Howto: Ubuntu fdisk on a partition with bad sector.I am new to Ubuntu partitioning, but the following steps worked for my fellow geeks, so maybe they will help someone else. Many sites warn that these operations are risky and may result in losing all the data on your hard drive, so be sure to back up whatever you want to save if you try this.My goal was to dual boot with Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows Vista Premium. I followed the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/9.10/switching/dualboot.html I wanted to reduce the size of my Windows partition, reduced size to 31.5GB this size of my Windows Recovery Disk. (The reduced size is based on hard drive size. Mine is 220GB. )
The Live CD http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download contains a number of useful partitioning tools such as GParted, ntfsresize, and fdisk, which I used. Booting from the CD, I opened GParted, right-clicked on my Windows partition, and selected the "information" option. It told me that GParted had detected bad sectors on this partition, but if I wanted to resize this partition anyway.
I logged into ntfs boot loader as root user. I ran root# fdsk. I could have returned to Windows, and ran 'chkdsk /f /r', reboot twice, and then use ntfsresize with the --bad-sectors option.
However, I ran fdsk and found 661 bad sectors. (after compressing old files and defragging), FDSK ran for maybe an hour. 661 bad sectors hadn't been "repaired" just compressed. I proceed with the reboot and install of Vista then Ubuntu.
I have access to my old hard drive. I get warning regularly to back up my hard drive it is failing. "Windows detected at hard disk problem" Until I purchase my new MAC. I'm going to hang on the this machine with it 661 bad sectors.
All my Documents are backup on Google docs. Music on iPod and backup on DVD and CD-r.
Finally, I use http://www.xmarks.com/ to backup and sync my IE and Chrome bookmarks on the web. So if there are docs I'm missing there are synced.
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