Can Disk Editor reset NTFS bad sectors?

I just did a major upgrade of my PC of just about everything except the chassis. To move my current installation, I used True Image to make a image of my old PATA IDE C: drive and wrote that image to my new SATA harddrive. That went flawlessly.

The problem is that the clone was a bit TOO exact. The old C: drive had bad sectors and I now find the same sectors are marked as bad on the new SATA drive. The new drive is defect free so I need a way of resetting the bad sector list cloned from the old drive.

I've googled and googled and can't find a solution.

So, my question is, will Disk Editor give me the ability (with no understanding of NTFS structure) to reset and reclaim the bad sectors on my new drive?

Bruce.

 

I've never tried using the Disk Editor to do something like that.

If you have TI, you could image the partition and then restore it resized (even just a little).

Or, if you're using Vista, you could run chkdsk with the new /B option to recheck bad clusters: chkdsk C: /B

 

Unfortunately I don't have access to Vista. As I just found out, that /B isn't valid in XP, darn it.

But your idea of restoring to a non-exact size sounds interesting. The theory being that if TI (which I have) has to do a volume resize, it will discard the old bad sector list.

Thanks for the idea!

Bruce.

 

Wouldn't the chkdsk /f switch work?

 

chkdsk /f (or /r)won't work because it will only scan for new bad sectors. It won't check existing bad sectors to see if they really should be marked as bad and change the status if they're okay.

 

http://www.bodden.de/legacy/bad-sector-recovery-on-ntfs/

 

Many thanks to MudCrab suggestion. As you thought, doing a restore to a partition different in size to the original would cause TI to wipe the bad sector list.

1) Use TI to make a image backup of C:
2) Use Partition Magic to make the C: drive smaller by 100GB (but still big enough
3) Use TI to restore the backup to the now smaller C:
4) Use Partition Magic to resize the C: back to the original size.
5) Do one last pass of chkdsk /r c: to look for *new* bad sectors.

And it worked perfectly! It took all night to do all those steps but I'm down to zero bad sectors, exactly as I should be.

Thanks for the help!

Bruce.