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I have a pretty old Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop that had a failing drive (boots started failing, S.M.A.R.T. parameters showed reallocated sectors), so I used Clonezilla to copy the data to a new drive while it was able.

The new drive was significantly larger and Clonezilla had copied the partitions exactly - so there was some unallocated space on the drive that I wanted to give to the Windows partition. I run GParted from a LiveUSB and got an error that says I have bad sectors (at least 5).

I tested the RAM per someone's suggestion online, and found a separate memory integrity issue. I removed the RAM card in question, but got the same error from GParted.

I've tried badblocks and that reported that no bad sectors were found. However, after running CHKDSK, it says that 64 KB were in bad sectors (nothing else was noted about these bad sectors, and everything else was fine).

Could the new drive have shipped with bad sectors or is GParted mistaken (in which case I would continue with ntfsresize -b)?

Edit: Here are the results of CHKDSK:

              Checking file system on C:
              The type of the file system is NTFS.
              Volume label is OS.

              A disk check has been scheduled.
              Windows will now check the disk.                         

              CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
                438528 file records processed.                                 

              File verification completed.
                1293 large file records processed.                             

                0 bad file records processed.                                  

                0 EA records processed.                                        

                164 reparse records processed.                                 

              CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
                587116 index entries processed.                                

              Index verification completed.
                0 unindexed files scanned.                                     

                0 unindexed files recovered.                                   

              CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
                438528 file SDs/SIDs processed.                                

              Cleaning up 8 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
              Cleaning up 8 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
              Cleaning up 8 unused security descriptors.
              Security descriptor verification completed.
                74295 data files processed.                                    

              CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
                34479312 USN bytes processed.                                  

              Usn Journal verification completed.
              CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
                438512 files processed.                                        

              File data verification completed.
              CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
                32353042 free clusters processed.                              

              Free space verification is complete.
              Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

               228796599 KB total disk space.
                98598160 KB in 356721 files.
                  237544 KB in 74296 indexes.
                      20 KB in bad sectors.
                  548707 KB in use by the system.
                   65536 KB occupied by the log file.
               129412168 KB available on disk.

                    4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
                57199149 total allocation units on disk.
                32353042 allocation units available on disk.

              Internal Info:
              00 b1 06 00 b5 93 06 00 73 c8 0c 00 00 00 00 00  ........s.......
              e9 0b 00 00 a4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
              00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................

              Windows has finished checking your disk.
              Please wait while your computer restarts.
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  • triage: Can you paste the output of gparted, badblocks, chkdsk, smart and also fsck, so someone can look at it. Jan 14, 2014 at 21:58
  • @richard will do. out and about right now, but I will report back when I have those for you. I know for a fact that badblocks just returned Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found.
    – Ethan Lee
    Jan 14, 2014 at 22:04

1 Answer 1

4

The message is because the filesystem flagged some sectors as bad on the old disk. What you want is ntfsfix -b to clear that bad blocks list.

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  • Will try this on a LiveCD today. Thanks for the suggestion!
    – Ethan Lee
    Jan 16, 2014 at 0:02
  • Worked perfectly! Ran CHKDSK one more time for sanity, and it went through with 0 KB in bad sectors now. Thanks again!
    – Ethan Lee
    Jan 16, 2014 at 18:04

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