hard drive problems help

spark rain fire · Jan 13, 2004, 01:14 AM

a girl i work with told me that her computer was acting strange, and wanted me to look at it. so i took her computer home, found that her hard drive has bad sectors, amongst other things.

windows chkdsk comes up with a bunch of bad sectors, fixes them and then does the surface scan.
but that dosent work, the next time i run chkdsk, the same bad sectors need to be fixed.

i tried nortan ghost to move the files to a good hard drive image, then take the image to another hard drive. the image creation process failed.

i'm totally clueless here. i need to get her windows installation moved over to another hdd. please help.

PangingJr · Jan 13, 2004, 06:46 AM

since bad sectors could be a sign of a failing disk, if the HDD is still under warranty, i suggest you goto your HDD manufacturer's site and download their diagnostic utility. Run a thorough scan, and it should find errors, and it'll give you an error code from which you will likely have to provide in order to get a replacement.

if it isn't under warranty, and the system is XP, as far as i know, Ghost doesnot have the capability to skip bad sectors on an NTFS file system.. it'll clone everything - sector by sector, and the bad sectors would be included. i'd say try running the "chkdsk /r" command in CMD window,,
(/R - Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information and if there's data on the unusable areas, chkdsk will try to recover that data)
after you've done that then to try Ghost again, or make an image using Drive Image, by default it'll only copy sectors that contain information.

Jan 13, 2004, 01:14 AM	#1
spark rain fire i am rad. Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: central pa Posts: 236 Rep Power: 0	hard drive problems help a girl i work with told me that her computer was acting strange, and wanted me to look at it. so i took her computer home, found that her hard drive has bad sectors, amongst other things. windows chkdsk comes up with a bunch of bad sectors, fixes them and then does the surface scan. but that dosent work, the next time i run chkdsk, the same bad sectors need to be fixed. i tried nortan ghost to move the files to a good hard drive image, then take the image to another hard drive. the image creation process failed. i'm totally clueless here. i need to get her windows installation moved over to another hdd. please help. __________________ ---- [color=red]http://www.invalidsystemdisk.vze.com[/color]

Jan 13, 2004, 06:46 AM	#2
PangingJr Member Join Date: Mar 2003 Posts: 5,989 Rep Power: 71	since bad sectors could be a sign of a failing disk, if the HDD is still under warranty, i suggest you goto your HDD manufacturer's site and download their diagnostic utility. Run a thorough scan, and it should find errors, and it'll give you an error code from which you will likely have to provide in order to get a replacement. if it isn't under warranty, and the system is XP, as far as i know, Ghost doesnot have the capability to skip bad sectors on an NTFS file system.. it'll clone everything - sector by sector, and the bad sectors would be included. i'd say try running the "chkdsk /r" command in CMD window,, (/R - Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information and if there's data on the unusable areas, chkdsk will try to recover that data) after you've done that then to try Ghost again, or make an image using Drive Image, by default it'll only copy sectors that contain information.