NTFS bad blocks errors in the event viewer

Question

I have a Dell 510m with XP and a Toshiba HD. There are a few bad blocks which I can see with the Diagnostic CD. They haven't got worse over the last few years. Recently I saw some "Bad Block" errors in the event viewer. The diianostic CD shows me one more bad block than before.

My question is: When the Bad Block error appears, does that mean that the NTFS filing system has marked that block as bad so it doesn't get used again?  If not, will CHKDSK (the /R option?) find the new bad block and mark it unusable?  If not, is there a way to do this?

There is no option to replace the HD. I just need to keep this laptop going long enough to decide what to buy to replace it.

Thanks

Peter

Answer 1

Peter

24 KB in bad sectors. = 6 clusters so it is presently not a serious problem. However, you need to check regularly for a while to make sure that the number does not increase.

Of course any bad cluster can be bad news if it coincides with the location of a vital system file.

You should also use chkdsk to effect repairs as per this part of the report:

Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.

Windows found problems with the file system.

Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these.

Use Edit, Find with Volume Bitmap as the Search Criteria for further information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_File_System

Answer 2

Jim:

Thanks for the tip. I haven't tried spinrite but I did try to restore the bad blocks using a CD-based LINUX operating system (Knoppix). This doesn't 'use' the HD so it's safe to play with it and I was also able to back-up the entire HD to an external USB drive.  The bad sectors were not repaired. The number of bad blocks has not increased over the last couple of years. That PC is getting old now so I am not concerned now.

PeterM