Need an alternative to XP's Chkdsk program.

I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors, but I 
have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that 
contain data.  I have a few old crappy hard drives with known bad sectors 
on them that I used for this test.  Using an IDE to USB adapter, I 
formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no errors. 
   I moved the drives to a Windows 98 machine and ran Scandisk...bingo, it 
found bad sectors.

Next, I re-formatted the drives and put them back on my XP machine.  As 
before, Chkdsk did not find any bad sectors.  However after I copied test 
data to the drive, Chkdsk found the same number of errors that Win98's 
Scandisk did.  Obviously, Chkdsk does not find bad sectors on a drive 
unless data has already been written there...which in my opinion is kinda 
stupid.  :-/

Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use that 

Borgholio wrote:
> I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors,
> but I have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard
> drive that contain data.  I have a few old crappy hard drives with
> known bad sectors
> on them that I used for this test.

> Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use
> that properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk
> program used to?

This is a very complicated subject that I don't know much about, but
I've read about a dozen or more of the pages at Steve Gibson's
SpinRite's site.  His software is used for both data recovery and
diagnostics to help prevent the need for data recovery.

According to Steve, it is all about how modern intelligent disks do
their own mapping and why 'everyone' needs his defect detection
magnetodynamics to search out and manage 'weak bits'.  The DDM maps out
the defective regions for the drive.

He sez SpinRite, unlike scandisk, tests the magnetic storage surfaces
with data patterns.

There are a lot of people who think that Gibson is 'full of sh*t' about
some of his ideas about security, but he has been making a good living
for years and years with his SpinRite technology.

If you want to learn something about the subject of bad sector testing,
go to his site and read a few pages - below are some snippages from his
site http://www.grc.com/srreviews.htm  (this isn't the front door)
SpinRite Reviews and Opinions - SpinRite prevents mass storage systems
from crashing or warns the user of pending catastrophe. If SpinRite is
not used until after a crash, it skillfully picks up all the pieces,
recovers your data, and puts everything back together again. -

...  Scandisk is probably guilty of more data loss than any other
utility ever created. Since everyone has Scandisk, everyone uses it. But
few people realize that Scandisk does NOTHING other than discard any
data that it can't read. -- you can't SEE the reliability of a drive
when you look at it. They all appear to be pretty much the same, so
there's no way to tell that one drive will be more reliable than
another.

...SpinRite's Data RecoveryTechnology - completely disable the drive's
built-in automatic sector relocation - uses its unique "hardware level
access" (which no other utility has) to read whatever data the drive was
able to get from the bad sector. SpinRite begins assembling a database
of this bad data, which will be used by SpinRite's "Dynastat" data
recovery system.

...During the defective sector re-reading, the drive's read/write head
is deliberately relocated to either side of the troubled sector -- and
at varying distances - If several thousand sector re-reads all fail to
produce a single perfect reading, SpinRite next employs the database it
has been building from each failed sector reading. By performing a
statistical analysis of this data, SpinRite is frequently able to
reconstruct all of the sector's data, even though no single reading was
perfect.

<end Steve Gibson's and back to me>

The problem is that SpinRite isn't free or particularly cheap, $90 for
one first time user.  Steve has provided a lot of freeware and testing
to the community, but his SpinRite is what supports everything.

What many people decide is that harddrives are cheap and when you start
thinking you need something like spinrite, it is cheaper and better to
replace the drive.  Also, even if you buy spinrite, there is the
possibility or likelihood that spinrite is going to tell you to back up
the data and replace the drive.

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin

Borgholio <borgholio@storymind.com> crashed Echelon writing
news:fscscd$l64$2@news.spamcop.net: 

> I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors,
> but I have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard
> drive that contain data.  I have a few old crappy hard drives with
> known bad sectors on them that I used for this test.  Using an IDE to
> USB adapter, I formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP
> machine...no errors. 
>    I moved the drives to a Windows 98 machine and ran
>    Scandisk...bingo, it 
> found bad sectors.

Though you say old harddrives, bad sectors today are foreign parts (like 
dust) or physicals errors on platters oi the drive, so in other words they 
are not worth a penny and marking bad sectors wont help a bit.

Buy some new drives.

-- 

Mike Easter wrote:

> 
> What many people decide is that harddrives are cheap and when you start
> thinking you need something like spinrite, it is cheaper and better to
> replace the drive.  Also, even if you buy spinrite, there is the
> possibility or likelihood that spinrite is going to tell you to back up
> the data and replace the drive.
> 

Borgholio wrote:
> 
> I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors, but I
> have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that
> contain data.  I have a few old crappy hard drives with known bad sectors
> on them that I used for this test.  Using an IDE to USB adapter, I
> formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no errors.
[...]

There used to be a scandisk utility with a "/surface" parameter to
get it to scan the entire drive.  However, my XP no longer has such
a program, and chkdsk has no such option.  Seems pretty stupid to me
to drop that feature.

I'm sure there are utilities out there that do surface scans under XP.

-- 
+-------------------------+--------------------+-----------------------+
| Kenneth J. Brody        | www.hvcomputer.com | #include              |
| kenbrody/at\spamcop.net | www.fptech.com     |    <std_disclaimer.h> |
+-------------------------+--------------------+-----------------------+
Don't e-mail me at: <mailto:ThisIsASpamTrap@gmail.com>