[plug] [OT] Clearing bad clusters?

[Andrew Furey]

Hi all,

Does anyone know of a tool to reset marked bad clusters on a Win98
FAT32 filesystem?

I have an existing install on my dualboot desktop machine. After the
disk started giving SMART errors and a couple of bad clusters popped
up, I bought a replacement.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to do a clean install on the new disk (not
sure why, it just kept dying at various places; never got any further
than the "initialising driver database" after the first reboot) so I
had to image it across with dd_rescue from the Linux install. Of
course the bad clusters came with it, except I know they're not bad
any more.

It seems Partition Magic (v4 onwards) has a "bad sector retest"
command to clear them if they're OK, but it doesn't seem to be in the
free version. I'd be happy to hex-edit the FAT itself from Linux, if I
knew for sure what I was editing... (fingers crossed)

Any suggestions?

Andrew

-- 
Linux supports the notion of a command line or a shell for the same
reason that only children read books with only pictures in them.
Language, be it English or something else, is the only tool flexible
enough to accomplish a sufficiently broad range of tasks.
                          -- Bill Garrett