Any way to ignore bad blocks / sectors on hard disk ?

[Matthieu]

Hi,

My harddisk (or the HDD controller) acts strange, giving sometimes read errors that seems random. Running scandisk with full check options doesn't detect anything.

I'd like to virtualize my machine anyway.[b] Is there any option to ignore[/i] unreadable sectors ?[/b]

Thanks

Matthieu[b][/b]

[continuum]

Scandisk ? - are you talking about Win9x ?

Converter has no option to ignore bad blocks.

[Matthieu]

Thanks,

I was talking of chkdsk, on Windows XP. I just ran Spinrite and I heared some clicks from the hardisk... 9 relocation events occured. I'm trying again, we will see.

Sad that this option doesn't exist...

Matthieu

[continuum]

Maybe some forensic tools can create dd-like images and allow to skip bad blocks.

Look at the LiveCD backtrack2 - probably it has a tool like this.

Anyway - did you try converter and received any problems ?

[Matthieu]

It didn't succeed :smileysad: I don't know what's wrong with this HDD... Moreover, it always happens on the D partition, never on the C...

Here the event viewer log :

Event Type: Error

Event Source: Disk

Event Category: None

Event ID: 7

Date: 6/09/2007

Time: 14:54:41

User: N/A

Computer: MG

Description:

The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Data:

0000: 03 00 68 00 01 00 b6 00 ..h...¶.

0008: 00 00 00 00 07 00 04 c0 .......À

0010: 00 01 00 00 9c 00 00 c0 ....œ..À

0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

0020: 00 fe 46 70 05 00 00 00 .þFp....

0028: 12 c1 08 00 00 00 00 00 .Á......

0030: ff ff ff ff 00 00 00 00 ÿÿÿÿ....

0038: 40 00 00 84 02 00 00 00 @..„....

0040: 00 20 0a 12 40 03 20 00 . ..@. .

0048: 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 ........

0050: 00 00 27 04 48 a5 ec 88 ..'.H¥ìˆ

0058: 00 00 00 00 08 20 e9 88 ..... éˆ

0060: 02 00 00 00 7f 23 b8 02 ....#¸.

0068: 28 00 02 b8 23 7f 00 00 (..¸#..

0070: 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 €.......

0078: f0 00 03 00 00 00 00 0b ð.......

0080: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

0088: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

I'll have a look at your product, but I whished being able to virutalize this machine easily...

[Matthieu]

The most astonishing is that I just copied the contents of this disk through network, and no error message or event was seen !?

Even while the disk is almost full, meaning the error isn't in the free space...

[devzero]

i have come across the same issue,

difference is, that converter complains about \Device\Harddisk1\D, this seems to be C:\ , System is on E:\ (don`t ask me why, i didn`t setup that system).

how can i tell vmware converter that it should skip bad disk blocks ?

[Peter_vm]

As a workaround you may clone problem disk to another hard drive, skipping bad blocks, using disk cloning/imaging software.

[devzero]

thanks,

i had this idea, but i had no second old 4gb scsi hdd around....

[gautam]

One thing you can try is, after running chkdsk, try resizing the volume sizes during the wizard step. THis "may" fix your problem.

[devzero]

i already resized the volume, but this didn`t make a difference.

furthermore, i wonder what`s difference for reading when resizing target volume. converter is touching all blocks on source, anyway.

isn`t it ?

the solution would be: make converter more fault tolerant and skip over the bad block, as most imaging tools (as drive snapshot at http://www.drivesnapshot.de/) already do.

p2v is something you do with old boxes - and old boxes have faulty disks very often.

this is a feature request !!!

[Matthieu]

Even more strange :

I tried to remove the Disk D from the source disks, in order to avoid those errors.

After a while Converter stopped again, same error read in the logs : \[#4] \[2007-09-06 17:21:04.962 'App' 3892 error] \[blockLevelVolumeCloningTaskImpl,353] Error 23 reading 65536 bytes starting from 23358504960 from the source volume

Looking at the event viewer, I saw that this error was related to disk D again ! While the hell did Converter accessed to this volume ?

I give up virtualizing my machine... Too much time lost already.

Matthieu

[continuum]

Matthieu - in your context using blocklevel cloning is unwise.

When you know that you have bad blocks you should use the file-by-file approach and not select to work with all disks.