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I have a disk with a single broken sector. SMART shows 0 reallocated sectors and 0 pending sectors.

Unfortunately, this sector can not be fixed in usual way by forcing HDD controller to remap it, as the HDD completely hangs on attempt to write to the sector. Even Victoria can't reinit the HDD, only turning power off-on resets the disk.

There is no need to restore data: I have a backup. Replacing the HDD is not an option.

So chkdsk as well as other tools which scan and restore data will not help me: those which just scan or try to read give me no new information; those which try to force remap, hang the disk.

Is there any way to mark that NTFS sector (or cluster) as bad under Windows?

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There is a ntfsmarkbad command line tool now on GitHub. You can either tell it a single sector or a sector range. It also accepts bad sector list as a file which was my use case.

You would use it like this, assuming 123456780 is the number of your broken sector and R: being the letter of the NTFS drive:

NtfsMarkBad.exe R: 123456780

It would be best to format the drive before it to clear any other records of bad sectors and run chkdsk after it to verify the problem is fixed.

Also, you could take note of the usage of the partition before and after the command. The usage should go up by a single sector. Don't know if the number has such a resolution though.

Also, you could use a defrag software like Defraggler to confirm the broken sector is "occupied" by the $BadClus:$Bad meta file.

This is how it looked in my case with many bad or slow areas that I wanted to avoid: Defraggler showing successful manual marking of bad NTFS clusters

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