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iceman
Asked: 2010-10-16 22:42:03 +0800 CST

NTFS hard disk repair utility in linux

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Is there a hard disk utility which can format(NTFS) &repair a HDD which has lots of bad sectors like Norton Disk Doctor from Linux ?

hard-drive ntfs formatting

6 Answers

  1. A few others here have already mentioned ntfsprogs and mkntfs.

    Also in the ntfsprogs suite is a utility called ntfsfix. Although the man page emphasizes that it's not a Linux version of chkdsk, I have successfully used ntfsfix to bring a non-bootable WinXP root disk back to life.

    A convenient place to find ntfsprogs (and many, many other diagnostic, repair, and rescue tools) is the CD- or USB-bootable System Rescue CD.

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  2. A modern hard disk on which you can't read/write from/to certain sectors anymore has consumed all the spare replacement sectors it had available, so it can't be "repaired" really. It's basically as good as dead. Did you check the S.M.A.R.T. status of the disk (with either udisks or smartctl)?

    In any case, mkntfs (mkfs.ntfs is a symlink to that) supposedly does a check for bad sectors by default, if you don't use any of the -f, --fast, -Q or --quick options.

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  4. The ntfsprogs package on linux has a disk formating utility called mkfs.ntfs. I don't know how well it handles detection and blocking of bad sectors, but it's worth trying.

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  5. In Debian, there is a package called scrounge-ntfs, which claim to be a data recovery program for NTFS filesystems. I have not tried it yet because I do not have any corrupted NTFS filesystem.

    Anyway, it would be safer to make a disk image of the disk with bad sectors and recover your files from that disk image instead of directly from the disk.

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  6. If you attach the (corrupt) hard disk to a virtual windows box then you can use windows' own chkdsk.exe on it, etc. ref: http://www.howtoforge.com/ntfs-disk-recovery

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