Imagined Bad Sector?

I am new to this forum so apologise if I am going about this incorrectly.

I have moved from Ghost to Acronis 10 and find that every full or differential backup halted by the error message that it cannot read at a point (always 140843375). I can click on Skip and the backup continues ending with "Back up completed successfully". I back up from my C drive to a Maxtor external drive. My operating system is WinXP SP2 Home.

I have been backing up the drive in question (C Drive) in Ghost for at least a year with no complaint or identification of what may be identified by Acronis as a bad sector.

I have run all four stages of Chkdsk (Phase 4 is the surface check) and Tweak XP Pro to try and find a bad sector but nothing is found.

Since I cannot identify the problem and therefore have no choice but to assume the sector can be skipped, I would like to be able to find a setting, like Ghost has, of ignoring a bad sector if you want to and so let the backup complete without the freeze up while I manually skip the identified sector/file or whatever. As it is I must monitor every scheduled to select the Skip, so cannot have the program backup in the background.

Would really appeciate any advice.

Graham

 

After much chasing around for effective software I did uncover a bad sector which, when fixed, has overcome the stall during backup.

Graham

 

So far, True Image is a pretty good imaging program but an excellent memory tester and now, disk structure tester.

What program or method found and fixed the bad sector?

 

Since you are running Win XP SP2 and if you ran 'chkdsk' with the /r switch (the /f switch is implied), there should have been five phases or steps. Glad to hear that you solved the matter.

As seekforever asked it would be helpful to know what application or utility you used that was successful.

Regards,
Bruce

 

Regarding Bad Sectors, could I describe my friend's problem laptop. His WinXP was "flaky". Running chkdsk /f /r a few times fixed many file errors but he was left with around 100 bad sectors. He created an image and restored this image to a new HD. The new HD seems fine but chkdsk reports around 100 bad sectors.

Does this mean his new HD is suspect or are we seeing "software" bad sectors that have been copied from the original OS?

 

I believe so. There was a bit of discussion about this previously and IIRC the solution is to do a "resize" of the partition when the image is restored to the new drive.

You might try a search of the forum and see if you can find the threads but I must admit I have trouble doing elegant searches on this forum. Hopefully, somebody else will add their comments.

 

Hello Brian,

I'm afraid it's a case of GIGO. As stated by seekforever, you will need to resize your partitions whilst carrying out an image restore.

Here is <one of the more recent replies on the subject from Acronis Support>.

Regards

 

Menorcaman, thanks for those links. Inadvertently he did the resizing procedure. The old HD was 20 GB and the new was 80 GB. Before restoring, partitions were created and the new C: drive is double the size of the old.

I'll advise him to keep an eye on the number of bad sectors in case it is a HD problem but hopefully it's just bad data that has been imaged.

 

I'd be pretty interested in what software was used to recover the bad sector as well. As far as i know windows can't retest a bad sector so the only way of recovering them is by formatting, using a disk manufacturers tools, dos utility that is destructive - if there's a way out there that isn't destructive that would be handy!