Bad Sectors

[DenisS]

so, is there a way to partition the drive without erasing it? mayby by telling the program to ignore those sectors since there are located in the first half of the drive.

[bwm]

I'm sure It must have. Seatools is like most other sector checkers in that it is data destructive, meaning it must prove that both the read function and the write function to every sector on the disk works, with readback flux levels within their respective acceptable SMART range values.

What more than likely happened to your disk is that a power outage or glitch happened during an attempt to write to the disk. That's what actually causes 99% of bad sectors, and ALL of them when they are recovered so easily by using the erase/wipe/zero/format function(s). This obviously makes the function a very powerful troubleshooting tool in its own rite. Congrats on your good luck

[DenisS]

all the disk checking programs that i have say that the drive is fine, but i cannot petition the drive with gparted because it sayis that i still have 2 bad sectors.
is there a mode in gparted to ignore those sectors or an other program i can try? can i partition the drive with XP on it without loosing any data using windows 7 installer?

[Jack Rabbit]

gparted is just calling ntfsresize. If you are good with a command line you can directly resize your partition and ignore the bad sectors with the –bad-sectors switch. Since the hard drive is "fixed" the bad sectors gparted is complaining about are just out of date data stored in the NTFS master file table. If the moons are aligned and nothing else is wrong this is supposed to work. I suggest having the rubber chick on stand by.

[DenisS]

can you write me a step by step guide on how to do it, so that i wont mess anything up.
Thank you for your help :).

[MarkOne]

your drive is old and start to have bad sector.... get a new one....it will not only fix the problem but improve your system,

[DenisS]

i will, it's just that i dont have money right now. ill probably get one on boxing day.
i still want to partition my drive because i hate doing system reistall, i have to many programs to install and some of them are hard to find.
but i do have a WD 500 black for storage (since it's bigger), so i dont care if this one dies.
i was planning to buy a new drive for a long time now. i guess it si a right time to start looking for one, maybe even ssd :D

[frontier204]

Back up your stuff if you haven't done so (as is always the case when prodding hard drive partitions).

Now that the hard disk seems stable (for now), have you tried running CHKDSK on your Windows XP partition?

chkdsk /r C:

(or whatever letter your drive is assigned)

Linux's ntfs tools don't let you do anything to a partition without the partition being CHKDSK'd or otherwise being in perfect condition.

[DenisS]

yes i did check the drive for errors.
i know you are all just trying to help, but can i please just get a way to partition my drive ignoring those bad sectors, and not loosing any data i have on it. i dont care if i break it, because i was looking into buying a new drive long time ago.

[Jack Rabbit]

You have a 160G disk with one large partition on it booting XP, correct?

What do you want to have after you repartition it?

EDIT: And how much free space is on that partition?