Windows chkdsk replaced bad cluster – are files now corrupted

bad-sectorschkdskhard drive

I ran chkdsk on a drive and when it got to stage 4 (verifying file data), this message appeared for some files:

Windows replaced bad clusters in file ######
of name \path\filename.ext

Does this mean that these files are now corrupt? I'm mainly concerned about ISOs and executables. Unfortunately, I don't have hashes of them so I have nothing to check their integrity against after chkdsk finishes running.

If it's relevant, this is a mechanical hard drive, a 2TB Western Digital Green.

Best Answer

The answer is, it depends. the file was at least in part occupying a bad cluster, which in effect corrupted the file. chkdsk reallocated the sector (pointed that address to a not-bad location on the disk surface) and attempted to copy the contents of the bad cluster to it. there is no guarantee however that the data in the source cluster could be fully recovered to the destination. if it was, your file is intact, but if it wasn't possible to recover the data completely and accurately, there will have been some corruption.

unfourtunately, without a baseline, there is no way to tell.

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