From microsoft documentation of chkdsk command, it has the following commonly used switches:
/f
Fixes errors on the disk. The disk must be locked. If chkdsk cannot lock the drive, a message appears that asks you if you want to check the drive the next time you restart the computer.
/r
Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information. The disk must be locked./r
includes the functionality of/f
, with the additional analysis of physical disk errors.
/b
NTFS only: Clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors./b
includes the functionality of/r
. Use this parameter after imaging a volume to a new hard disk drive.
Q1:
Does it mean /r
switch will scan for both logical errors in files (logical file corruptions) and physical HDD damages (like bad sectors)?
Q2:
If /r
switch does scan for bad sectors, will it scan the entire HDD (both used and free areas) ?
Q3:
Do the differences between /r
and /b
lie in that /r
will skip scanning for the sectors previously marked as bad sectors while /b
will scan all sectors (no matter normal or bad)?
Therefore, /b
will update the list of marked bad sectors, which means releasing false-positive bad sectors for normal usage (This often happens when cloning an old HDD with bad sectors to a brand new HDD which should have no bad sectors in ideal case). Am I correct?
Q4:
If my understanding is correct in Q3, then I would wonder about the mechanism of determination for bad sectors.
Suppose there is a bad sector(already marked as bad) in old HDD and it is not 100% dead practically, so it could read once in several attempts. Then I clone the old HDD to a brand new one, so the bad sector records are also copied to the new HDD.
If now I run chkdsk /b
for the brand new HDD, will there be a chance that this abnormal sector will be released as a normal sector for read/write? That sounds dangerous and unreliable.
Is it worth to use /b
for the brand new HDD after cloned?
Answer
Firstly credit to Akinaand Moab
Answers for all 4 questions are yes.
Furthermore, /b
switch will scan the entire disk surface.
And after first failed attempt (write/verify or chkdsk /r
), the bad sector must be marked as bad and it will never be used in future until format
, chkdsk /b
or similar action.
No comments:
Post a Comment