How To Find File Containing Bad Sector

Windows 7 started telling me my C: drive was bad, telling me to back it up and replace it. Turns out the Seagate Barracuda 7200 ST31000528A8 1 TB drive had expended all the the alternate sectors and had marked 3 additional sectors as bad (read errors).

I had a refurbished Hitachi 3TB drive (in sealed package) available, so I installed it and used Acronis True Image (WD edition) to partition the new drive and clone the C: D: Seagate drive to it. Acronis True Image reported 3 sectors that it could not read from the old drive. It reports those sectors in the format of 167,012,039, 167,012,080, and 864,385,022.

I removed the old Seagate drive and booted from the new Hitachi drive.

I'm left with the question: What file spanned each 0f the sectors that Acronis could not read and copy to the new drive? Was that a Windows page file, which I would not care about... or perhaps my copy of my 2014 IRS Form 1040, which I won't need until they come to audit me?

Any suggestions on how I can find the file names involved?

I do have an external case I could drop the bad drive into and access via USB 2.0. I have been thinking about doing so and using Windows "copy" command (or similar) to traverse all the files on the drive (copying to an internal drive) until it reaches something it cannot read. Hopefully it will fail and stop, revealing the name of the file it was attempting to copy when it died.

My system is an unbranded box, MSI motherboard, with AMD Athlon II X2 255 processor, 4 GB RAM, 64-bit Windows 7, 3 HDD (Hitachi 3 TB, WD 1 TB, Seagate 1 TB)... nothing special.

Thanks for suggestions.

 

Understand files do not contain bad sectors. A bad sector on the disk contains a segment of a file.

This is not as easy as it sounds. And if you could read it, not sure you would understand the results.

It would be best to use your Tax program to see if you can call up that file, then save it again. That said, didn't you keep a hard copy of it? And don't you have a backup copy of all your files just in case you have a hard drive error? If not, you may just have to keep your fingers crossed. Note for most users, 3 years is a far back as the IRS goes - though there are exceptions if things seem "funny"

http://www.disk-editor.org/
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28314/Reading-and-Writing-to-Raw-Disk-Sectors

 

Thanks for your response.

We can argue the semantics of which contains which, as a sector on a disk contains one or more records of a file and a large file will have records on many sectors of the disk. So, from the perspective of the hardware, sectors contain files, while, from the file system perspective, files contain records or sectors of records. But that's not the point of my quandary.

Yes, I DO have a backup... actually, I use Carbonite, so that I always have a backup off-site. What I am attempting to do is to determine which file(s) may be corrupted (missing record(s)), so that I can go to my Carbonite backup and restore the file(s) to the new hard drive... and proceed with life normally.

When Acronis encountered the error, I told it to retry... after 3 attempts I clicked Ignore. So on the target drive, there are 3 sectors that contain no data. I'm assuming there is a file that spans each of these bad sectors, having a forward link to that sector in the previous sector containing a piece of the same file.

Are the files that occupied these sectors actually files that I care about or files I don't care about? I don't know and won't know until I see a file name. I (tongue-in-cheek) used the IRS form as an example of something that I probably care about. It doesn't really matter if I can understand the data when I read it to see if the file is intact... just that it can be read without producing an error (Acronis reported a direct read error... 0x590001). If the hardware can read it, I assume it's OK. If it produces an error in a utility, such as COPY, XCOPY, or ROBOCOPY, and I can tell which file it died on, I should be able to tell if it's an important file that I need to look for a good copy on the backup... or a file I can ignore.

I think that's the approach I am going to try. I was hoping I would get a response from someone who had knowledge of a utility that could take the error message I received from Acronis and map it to a file name. Since the advent of automatic sector reassignment, that sort of software is not really necessary unless someone gets to the point where all alternate sectors have been assigned.

 

No! When it comes to technical issues, there are facts, and there are falsehoods. And there is correct terminology and incorrect terminology. This is a technical site so we need to use correct terminology. Therefore, there is nothing to argue. You don't get to redefine the accepted terminology.

As disk "sector" is the smallest physical storage unit on a hard disk, and is almost always 512 bytes (0.5 kB) in size in hard disks formatted using NTFS. Very few files are that small. So instead, files are fragmented, split up in to file "segments" or "fragments" and spread across several sectors. On hard disks, those segments are ideally spread across adjacent sectors. On SSDs, it does not matter. A cluster is made up of one or more consecutive sectors.

Please do your homework before making such incorrect statements. Files don't contain records or sectors. They are made up of segments. It is not about semantics. It is about using the correct terms to avoid misinterpretations.

Disk drive basics

You may not see a file name. This information is kept in the file tables, not with each segment nor stored in each sector. The file table points to the first sector. That sector points to the next sector and so on. So you cannot just look for a file name and assume the address for each file segment will be revealed, and in the correct order.