[plug] [OT] Clearing bad clusters?

[Steve Grasso]

Hi Andrew,

If you're feeling intrepid and just a little bit lucky, grab a copy of LDE (
http://lde.sourceforge.net/ ) and edit BOTH copies of the FAT. According to
Thomas Kjoernes' article ( http://home.no.net/tkos/info/fat.html ) FAT32 bad
clusters are marked 0x0FFFFFF7 while available clusters are marked 0x00000000,
so I guess changing the cluster markers from "bad" to "available" will probably
do the trick.

If it was *my* drive, I'd back it up solidly before I played with any of this!
(No, really, I would).

Cheers,
Steve


Quoting Andrew Furey <andrew.furey at gmail.com>:

> 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
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