Chkdsk doesn't find bad sectors in unused space

  • Thread starter Thread starter Borgholio
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Borgholio

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
properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk program used
to? A previous thread mentioned SpinRite. Would that do a better job
than Chkdsk for locating bad sectors over the entire disk (even in unused
space)?
 
CHKDSK does run thruout the entire hd,thats why it runs for an hour or so.
Also,the results can be viewed in event-viewer.Also,if the hds are in use in
windows explorer,the utility is limited,try running in recovery console (boot
to xp cd).
 
Andrew said:
CHKDSK does run thruout the entire hd,thats why it runs for an hour or so.
Also,the results can be viewed in event-viewer.Also,if the hds are in use in
windows explorer,the utility is limited,try running in recovery console (boot
to xp cd).
Click to expand...

To be honest I've rarely had chkdsk take longer than half an hour to run.
And if it does check the entire drive, then why does it not find bad
sectors until data has already been written to the drive?
 
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