

At the command prompt, type fdisk, and then press ENTER.Boot to a command prompt by using a Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) boot floppy disk.Try changing the active partition by booting to a floppy disk and then using disk utilities to manually change the active partition: To resolve this behavior, use one of the following procedures: Boot the disk imaging program and restore the image from backup.Before performing the steps listed below, make sure that you have a good backup of your critical data files.Replace no other components than the disk, or you might have a problem with Windows activation.Replace the failing disk with a new one (save the old one).Put the resulting image om another disk, internal or external. Take an image of the disk using a disk imaging program.If you wish to preserve your Windows installation and applications, I suggest the following : I strongly suggest that you replace the disk. Each disk has normally many thousands of such spare sectors, which means that your disk is really in a very sad state. You are getting these errors because the disk firmware has run out of spare sectors to replace the failing ones. I also advice you to have a look at the SMART data of the disk, Here are some more well-known disk-repair products that you could try : Since you backed up your important data anyway, if your first bad sector is somewhere in the middle of the drive, it may be best to reinstall Windows, and when formatting, make sure you partition just below that bad sector. So I partitioned accordingly, and was able to use the drive at a reduced capacity. What happened after I reformatted it (not quick formatted) was that there was a big block of bad sectors in the middle of it. I dropped an old IDE 1GByte hard drive once. However your installation or some programs within will probably not be useable if CHKDSK /f found things to fix. This isn't supported by Windows ( fsutil can set it but not clear it), so you will have to take the hard drive to another system and perform the steps here. If Windows is forcing you to run CHKDSK on this during each boot, you can override that by clearing the "dirty" bit. The problem is that some portion of your current Windows installation may be on those damaged sectors. I'm looking for some tool that preferably non-destructively(to preserve current Windows/apps installs)
