Getting a list of bad sectors

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have a WDC WD10EADS-65M2B0 (SATA) drive that is experiencing problems:

  1. Windows 7 drive image will not complete.
  2. CHKDSK finds numerous errors.
  3. LifeGuard Extended Test finds bad sectors.
  4. Event Manager describes several instances of repeatedly trying to access certain files. Some of those files are in the Windows and System32 folders.

This drive holds my boot sector, C: drive (OS and personal data), and D: drive (factory system image). I have backed up all my personal data, so that is not a concern.

I have cloned the disk to a new WDC WD20EADS-00SB0 (SATA) using Acronis TrueImage downloaded from WD. During cloning Acronic identified some sectors that were bad and couldn’t be copied. For example:

1,142,562,673
1,142,562,674
1,142,562,675
1,142,562,676
1,142,562,677
…

It prompted me once for each sector, and, after a few of those and not wanting to press Skip thousands of times, I pressed Skip All. So, it completed the cloning, but my C: drive was not copied perfectly. It may not be possible to get a perfect copy but I still want to keep trying. I don’t want to just start using the new disk only to have problems. I’d rather reinstall the OS if that were the case.

What I really want to do is get a list of all the tad sectors and affected files. Then I can decide if these files are important and replace them manually (such as DLLs), or unimportant (ie, search indexes, caches, etc.). So, I downloaded LifeGuard and ran it. The extended test took over 4 hours and at the end it said there were bad sectors and my options were to Close it or Repair. The documentation is silent on whether or not the Repair option proceeds merrily as soon as you press Repair or if there is a chance to review the details of what you are about to do (in fact, Data LifeGuard Tools Software Manual 2779-001005.pdf does not describe the Repair option at all - documentation fail). I was unwilling to automatically repair without knowing which files were affected. (I could have done this with CHKDSK) 

Here are my test results:

Test Option: EXTENDED TEST
Model Number: WDC WD10EADS-65M2B0
Unit Serial Number: WD-[Deleted]
Firmware Number: 01.00A01
Capacity: 1000.20 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: FAIL
Test Error Code: 08-
Test Time: 08:54:43, October 06, 2014

Test Option: QUICK TEST
Model Number: WDC WD10EADS-65M2B0
Unit Serial Number: WD-[Deleted]
Firmware Number: 01.00A01
Capacity: 1000.20 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: FAIL
Test Error Code: 06-Quick Test on drive 1 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 1!
Test Time: 09:01:51, October 06, 2014

My questions:

Does the Repair button have an option to output a list of all the bad sectors?

Is there any other utility that will give me a list of bad sectors, or even a count?

Does it give me the chance to review its proposed actions and approve or deny them individually?

Does anyone know of a utility to map sectors to filenames?

Thanks,
Block Head

2

In your position I would replace the hard drive under warranty. This is because not every sector has the potential to be recoverable.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8

Regards,

3

The ntfsprogs project had a utility (ntfscluster) that could identify which file was associated with a particular logical sector or cluster:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfsprogs
https://web.archive.org/web/20080522140207/http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsprogs

ntfscluster - Given a cluster, or sector, find the file

Microsoft also provides a tool called nfi.exe (Win2K OEM support tools):

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/temp/ph3nfi.htm

OEM Support Tools Phase 3 Service Release 2 (includes NFI.EXE):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253066

CrystalDiskInfo SMART report will indicate the number of reallocated, pending, and uncorrectable sectors.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Does Acronis True Image maintain a log?

Ddrescue is an alternative freeware sector-by-sector cloning tool that understands how to work around bad sectors. It keeps a log, allowing it to resume after an interruption. Ddrescue is a multipass tool. It clones the easy sectors on the first pass and then tries for the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. If you wish to try this tool, I would suggest that you use a third drive as your target, just in case the patient drive has degraded.

https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html

With ddrescue you can fill bad sectors on the target with a unique string (eg “DEADBEEF”), and then search all files on the cloned drive for this string.

4

Thanks, fzabkar.  These look promising.  I will let you know what I find.

5

Hi fzabkar, your suggestions led me to a solution.  I used ddrescue and nfi as follows:

  1. I made a Ubuntu 14.04.1 Live CD and did apt-get install gddrescue.  gddrescue apparently supersedes ddrescue.  Also I had to add “component” to my universe to see gddrescue.

  2. gddrescue gave me a list of bad bytes, as position and offset, in hex.  I was able to expand this to a list of 512 byte blocks.  There were 284 bad blocks and the first 50 or so matched very closely the ones I had written down from Acronis.  I was a little surprised to see such close correspondence, though there were a few new ones, and also some that Acronis had flagged but gddrescue did not.

  3. I uses WinObj to get the NT-device-name of my disk.  Then I created a batch file calling nfi 284 times running in an emacs shell buffer and scraped out the file names.  There were a lot of repeats, with only a dozen unique names and fortunately nothing critical, all files I have copies of or could reinstall, or just uninstall or delete.

Now I have confidence in my boot disk and I know I won’t need to reinstall Windows.  Thanks, fzabkar!

6

Hi Trancer,

The drive is not under warranty and I was able to copy everything off it.  Now I’ll probably use it for unimportant storage.  I’m going to do a low level format and bad block mapping.  I have 284 bads.  Will that exceed the size of my bad block table?

BH