Bad Block Remaps

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

When CHKDSK does a surface scan and remaps a bad block, is the remap written to the drive’s electronics or somewhere else in the OS ?  I assume it’s in the drive’s own firmware table and that this table remains intact even after mounting it in another PC.

Is the same true for comparable utilities in Linux and xBSD ?  Can Acronis remap sectors at all ?

Anyone recommend  any bootable utilities, independent of an installed OS, that can do a sector by sector scan and remap bad blocks without affecting the whole drive the way a full reformat would ?  Acronis can accomplish a recovery using its backup scheme for some Linux file systems, but that is a long way around the problem, unless I am misinformed (I haven’t tried Acronis yet).

2

Hi, you can use the DLG boot disk.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1083/session/L3RpbWUvMTMzMDc5OTg1Ny9zaWQveVNpWkJhU2s%3D

1 Like
3

You know I saw it there and then got so hung up with Acronis that I completely forgot about it.  Will let you know how it goes…

4

chkdsk works at the filesystem level, so if it can’t read a block, it just marks it as bad so the filesystem does not try to use it in the future.

5

It’s formatted for FreeBSD, probably ext2 or ext3 because I stick to Linuxx compatibility, but thanks anyway because that is always worth being reminded about.