Useful (and FREE) Hard Drive Utilities

Currently, I'm working on a laptop for one of my clients and thought I would share a few of the FREE hard drive utilities that I used to get the computer back in working order. First, after a CHKDSK scan revealed and successfully relocated 3000-some-odd bad clusters, I informed my client that the HD would need to be replaced. At this point I decided that cloning the HD to a new drive would be a reasonable course of action. A new 500 GB HD would replace the old 250 GB drive. Here are few utilities that I used to accomplish this:

Clonezilla ( http://clonezilla.org/ ), is a Norton Ghost-esque, Debian Linux-based drive cloning live CD. Clonezilla offers several different methods for cloning drives, but for my needs I opted to download and burn the latest stable CD-ROM bootable .iso image to CD. I attached the new HD to the laptop using a SATA-to-USB adapter cable, booted from the Clonezilla CD, and performed a direct local disk to local disk image.

The imaging worked perfectly, however it created two problems...

The first problem was that the last 250 GB of the new HD was left unpartitioned and unformatted. I could have used it to create a new D: drive, but I imagine this wouldn't be terribly useful to my client. Instead, I used Partition Master ( http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm ) to resize the C: and extend it to utilize the remainder of the free space of the drive. After applying the settings and a couple reboots later, Windows was showing the C: drive with the additional 250 GB of storage.

The second problem was that the bad blocks from the old drive were still being reported on the new drive. This brought me back to CHKDSK. CHKDSK has been around for quite a while, but the release of Windows Vista brought a new feature that clears the marked bad blocks and retests the drive. To do this run: CHKDSK C: /b from a command prompt elevated with Administrator privileges. This feature still exists in Windows 7, but is NOT present in XP. Since the system in question is running 7, this is not a problem.

Here is a description of the /b switch:

NTFS only: Clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors. /b includes the functionality of /r. Use this parameter after imaging a volume to a new hard disk drive.

With the help of these utilities, and after swapping the drives, the laptop is now booting from the new, larger, error free hard drive with the Windows installation and recovery partitions still intact.

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