Bad Sector list.

[CidiRome]

Hi.

I'm search for an utility that can tell me this info about NTFS partitions:
- First Sector of a partion (I don't know if this address is adsolute to the disk or to the partition);
- Last Sector of the Partition;
- List of the bad sector adresses.

The goal is to pinpoint if the bad sectors are confined to a specific area and create partitions with safe unused space margins arround the bad sectors to prevent the typical growing bad sectors arround the existing ones. For examples, if I discover that the existing bad sectors are located within the first Gbyte of the partition, I would shrink the partion for 2 Gb at the begining to allow the bad sectors to stay outside of the partition.

I've searched for hours and know that much of this information is stored in a special file called $badclus on the root of the partition, but haven't found any way to see the actual information I need.

Any Ideas.

Best Regards.

 

[sminlal]

In most cases you won't find any bad sectors in the NTFS bad sector list on modern hard drives. This is because the hard drives themselves do bad sector remapping and hide this from the operating system.

 

[sminlal]

Duplicate thread - see: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/268989-32-ntfs-sector-info

 

[hang-the-9]

If your drive is getting bad sectors, replace the drive unless you keep very good backups. Any type of drive errors that start showing up is a good indicator of problems down the road.

 

[fredbred]

Hi i was facing a similar problem - my 2TB WD Caviar started to have bad blocks - one month after the guarantee ended, the disk started to have bad blocks. I did not feel like buying a new one and decided to retain the disk for non critical data.

Solution, that worked for me (in win 7, but should be similar from Win XP onwards):

0) Make sure there ane no data on the disk, as these will be destroyed! It can be done only on a secondary disk (no the one with the system)
1) Format the disk (NTFS)
2) Disable Recycle bin and System recovery for this particular disk if it is running
3) run a full scan for badblocks eg "chkdsk d: /r" - this is to identify the bad sectors - it might take a long time. the test was much faster on a empty disk; this will tell you the number of bytes occupied by bad blocks
4) Open the "Disk Management" in the Computer Management, select the disk and choose "Shrink volume" - the system will not let you to shrink the partition beyond the bad blocks, therefore you have the last bad block
5) the newly freed space after the original partition should be clean without bad blocks
6) now you can use a tool to resize the partition from the beginning - based on the number of bad blocks, I used my best guess and shrank the partition to 1GB, what will later be the gap containing the bad blocks between two partitions without bad blocks - there were 7 mb of bad blocks in my case. For this I used the MiniTool Partition Wizard http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html which is free for personal use.
7) You should have now three partitions with the original partition with the bad blocks in the middle; create and format the other two partitions.
8) Now if you do a chkdsk /c scan for the two new partitions, these should be clean. If so, I would suggest to either delete the original partition with the bad blocks or remove its drive letter (in Disk Management), so that you do not accidentally copy any data to it
9 pray that the bad blocks won't spread (too fast ;-)

The above worked for me and basically eliminate the need to know the exact location of the bad blocks and for me - I lost 1GB but saved 1999GB (at least for now).

Good luck