Bad sectors in hard drive

Johnnio · 07-31-2007, 11:49 AM

Well, recently I found out that I have some bad sectors in my hard drive, I found it out when I tried to partition my drive using GParted. I've ran 'chkdsk /f /r' in the command prompt inside Windows, but that did nothing at all.

I've downloaded the Seagate Tools (Seagate Diagnostic Tool) from the Seagate website, and I'm wondering will that do any good? I'm not going to try it until SUSE downloads incase I lose it.

I'll post what chkdsk throws back at me.

Code:

78140128 KB total disk space
12878160 KB in 32512 files
9956 KB in 3086 indexes
4 KB in bad sectors
138608 KB in use by the system
65536 KB occupied by the log file
65113400 KB available on the disk

4096 bytes in each allocation unit
19535032 total allocation units on disk
16278350 allocationunits available on disk

It also tells me to run chkdsk with the /f parameter, but I have so 3 times! And as I said, no luck!

Thanks guys,
John

jailbait · 07-31-2007, 12:28 PM

"I've downloaded the Seagate Tools (Seagate Diagnostic Tool) from the Seagate website, and I'm wondering will that do any good?"

Yes. I have used this tool and it is very powerful. Most likely in the course of correcting the bad block problem you will lose data. Therefore back everything up before you start working with the Seagate tool.

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Steve Stites

Johnnio · 07-31-2007, 12:55 PM

What tests should I take with the program, that would actually help me fix my problem?

jailbait · 07-31-2007, 01:18 PM

"What tests should I take with the program, that would actually help me fix my problem?"

You can use the program to assign spare blocks to replace the bad blocks. I don't think that you recover the data on the bad blocks when you assign spares. In the worst case you can do the whole drive. It has been several years since I have used the program so I don't remember any more detail other than some tests took hours to run.

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Steve Stites

Johnnio · 07-31-2007, 02:09 PM

Thanks for the notification. I'll run some tests tommorow and try and do a clean installation of Linux over my dear Windows partition.

Thanks mate.

Johnnio · 07-31-2007, 03:38 PM

I was wondering, should I format my whole drive completely and then run a full test with Seatools?

EDIT: I've ran Seatools and it said it repaired the 1 error it found, but I'm still having problems, it didn't replace the sectors or mark them as non-operable or something. Because I booted into Fedora 7 to use GParted and it still says the hard drive has errors in it and it wont let me partition it. So that's why I asked the above question.

EDIT2: I ran a zero format on my hard drive which seems to have fixed it. Problem resolved (you can close topic now).