HELP – Disk clone cloned bad block table, restored table to new disk with no bad blocks, now I can't do partition save.
HELP – Disk clone cloned bad block table, restored table to new disk with no bad blocks, now I can't do partition save. How do I delete bad blocks marking on new good disk?
I have had Acronis True Image 9.0 build 2,323 for almost 10 years and have used it to occasionally back up partitions in case of a disk failure. Fortunately I have never had a disk failure so I have never had to recover any of the backups.
Recently an older WD Blue 1 TB disk where my WinXP SP3 operating system was located on the first partition (it was the boot partition) started to develop a few bad blocks. It had 8 bad blocks. I ordered a new WD Black 2 TB disk and did a disk clone of the boot disk to a good, bad-block-free partition on that old boot disk.
I then restored the disk clone to the new 2 TB WD Black disk. That went fine. I then tried to do a backup of my boot partition on my new disk and True Image gave an error saying it could not backup a disk with bad blocks. I checked the old disk and all the data there was gone. I did a chkdsk /F on the first partition of the new disk and it reported no bad blocks, as expected.
I did an internet search and discovered that True image "clone disk" copies the bad block table for the old disk and when you restore the clone to a new good disk without bad blocks it copies that table to the new disk even though the new disk doesn't have any bad blocks.
I also tried to run WD Align ("powered by Acronis") and it wouldn't run on the first partition because it reported bad blocks on that partition.
MY QUESTION: How do I change the bogus bad block table? The original disk with the data and bad blocks no longer has the original partitions on it, True Image deleted them. I have searched and have found no utility to check for bad blocks and remove the bad block marking in the bad block table if the blocks are really good.
Thanks in advance for a solution to my problem.


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Steve, thanks for the suggestion but that didn't work. I ran chkdsk C: /F /R on my boot partition and it ran for a long long time checking all the files and free space. But then when I tried to run True Image to back up my C: drive the process aborted with the following error:
Error, Module: 1, Error (Code): 502 (0x101F6), Message: Operation with partition "C:" was terminated, Details: Unable to creste volume smapshot (0x70021)
Error, Module: 100, Error (Code): 5 (0x640005), Message: Operation has completed with errors
I also tried to run WD align on C: but it aborted with "partition with bad blocks cannot be resized"
Apparently on WinXP SP3 chkdsk checks all the files and free space, but the sectors marked bad are not checked because they are marked bad and no data is supposed to be in them, so no change is made to the bad block table. Do you know of any utilities that will change the table and eliminate all the sectors marked bad from the table? Not being able to back up a partition leaves me helpless. Another thread suggested cloning the partition while resizing it, but I suspect that won't work either and it's not clear how to do that in version 9.
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James, at this point I would suggest going for a different approach with your WD drive.
Download a copy of Hiren's Boot CD and boot from this and go into the DOS Tools that it offers where you will find a utility program called HDAT2 that I have used to sort out bad sectors on various drives lots of times.
See attached document on how to use HDAT2 from the Hiren's CD.
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374281-131482.pdf | 681.62 KB |
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