jimmies

I have a large hard drive of 500GB that I split into three large partitions of ~100GB, 100, and 200 or so.

First, I used ntfsclone to create an image of my drive. I resized the drive down to 5GB for just a basic Windows + drivers install. Then I used this 5GB size to create my image. Afterwards, I resized it back to 100GB and used it just fine for the first 1.5 months I had it.

After 1.5 months, I started slowly losing the ability to access certain files and Windows had errors reading these commonly used Windows and driver files. So I backed up and used ntfsclone. I restored using the 5GB image and noticed my Windows only showed 5GB even though I allocated 100GB. The only way I could think of forcing Windows to show the full 100GB was to use gparted again and just resize that partition and it worked.

A day later, same Windows and driver file corruption so I did another ntfsclone restore and Windows shows 5GB. Now, I want to resize the partition but gparted says there are over 15 bad blocks so gparted will not be able to resize it and recommends doing a chkdsk.

Is the ntfsclone and the resizing the cause of my "bad blocks"? Are bad blocks definitely 100% hardware errors? Trying to decide if I need an RMA and whether I should stop using ntfsclone.

Rubberman

It sounds like you have a hardware problem with the drive. You need to run some extended diagnostics on the disc to see if you are getting bad sectors.

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jimmies

SMART and chkdsk said it is fine after I deleted the partition, reinstalled Windows, and did nfsclone restore. Hopefully all will be good.

jimmies

Spoke too soon. Definitely a HD failure. So...can ntfsclone be the cause somehow since I adjusted partition sizes so often?

Rubberman

Neither ntfsclone nor frequent partition table changes or drive reformats should cause any problems for a hard drive - SSD's are another thing, but that isn't an issue here. I think that SMART will detect when the drive starts getting too many bad sectors, but it cannot detect other problems, such as head wear, controller failure, motor issues, etc. Also, Windows drive diagnostics are very much a minimal thing. I certainly would never depend on them. If you have a seagate drive, they have good diagnostic tools available for download from their web site, including ones that will run from Windows, and ones that will let you create a bootable CD or thumb drive so you can run the diagnostics without the actual operating system functioning.

__________________
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real time.

jimmies

Well the HD is about 2 months old. I ran the WD diagnostics and it said I had too many errors to recover so I ended up RMAing. The issue I was seeing is that the primary partition said it had 8gb total due to my ntfsclone image had that sized partition but when I adjusted the size in gparted then Windows finally realized my actual partition size and from then when my problems occur. The initial size mismatch writes the hard drive in only the 8gb it knows about, or will it write randomly throughout the first partition?

Rubberman

With Windows you never know exactly what it is going to do... However, it should only write to the partition size/location it was formatted with, assuming that the partition table hasn't been munged. If the partition table information, and file system configuration do not agree, it should complain - BSOD I would think (but am not sure).

__________________
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real time.