[Gllug] ntfsresize is lying to me!

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

It has allegedly "detected" that the disk has at least 74 bad sectors.
I'm sure the failing disk I copied did have at least that many bad
sectors but the lovely new disk I put in definitely doesn't. It's
booting into XP just fine and running chkdsk from within XP and from the
recovery CD doesn't bring up any errors. Smartctl reports absolutely no
failed reads, sector relocations or indeed any sign of error whatsoever.
I have run spinrite on the drive just to make double sure every sector
has been tested and I am now certain the drive is 100% fine.

So I had been running ntfsresize as part of g-parted but it kept choking
so now I'm looking at using it standalone with the --bad-sectors flag
however... it says I need to repartition the disk with fdisk first and
looking at the fdisk man page makes me never want to use fdsik again,
and I quote...


"fdisk is a buggy program that does fuzzy things - usually it happens to
produce reasonable results. Its single  advantage is  that it has some
support for BSD disk labels and other non-DOS partition tables.  Avoid
it if you can.  sfdisk is for hackers only -  the
user  interface is terrible, but it is more correct than fdisk and more
powerful than both fdisk and cfdisk.  Moreover, it can be  used 
noninteractively.)"

So I figure I'd use parted instead... it has a command "resize" which
looks like the right sort of thing but it gives me "Support for opening
ntfs file systems in not implemented yet".

So it looks like a choice between getting my hands dirty with the (by
its own admission flaky) fdisk or somehow fixing the problems that are
making gparted/ntfsresize choke.

I'd prefer to do the latter but if there's no way to do that then I'd
appreciate a bit of guidance from someone who knows their fdisk!

Thanks,

Roger.
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