Chkdsk doesn't find bad sectors in unused space

[Landon]

I thought that Chkdsk /r is used to locate and repair bad sectors, but I came to know that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that contains data. There are some old hard drives with bad sectors with me that I am using for this test. After using an IDE to USB adapter, I formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk for the XP computer that I have and got no errors. So, I moved the drive to Windows 98 computer and ran Scandisk and it found some bad sectors. I then formatted the drives and put them back on XP machine but it did not find any bad sectors. But when I copied test data on the drive then Chkdsk found similar errors that Windows 98 did. So, can anyone tell me if there is other drive diagnostic program that I can use which can properly scan an entire disk? Thanks

[mauricio]

The function of CHKDSK does run throughout the entire hard drive, and hence it runs for so long time. Also, you can check the results in the event viewer. Incase the hard drive are in use in Windows Explorer, then the utility is limited, so try running in Recovery Console by booting to XP CD and see if that works.

[Landon]

I actually had chkdsk not taking more than 30 minutes or so to check the drive. And it is checking the entire drive then why does it not find bad sector until data has already been written to the drive?

[imwithid]

I've had the same problem. This is driving me crazy. I have a laptop hard drive placed into a caddy and had CHKDSK run overnight for approximately 13 hours twice (upon rebooting, it asked again to check the hard drive which I had allowed - it asked a third time but I thought this was a waste of time at this point as it started from the beginning each time) and I am randomly encountering errors that were not marked in the unused portion of the hard drive.

I understand that bad sectors cannot be fixed as I'm assuming that most of these are physical (head crashes, physical flaws during production, etc.). I want them marked in the partition table so as to minimize the probability of errors later on (as I'm encountering now).

It would seem far fetched to have to fill the entire hard drive with data first in order to properly mark all bad sectors.

In this application, SpinRite does not work as it does not detect external drives. I've tried a number of other applications (encountering a virus with one).

Has anyone found a disk application that can read the entire disk (regardless of partition type - I'm using FAT32 for this drive - required)?