Bad blocks in MFT

[sonyk]

Hi guys! Hope this is the right place to ask for help. I have looked through forum threads and unfortunately was unable to find something familiar to my problem. The situation is next. Recently my hard drive began to make strange sounds like clicking. I have backed up my data by simply copying everything to another drive and after that clicking disappeared for some time, but now it's back and it's completely impossible to work with that drive, because windows hangs all the time. I have run a scan with MHDD and two bad blocks >500ms were found right on some of first blocks. I guess that MFT is situated somewhere there and windows hangs each time i request a file read or write, because it must get it's metadata from MFT. (btw i'm using NTFS). Is there a way to move MFT from this area? maybe repartitioning should help ? I mean what if i create a fake partition that will consume for it's area these bad blocks, will my system continue to hang each time I request a file r/w ?

[xsoliman]

If your sure that all or most of your bad / slow blocks are near the begining, and if you can get a usable (even if slow) block 0, then indeed could try creating an unused (fake) partition at the start of the drive.

However often the bad/slow sectors are spread throught the drive (maybe associated with a particular head) in which case it wont really help

A low level format or self scan might be able to clean it up, but no easy way to do that
(unless you happen to be lucky and there is a manufacturers utility to do it)


I have a similar test drive (WD2500) with lots of slow (and a few bad) sectors
Remapping slow sectors with MHDD helped a bit
Running secure earse didnt help
I hoping to one day find a way to 'self-scan' it and see if that can truely mapped out the bad sectors (altough looks like there is too many of them to fit in the g-list)

[xsoliman]

Also, in relation to the title of this post (Bad blocks in MFT)

Bad blocks in the MFT area, and freshly occuring ones, do NOT get mapped out by NTFS's badcluster mechansim
The MFT area is alway assumed good
(or rather the contigious MFT areas are alway considered good; in theory could map out bad areas by having a discontigious MFT)

Hence need to hope they get mapped out / remapped at the physical level

[sonyk]

Okay, I'll try to create a fake partition in the beginning of my drive. Thanks for sharing your experience. I will report back later. I think first of all I will try to dump all data to other drive by byte-copying partition not by copying files.