HD failure, bad cluster size, need to resize to recover

[biffy666]

I need to know how to proceed.

Hi, I had a ntfs drive that I let partition magic resize the partitions, but the problem is IIRC I manually made the cluster size over the max of 4096, now I've got tons of problems. I need to fix the drive so I can backup the data.

I have that program called "spinrite", but do I need to tell spinrite what I did or will it figure it out?

I'm using win2000/win xp

Thank you.

 

[evongugg]

How to locate and correct disk space problems on NTFS volumes in Windows XP

An excessive discrepancy between the Size on disk value and the Size value is an indication that the default cluster size is too large for the average file size that you are storing on the volume. Back up the volume, and then use the format command with the /a switch to specify the appropriate allocation size to reformat the volume. For example, run the following command for a 2-KB cluster size:
format D: /a:2048
Alternatively, you can enable NTFS compression to regain space that is lost because of an incorrect cluster size; however, if you do so, you may experience a slight decrease in performance.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315688\

 

[biffy666]

Thank You, but this

"back up the volume"

is what is giving me trouble to begin with. I'd like to get rid of the problems then ghost(backup) the disk. If the disk was blank there would be no problem. I'd just format and start with the correct amount of clusters.

However, I'm glad I read that arcticle. It almost makes it sound like have 8K clusters is less of a problem that I thought it was. From what I gather, you can't use ntfs compression if you have 8K clusters. But, what does that even mean? Does xp need to use ntfs compression to run correctly?

 

[biffy666]

Best answer selected by biffy666.