NTFS Bad Sector Info

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CidiRome

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May 3, 2011
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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.
 
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Very interested if you find a utility to do this.

I've seen this repartitioning strategy mentioned somewhere, I think it might even be a wiki page, but I'm not entirely convinced it's a good idea. I doubt the probability of a bad sector developing beside an existing bad sector is any greater than anywhere on the disk.

From my understanding bad sectors get suitably managed by the hard drive by referring to the reserved remapping area instead.

Hawkeye22 is spot on about just picking up a new drive though.
 
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This is doable but not recommended. Bad sectors are like grey hairs once they start to develop more are likely to follow. Why risk your data on a known failing drive? Probably the cost of the software you need to do this from Windows exceeds the cost of a new drive.

Having said that I've done this a few times on behalf of some of my more frugal clients. If you're handy with Linux there are some command line disk manipulation utilities that you can use to do this.


 
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Sometimes "bad sectors' are not hardware related but software,,you could try fdisking the whole hdd from dos, I know it will take forever, at least you will be sure usually the firmware on the hdd manages the "bad sectors" and maps them out of service, the dos format utility will do the same except that you will always see the sectors marked with a "B", if on the other hand they disappear after fdisking then they were software snafu"s..:)
 
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I had one some time ago:

700279807 KB total disk space.
72184324 KB in 45357 files.
17508 KB in 687 indexes.
4 KB in bad sectors.
138023 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
627939948 KB available on disk.

I did wonder where on the disk it was located, that is on which partition the bad sector was on, so if there is any way to get this information from NTFS it would be interesting. Perhaps not useful, but interesting. :)
 
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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.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
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.
 
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The NTFS bad sector list does occasionally get some entries if the drive isn't able to read data from a failed sector before it reallocates it - that's why I qualified my statement with "in most cases". But the important point is that the NTFS bad sector list isn't a reliable way to find out where all the bad sectors are on the drive.
 
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Hi.

I'm sorry for the dupplicates. But in my understanding the topic was never created because I always recieved a message telling me that the page was not available or something like every time I tried to submit the message. I only noticed now through message on my email that reported me to this topic.

From my old experience of formating drives in MS-DOS about 15 years ago, most of the times (not always) the bad sectors are confined to a section of the drive and tend to grow to the sibbling sectors. Probably the actual tecnology is not anything close to a 420Mb or 1.6Gb drive, but I think the same theory may apply.

When I find some application that gives me this info I will test it.

For testing I thought of partitioning the disk with small partions and test them individually that way I would know wich ones have bad sectors and at the end exclude the space of the ones that were affected, but this would be to much work for a thing that should be very easy and that should be done wuthout the necessity to partition or even format the drive.

Best Regards.
 
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