re: chkdsk won't remove bad clusters
Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 11:07 am
Windows 2000 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by C K
(6909 messages posted)
Western Digital has a diagnostics utility designed for their drives to check it.
You really can't check a drive properly on the fly while a program or operating
system is running. Download the WD utility and check the drive as per their instructions.
Even then, it won't catch all errors due to the possibility that the addressing
on the electronics may have faults and failures. MS chkdsk is only a light duty
app that marks clusters as bad and not to be used. It can't repair or save corrupted
data. It can't truely do what the WD utility can to "replace" clusters when some
go bad, or what Spinrite can do to try and recover bad clusters. If data is corrupted
from a bad cluster, is impossible to repair it. That's when you need a back up.
Only particular RAID system have a safety net to keep your data safer from corruption.
If the fault lies in particular areas of the drive where important info is kept (MBR,
directories etc), then MS utilities can't cure that issue and you can see the results
that you are seeing.
Another excellent utility that I use all the time is Spinrite from GRC.com It can
test a drive and the surface extensively along with giving you a host of other info
about the drive. Well worth the cost I have found over the years. Check it out..
I checked the program you mention and found it didn't do anything more than give
you a GUI to the already monitoring SMART etc from the drive. When SMART is triggered
you will get a message of pending problems as reported by the HDD, on bootup or from
the operating system. The program you are using doesn't do ANY testing of the HDD
to find surface problems idependent of the HDD's own error correcting/detecting system.
Spinrite will, and it will activate spare sectors to replace bad ones when found
if you want it to. If there are any left, the newer HDD's do this behind the scenes.
If it can't or doesn't, then you are out of spares or there are other problems preventing
it from doing this. In that case, the drive is unreliable and should be taken out
of service. It could suffer a catastrophic failure at anytime in my opnion.
Keep an eye on your event viewer for errors pertianing to the HDD.. If you see them,
it's time to stop using the drive and replace it if it is still under warranty.
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