bad sectors on my ntfs partition, what do i do?

[Haneef Bashir]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 3:43 AM, Brian McKee<brian.mckee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Haneef Bashir<darkfena313 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> i just want to know is this haddrive still any good? can it be fixed,
>> can i install windows on another partition with out any problem?
>
> Harddrives can reassign bad sectors automatically - when they start
> showing up without the harddrive hiding them from you before you got
> to them it's often not a good sign.
>
> Step one is make darned sure you have a backup of everything on that drive, then
>
> You could run Spinrite on it - a commercial product that attempts to
> recover the data from the bad partitions and rewrite them elsewhere.
> A pass with it will also give you a better idea of just how many
> issues there are on the drive.  Run it a second time and if new
> problems keep popping up it's time to trash the drive.  If the
> problems stay fixed and the SMART data looks ok, than I'd put it back
> in service.
>
> If you'd prefer free or open solutions, you could repartition it to a
> single partition, then run mke2fs -cc on it - that will do a
> read-write test for bad blocks as it formats.  Once it completes I'd
> write /dev/random to the whole drive with dd as a last test watching
> the output for errors, again if it looks ok and SMART tests pass, I'd
> put it back in service.l
>
thanks brian ill try that out.