i have a maxtor dimond max plus 9 60gb hard drive where i have partitioned it into 10gb primary partition which means its at hda1 and then 40gb for extended partition which contain 100mb /boot, 512mb swap, and 8gb is / partition. the rest 40gb of space on my drive is devided among d:\,e:\,f:\ and g:\ drives.

i wanted to install my redhat linux on my first partiton on my extended partition. so i installed it as i. i have experience in installing reahat 9 coz i have installed it many times b4 this. but i never tried using the default check for bad block when formating my 3 required partition which is swap, boot and / partition.

but today i tried once to check whether my disk is defective or so i check the check badblock when partitionning for installation. every things goes well and reaches where formating and unfortunately a window popup has a title of "error" saying that found bad block on /dev/hda10 and cannot continue and has to reboot. when i do this my linux partition contain redhat 9 and i wanted to reinstall fresh copy of linux.

so its obvious that that is bad sector right. so i start to panic and do alot of backup. (BTW this new harddrive i've just got 2days) and trying to format my linux partiton ot ntfs so that i can scandisk for badsector using windows xp. but i notice that if i just format like that in windows xp then i will lose the GRUB and will no longer be able to boot windows and have to reinstall windows again. so i've somehow got erasedGRUB from MBR and then format my linux partition into k:\ and scaned it using windows xp and found no error or any badblock in the disk.

what is bad block anyway? why windows dont detected bad sector?

and so i used Power Max which utilities that Maxtor.com provide to check its disk condition. and used it to scan the disk for all possible scan type that the utilities provided and found no error and each and every one of the scan passed?

another question.

how am i gonna use GRUB bootloader which when i format linux partition and still beable to boot into windows without GRUB?

thax for the patient of reading this broken english questions.
and in advance for answering.

Bad blocks are physical portions of your hard disk that do not consistently store and return information properly. They're just parts of the disk that are unreliable. Just about every disk has a few bad block on it, because manufacturing a perfect disk is just about impossible. Disk makers test their media carefully, and actually throw out disks that have too many bad blocks on them to sell. Bad blocks are so common that disks have an internal mechanism to deal with them. You can instruct the disk to mark a block as "bad", and it will then no longer use it to store data. It will automatically skip right over it for you.

The reason Linux complained about the bad block and Windows didn't is probably because Linux is doing a much more complete test of your disk. The Windows ScanDisk program is not concerned about problems with your disk media, it only cares about the structure of directories and files on the disk. When you asked the RedHat 9 installer to check for bad blocks, it started writing and reading back data from every block on the disk, probably several times on each block, to be sure that you would always get back exactly what you wrote to disk. One block didn't work right, so it complained. If I remember right, there's also an option to automatically mark blocks as bad, which you probably didn't check. If you had, I think it would automatically tell the disk about that bad block and then keep going. Yes, that should probably be the default behavior.

If PowerMax didn't find that bad block, it probably means that it's usually working OK, and just failing sometimes. It happened to fail when Linux was checking it, and happened to work when PowerMax was checking it. This sort of intermittent problem can happen with magnetic media. That's why Linux checks so carefully: so it has a good chance of finding intermittent problems. After all, those are the worst sort of storage problem you can have!

So I recommend letting Linux scan for bad blocks and automatically mark them as bad. That's always a good idea with a new disk.

Now about your booting problem. I'm not sure I understand what's happened here, but let me describe what I think your setup is and you can correct me where I'm wrong. You've got eight partitions: the first for your Windows C: drive, then three for Linux, then four more for Windows. Your disk's Master Boot Record contains Grub, which is set up to dual-boot from either the first or second partitions. Now you've re-formatted your Linux partitions with NTFS, and run ScanDisk on them, so they no longer contain any Linux filesystems. But your disk's MBR should still contain Grub, because you only overwrote some partitions, not the entire disk. Unless, of course, Microsoft is nasty enough to overwrite the MBR when you format any partition, which wouldn't make sense to me but might to them.

I think your best bet is to boot from the RH9 CD again and install it to the Linux partitions that already exist. During the installation, be sure to tell it to automatically mark bad blocks, and to install Grub as the boot loader on the MBR. You will then have a system that boots into Linux. You can then manually configure Grub to boot Windows from that first partition, and get both OS's back.