Hi all, I have a disk with some bad sectors. I've lost some files, and it has refused to boot few times, and some more. Running CHKDSK from an XP installation disk has worked so far, but it's definitly a shortsighted solution. So I've ordered a new disk, 320gb (current is 250gb), and I'm thinking about ghosting (there's only one partition). Will it work, or will the process fail due to bad sectors? Is it generally a good idea? Will my new disk break while doing this? Is it likely that this is caused by a virus that isn't detected by a fully updated AVG free? I realize that by ghosting the partition on my old disk, I'd get 50-70gb left over on the new one, but I intent to use that for a Linux and/or FreeBSD installation, so that doesn't matter. I'm very thankful for any answers on this.

I can't say much about ghosting, but I just thought I'd mention that bad sectors are usually due to physical corruptions on the disk itself, not from viruses. This can be caused by wear and tear or nasty bumps and shunts.

If the disk is a seagate / maxtor disk, then it's a good chance of being able to repair the disk with Seatools. Download Seatools for DOS(it comes with a FreeDOS version), boot it up and then run the long test. It might take quite some time, but if all goes well, it might 'repair' the damaged sectors, perhaps even salvage some data and mark the sectors as bad.

Ghosting might work, but in my case, it failed. It's a guess if it works or won't work. If the bad sectors are properly marked as such, I would assume ghosting would work just fine.

Toolmaker