can i unflag the bad sectors on my harddrive?

hi, i've recently repaired a hard using spinrite, and it is now showing no bad sectors/clusters when i scan it. the problem is that chkdisc had previously flagged the bad clusters/sectors, and now even though they are repaired, the flags that chkdisc created are still there and so windows won't use the repaired space. is there any way to delete them without formating my drive? as i have data on there and can't afford a new harddrive at the moment to back it up.

i look forward to your reply
thanks

Bad sectors are not normally repaired (unless it's done by what is mistakenly called a low-level format), they are just marked as unuseable.

Once they are flagged and data has been moved from them to a safe location...chkdsk does not pick them up again.

Or you are seeing new bad sectors...which is a bad sign for the drive (possibly).

Bad Sectors On Hard Drives - http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?art...1583&page=3

<<...the flags that chkdisc created are still there...>>

What is the source for that statement, please? How did you determine that?

Louis

have you run chkdsk after spinrite did its job ? possibly it will remap the drive and you will gain your space back.
the only sure fire way i know is to re-write the drive with 0's and this destroys all data.

thanks for your responses,
in reply to both of you. the spinrite scan and the hdd regenerater scan show NO bad sectors/clusters! but then when i run chkdsc it's still saying there are bad sectors/clusters, quite a large amount! it seems that once chkdsc has marked(flagged) a bad sector/cluster it will not test and unflag it, even though it is repaired. is there any way WITHOUT formatting, to mark these again as good sectors/clusters. the problem it's creating is that any data now put on the part of the disk with the (false) bad sectors marked, becomes incredibly fragmented.






p.s.sorry for writing "sector/clusters" i can never remember which is which

ok, i've finally found some info about my problem, it's pretty complex! anyway here are some links for anyone else with the same problem

http://www.djkaty.com/ntfsbadsectors

http://www.bodden.de/legacy/bad-sector-recovery-on-ntfs/

need to psyche myself up now for what looks like a very tricky mission!

SUCCESS!!!

i've had this posted on the malwarebytes forum aswell, hoping for answers, and a user there "marktreg" came up with a marvelous idea. my computers XP, but in vista chkdsc has a new option to retest bad clusters and then unflag them if they pass its test. "marktreg" suggested using the "vista recovery disc" to boot my computer and then run the vista version of chkdsc from the command promt,typing... chkdsk d: /b the 'b' is a switch witch isn't available in xp's chkdsc, and tells chkdsc to restest bad clusters. it worked!!

the drinks are on me

Edited by 666philb, 12 December 2009 - 08:33 PM.