How can I get Win2K to mark bad sectors

[Chu]

My less then 1 year old IBM Hard drive has some bad sectors on it, because whenever I try to copy a certain file, I get weird "grinding" sounds, and the file copy fails. The problem is, when I run scandisk in surface scan disk mode on the drive, scandisk reports everything is fine. IBM's Hard Drive utility and chkdsk pick out the bad sectors correctly though. I know with FAT32/Win98SE, a "surface scan" always always seemed to catch these errors, and marked the sectors as bad so no other program would try to write to them, but how can I confirm that the bad sectors were marked under NTFS/Win2K?

On a side note, where exactly are bad sectors marked on a drive i.e. if you nuke a partition with bad sectors, does the info about which sectors are bad go away as well? Also, IBM recommends doing a low level format on the drive to fix these bad sectors, but how exactly would this help? Arn't these sectors physically bad? What else would cause this?

-Chu

P.S., excuse my horrible spelling.

 

[bevancoleman]

W2k's scandisk is fairly lame, see if you can get hold of norton utilities (make sure you get a w2k compatiable version )

 

[Chu]

Found out that windows already fixed it at some point, but decided not to tell me (weird). Anyways, my questions about bad sectors & redoing a low level format are still puzzling me. And a new problem has arrisen on the same drive as the ones /w the bad sectors.

Every time I run chkdsk on this drive, I get the same error:

CHKDSK is verifying secturiy descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
Cleaning up 2 unused index entries from index $SII of file 9.
Cleaning up 2 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 9.
Cleaning up 2 unused security descriptors.
Fixing mirror copy of the security descriptors data stream.
Security descriptor verification completed.

Sorta odd it finds, and fixes, and refinds the same error every time. Also of note, there are 2 bad sectors on this drive . . .

-Chu