dealing with bad sectors in NTFS - advice please

graysky · 2009-05-25 18:07:04

I use smartmontools to check out my hdd's SMART system from time to time. Recently, I discovered some warning flags that physical corruption was present on my newest disk. I read the badblockshowto on the smartmontools website and determined that the errors begin (thankfully) in the middle of a shared NTFS partition. I booted into Windows XP and ran the m$ scanner (scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors) tool. After 90 min or so, it finished with a pretty non-descript box that more or less said the process was finished without displaying any log file detailing just how many bad sectors it locked out and which files were affected.

Does anyone have any experience detecting bad sectors/blocks on NTFS partitions under Linux?

MoonSwan · 2009-05-25 20:10:00

I downloaded and used the SeaTools package from Seagate (It covers modern Maxtors now too + their own drives). I found that, over all, it is slower to detect & run tests than Western Digital's. But it gave me an idea of which drive was toast and why, as opposed to Windows tools which just said there was a huge delayed write error. *rolls eyes* Big help eh? It's logs are also pretty useless but you can check them in the "computer management" section, storage module under the Control Panel.

I hope that helps. Oh also, IIRC the Seatools & WD's tools will also be download-able as ISO's if you suspect windows is making things worse. Worst case, go get the Ultimate Boot-CD. It has everything you need (literally, for any brand of hard drive it has a tool).

graysky · 2009-05-29 07:24:18

SeaTools sucks. The short test told me to run the long test. The long test crashed such that keyboard/mouse wouldn't respond. Long story short, I RMA'ed the drive and am expecting a replacement today (only cost me $22 and that covered 2-day shipping and return shipping). I have all my stuff backed-up, but hopefully, I can rsync the partitions to the replacement with minimal data loss. After all, the bad sectors could be on free space.

fukawi2 · 2009-05-29 11:49:27

1) Mount NTFS system
2) Create a tarball of the contents on another partition
3) Wipe the NTFS partition and run badblocks over it
4) Recreate partition
5) Extract the tarball back to the fresh partition

graysky · 2009-05-29 23:20:07

@fukawi2 - The partition in question is enormous... I don't have enough free space to do it.

fukawi2 · 2009-05-30 06:14:11

Is it all used though? Tar will only take what's used, so even if it's 500gb with only 20gb used, youll only need ~20gb to back it up.

Other than that, I'm not sure what to do about it.

graysky · 2009-05-30 08:21:14

True.. thanks for the suggestion.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-05-25 18:07:04

dealing with bad sectors in NTFS - advice please

#2 2009-05-25 20:10:00

Re: dealing with bad sectors in NTFS - advice please

#3 2009-05-29 07:24:18

Re: dealing with bad sectors in NTFS - advice please

#4 2009-05-29 11:49:27

Re: dealing with bad sectors in NTFS - advice please

#5 2009-05-29 23:20:07

Re: dealing with bad sectors in NTFS - advice please

#6 2009-05-30 06:14:11

Re: dealing with bad sectors in NTFS - advice please

#7 2009-05-30 08:21:14

Re: dealing with bad sectors in NTFS - advice please

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