"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Coping with Bad Sectors

From excess6 on Mon, 11 Oct 1999

Hi, i found out my 4month old quantum hdd has some bad clusters, is there a way i can fix it? what happed was i turned off ym poota in windows and later on i turned it on and it said data error reading c: i did scandisk surface scan and it found 1 of my sectors was bad, i rebooted later and windows is working but is there anything i can do to like isolate the sector so i dont put inportant stuff on that sector or something. -cheers excess

I would hope that SCANDISK.EXE would mark bad sectors so they would no longer be used. If not, get a copy of Norton Utilities or download some shareware utilities for MS-DOS. There used to be a few utilities with names like MARKBAD.COM that would mark clusters as bad under MS-DOS. (Windows '9x filesystems are mostly the same as MS-DOS FAT with some hackery involving extra "volume labels" to get long filename support. MS should have called their new variant KFAT -- for "kludge" rather than VFAT).

Of course if you were using Linux you could just use 'e2fsck -c' to check your filesystems, test them for back blocks and automatically assign any bad blocks to a special system list (thus prevent them from every being accessed by anything else).

When you create new filesystems under Linux, you should also use the -c option to mkfs (or check the appropriate box/option in any GUI/dialog that you happen to be using).

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 48 December 1999

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