Surface scan... bad sectors - can't repair though
I'm still not able to get into my WinXP VM without getting stuck at 29% chkdsk failing with a hard disk I/O error, but I did happen to take advantage of the Windows 8 Developer Preview with SDK (installed that as another VM) and ran the Western Digital hard drive diagnostic program (extended test) they offer for my drive for 11 or so hours.
I did this a couple times because it showed there are some bad sectors that it "may" be able to repair, but wouldn't ya know it, when I click repair soon after that, it came back saying there was an error in repairing... and leaves me right back where I started - dead in the water.
Incidentally, with the NTFS driver for Mac that I have, I'm able to run repair disk on the drive as well and come back with this report from disk utility:
Verify and Repair volume WD1TB
Checking file systemChecking Volume /dev/disk1s1...
Type of the filesystem is NTFS.
Volume label is: WD1TB
Verifying 339856 records ...
Verifying Zu folders ...
Verifying files security...
Can't read $SDS
$UpCase file is formatted for use in Windows NT/2K/XP
388.64 GB in 302521 files
118312 KB in 33534 directories
4 KB in bad blocks in 1 fragments
547300 KB in use by the system
65536 KB occupied by the log file
4096 bytes in each allocation unit
244187992 total allocation units on volume
136423381 allocation units available on volume
The volume /dev/disk1s1
has been repaired successfully.
Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
I have a feeling (though can't be 100% certain) the $SDS that disk utility can't read and the 4KB bad block may be inter-related. I don't quite understand what the $SDS pertains to outside of security for NTFS, but I suspect that's the reason the disk utility can't read it and also why the repair from Western Digital is failing.
I think I will probably need to write zeros to the drive, but dread the time that I know this is going to take to get back up and running - let alone the added cost to get another hard drive or something to back my stuff up first! The drive is still under warranty, so that's a saving grace I guess. I just don't want to have to set things up again. It's a pain in the assets
Can't think of a better way to spend my time off from work (*sarcastic glance*) this coming holiday season.
Anywho, thanks for your input and taking the time to help me come to this point.