NTFS drive showing bad blocks on new hard drive

80 GB hard drive started to fail and when examined showed that 30 GB of files
occupied 70 GB of space due to bad blocks being locked out by windows. I
assume that these were bad from day one because the drive has not had any
real issues other than the drive filling up with not very much on it.

The drive was then ghosted to a new 100 GB hard drive but it still shows the
70 GB of space occupied. The bad blocks are still showing on a chkdsk /r and
it won't recover the good but marked bad space. Is there a way to get windows
to retest the bad blocks and reclaim them as useable disk space in a
non-destructive fashion. I could of course re-format and reinstall everything
but the time to do so makes me shudder. Any ideas? Thanks in advance for
anything that helps (or points me in the right direction)

You might try the hd manu disk checking tool, available on their site

"pjberr" <pjberr.shoes@hotmail..com> wrote in message
news:0DA5924E-C260-4855-8E5D-CB08FCD65DD2@microsoft.com...
> 80 GB hard drive started to fail and when examined showed that 30 GB of
files
> occupied 70 GB of space due to bad blocks being locked out by windows. I
> assume that these were bad from day one because the drive has not had any
> real issues other than the drive filling up with not very much on it.
>
> The drive was then ghosted to a new 100 GB hard drive but it still shows
the
> 70 GB of space occupied. The bad blocks are still showing on a chkdsk /r
and
> it won't recover the good but marked bad space. Is there a way to get
windows
> to retest the bad blocks and reclaim them as useable disk space in a
> non-destructive fashion. I could of course re-format and reinstall
everything
> but the time to do so makes me shudder. Any ideas? Thanks in advance for
> anything that helps (or points me in the right direction)