Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!jarthur!nntp-server.caltech.edu!gah
From: gah@hood.hood.caltech.edu (Glen Herrmannsfeldt)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.programmer
Subject: hpfs recovery???
Summary: how to recover lost superblock
Keywords: hpfs
Message-ID: <gah.671603617@hood>
Date: 14 Apr 91 04:33:37 GMT
Sender: news@nntp-server.caltech.edu
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Lines: 26

Apparently HPFS can dynamically mark bad blocks on the disk.
Mine has twice now decided that cyl 1 head 1 was bad.

No option of chkdsk has any idea what to do about it.  It actually
sets the flag on the block so that a hardware error occurs when
it is read.  Reformatting the track (low level) fixes it, but I
then have to reformat the partition.  (This is not the boot partition,
so the system still runs.)  

Is there any way to recover such a disk?  The unix fsck program 
can fix just about anything that can happen to a disk.  They
have spare superblocks in case the first gets destroyed.

It seems that chkdsk knows very little about recovering HPFS disks.

How can I avoid this in the future?  Can dynamic bad block marking
be turned off?  I do not believe it is actually bad.  I ran a low
level surface analysis program on just that track for a number of
passes without problem.

I really like HPFS, and want to keep using it, but it needs to be
reliable, and recoverable.

Thanks for any help related to this.

-- glen