Can chkdsk /r mark bad sectors good if they are no longer bad?

My hard drive was having some problems, and chkdsk /r reported 60 bad sectors, so I copied it to a new hard drive using Clonezilla. The copy went fine, but chkdsk (the quick read-only test) reports the same 60 bad sectors on the new drive. Presumably it's only reporting these sectors as bad because that information was carried over from the old drive. If I run chkdsk /r on the new drive, will it re-scan the sectors marked bad and discover that they are really good (and mark them as such?)

I know we're only talking about 30KB of disk space, but I don't want my new drive reporting bad sectors if the drive does not actually have any problems. That could be confusing in the future if I forget and need to diagnose some problem with the new drive.

Thanks!

Bad sectors on one drive will not carry over to another however corrupt data would. If you have bad sectors that's because the drive has been damaged or there are problems with the file system. Windows will try to repair bad sectors if you run the full check however it won't be able to fix it if the disk is damaged. Perhaps this will help. Bad Sectors Explained: Why Hard Drives Get Bad Sectors and What You Can Do About It

Right, that's kind of my question: it's a new drive with an image of the old drive on it, so the sectors marked bad aren't REALLY bad. If I run chkdsk /r on it, will chkdsk recheck those bad sectors (and discover they're good) or will it skip them because it sees they're already marked bad, and just leave them marked bad?

I can't find a definitive answer to this on-line. I know I can just run it and see what happens, but I like knowing these kinds of things in advance.

If you run checkdisk windows will look for bad sectors and attempt to fix them if there are.

On the new drive run 'chkdsk c: /b' which will re-evaluate all the bad clusters restored on your drive and remove non-faulty clusters from the list. Presumes the new drive is c: and if not change accordingly.

Hope this helps.

MTS52 said:

On the new drive run 'chkdsk c: /b' which will re-evaluate all the bad clusters restored on your drive and remove non-faulty clusters from the list. Presumes the new drive is c: and if not change accordingly.

Hope this helps.

THANK YOU! I've been using chkdsk since MS-DOS days but I didn't know about the /b option. Seems like it was only added relatively recently? Anyway, I'll give it a try and see what happens.

RolandJS said:

As one who does backups regularly, I sense a possible disturbance in the for- er OS operations. If possible, find out which data files [if any] may have been adjusted by hard-drive's moving data from bad sector to another sector operations. I hope you an earlier backup of your data folders/files just in case a couple or more are no longer usable. hddguru board has a few threads that talk about what can happen during such hard-drive reallocating operations, hence my concern.

Thanks for the advice. I do back up regularly, using Crashplan to a local external HDD. Crashplan has never reported any trouble with data files written to bad sectors, so I think I'm OK there. (It does sometimes tell me it can't back up files because they're locked, encrypted, etc., so I think if it encountered unreadable sectors it would tell me.)

I seem to recall checking and discovering that all the bad sectors on the old drive were in the free space area. So far so good re booting off the new HDD. Time will tell.