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My hard disc have some errors and thereby my windows was failing in to a blue screen error.I was not even able to reinstall windows.After loading all the files, it will end up in a blue screen error. Then i installed Ubuntu by replacing the whole windows.It is working well. But then when i tried to again install Windows 7, the blue error screen again stopped me. What my question is like can i do something in Ubuntu so as to fix the hard disc errors or to flag those corrupted sectors so that they will be never used by any other OS so that i can install windows. I dont know whether it is a foolish idea. But i want to install Windows 7.

'Please help.

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I would boot from a live Linux CD (like Recovery is Possible Linux), and then check the HD using "badblocks", as well as "smartctl". Be advised: if you find more than a few (or even just one) bad sector in the HD, the best thing you can do is to discard it, since it's about to die.

To be even more sure, use "smartctl" and check the "Reallocated sector count" variable. If it has a significantly high number (in the hundreds) and there are bad sectors, throw the disk.

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  • I tried badblocks and found 5 bad sectors. :( And i also tried the command smartcl.But the package is missing, command not found error. I tried installing the same using sudo apt-get install smartmonotools But resulted in the message E: Package 'smartmonotools' has no candidate.
    – Arun Paul
    Aug 3, 2013 at 3:11
  • "smartMONtools". Pay attention to the spelling.
    – PaulJ
    Aug 3, 2013 at 12:33
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You can not really fix bad sectors on a hard disk.

The closest you can come is to use the feature to remap broken sectors to spare sectors.

If you want to can compare this to having a book with torn pages. You can not fix the torn pages. But you can make a note in the index that says 'do not try to read or write from page 10. Use the first spare page in the back of the book instead'.

This is something the drive does on its own. You can try to read or write to all sectors in the disk to trigger these internal notes, but that will only work as long as there are 'spare pages in the back of the book'.

Personally I would check the S.M.A.R.T. data and if uses of these spare sectors is increasing I would toss the drive in the trash. It is not longer reliable.

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  • Agreed. Reallocated sector count tends to grow very quickly after you get more than a couple of them. Aug 3, 2013 at 3:42

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