I have had the same exact problem with a brand new Compaq laptop I have purchased with Vista Home Ultimate edition loaded on it. I have reported here then but never received a response to it.
Now that I see your message, I feel better not being the one, who is singled out and since your OS is XP, I am also glad to know that, this problem is not related to Redmond's finest OS called VISTA (=crap in my opinion).
Today's Topics:
1. Gparted says there are bad sectors, WIN chkdsk says No (Dinbandhu)
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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:02:32 -0500
From: Dinbandhu <address@hidden
>
Subject: Gparted says there are bad sectors, WIN chkdsk says No
To: address@hidden
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain
I just purchased a 3 year-old laptop (Dell Latitude D400) which has XP
on it. I want to set up a dual boot with XP and Gutsy. I have a recent
Parted Magic live cd so I booted up with that to downsize the XP
partition and free up space for Gutsy. Once Parted Magic booted up, I
opened Gparted to downsize the XP partition. But Gparted refused to
allow a resizing of the partition because it said it found at least 1
bad sector on the disk. It further said I should run 'chkdsk /f /r' in
Windows and reboot it twice. It said that after that, I could resize
NTFS safely by additionally using the "bad-sectors option" of
ntfsresize.
So I booted into XP to run chkdsk in the command line. Although I had no
other programs running, the chkdsk utility told me it would only run on
reboot because there were other utilities running. So I rebooted the
computer, Chkdsk ran, and after checking the drive, said the disk was
perfectly fine i.e. no bad sectors. I rebooted the computer twice, then
went back into Parted Magic, and Gparted still said it found at least 1
bad sector on the disk and refused to resize. I went back to XP and ran
chkdsk again, and again it found no bad sectors. Again I went into
Gparted, and again it said it found at least 1 bad sector. So I don't
know whether there is really a bad sector or not, and furthermore
Gparted will not allow me to downsize the XP partition.
(1) Which utility is wrong: CHKDSK or Gparted? Could this discrepancy
represent a bug in Gparted?
How can I be confirmed if there really is a bad sector or not?
(2) If there is no bad sector and Gparted is incorrect, then how can I
get Gparted to downsize the ntfs partition?
(The "ntfsresize" utility is not so easy to use as gparted, because
"ntfsresize" only shrinks the file system, not the partition. Then you
have to use fdisk to shrink the partition and you have to match the size
of the partition to the size of the file system, otherwise it won't
work.)
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