggestions?

47 GB of bad sectors is certainly a lot... Such a drive is not long for
this world. Reclaim the space with a new drive.
Jim

 

[R. McCarty]

Outside of a new drive or attempting a RMA with the
manufacturer, you might consider the program SpinRite.
It is probably the pre-eminent disk repair utility.Created
by Steve Gibson (SheildsUp). Version 6.0 was released
not too long ago and has support for NTFS, which 5.0
lacked. I've used this tool for a long time and had a good
deal of success with it. Not cheap but very effective.
http://grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

 

[Guest]

Turns out that my problem was created when, after installing the 200GB drive,
I installed XP on it using the installation CD with the original release of
XP, and then installed SP2. As described in
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013
disks >137GB are only supported with SP1+, and bad things happen to your
data if the disk is installed without SP1/2.

The only thing I could do, was reinstall the disk using Seagate's DiskWizard
(formatting will not do), and I got these sectors back.

I can't believe that Microsoft acknowledges this kind of issue only in the
fine-print of this article. The Newsgroup is filled up with postings from
people who got screwed from that...
==============================================

 

[anonymous]

Consider how old XP is and how new 137+ GB drives are.