Is it possible to find out if a bad sector has been allocated to a file and
the identity of the file?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #11, I look at a way to check a file that seems to be on a bad
sector and troubleshoot the hardware problem.
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Find a bad sector
Sure, the easiest way to do that is to see if you can copy the file
somewhere else.
By that I mean, just copy foo.foo (if that’s your file) to some other
location; ideally, on some other hard drive.
If you get a “CRC” or “bad sector” during that read, during that copy, then
you know that file has a bad sector in it. If you get no errors, then there are
no errors in the file that was copied.
More often than not, you actually get a CRC error on a write, which causes
the copy operation to fail.
But if you’ve got a file on disk and you suspect that it somehow is on top
of a bad sector, it should become evident when you try and copy the file
somewhere else.
Bad sectors are physical defects
One thing that is important to notice is that bad sectors do not travel with
the file. Bad sectors are physical defects on the hard disk’s surface. So if
you manage to successfully copy the file to some other location or some other
hard drive, then you know for certain that the bad sector can not have come
with it.
If you start experiencing bad sectors on your new hard drive, that’s a
different problem unrelated to the bad sector that you apparently have on
the first.
