gah@hood.hood.caltech.edu (Glen Herrmannsfeldt) (04/14/91)
Apparently HPFS can dynamically mark bad blocks on the disk. Mine has twice now decided that cyl 1 head 1 was bad. No option of chkdsk has any idea what to do about it. It actually sets the flag on the block so that a hardware error occurs when it is read. Reformatting the track (low level) fixes it, but I then have to reformat the partition. (This is not the boot partition, so the system still runs.) Is there any way to recover such a disk? The unix fsck program can fix just about anything that can happen to a disk. They have spare superblocks in case the first gets destroyed. It seems that chkdsk knows very little about recovering HPFS disks. How can I avoid this in the future? Can dynamic bad block marking be turned off? I do not believe it is actually bad. I ran a low level surface analysis program on just that track for a number of passes without problem. I really like HPFS, and want to keep using it, but it needs to be reliable, and recoverable. Thanks for any help related to this. -- glen