Bad Clusters

I recently ran a chkdsk with the repair option on an external hard drive, and
it reported the following on one of the files:

Windows replaced bad clusters in file 99407
of name \Archive\SOFTWA~1\TopoMaps\CONSOL~1\TopoMaps.zip.

I have several questions:
1) Does this mean the file it refers to is now corrupt? The file was still
present on the disk after chkdsk finished. If bad clusters were found, I
assume the data in the clusters is now trash.

2) Are bad clusters the same as bad sectors, ie, if a bad cluster exists it
means it contains one or more bad sectors?

3) Further down in the same chkdsk report, it reported "0 KB in bad
sectors". Why does it report this when it had just found some bad clusters?
Does it report this because it had "fixed" them, ie, replaced them with
spares, and bad sectors no longer exist?

I could find no documentation that clearly explains all this. Does anyone
know of a good source of documentation for these kinds of questions?

Regards,
Robert Reader
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Not sure what to do about not receiving error messages
    ... If you need most of them, the drive is dying. ... clusters and running sector repair just results in a COMPLETED ... And that shows that the drive has some bad sectors that have been replaced. ... It should report on the drive max temp too with a Hitachi drive. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)
  • Re: Bad Clusters
    ... BOTH drives issued a "bad ... clusters" notice on one file. ... I don't know if dozens of other sectors have recently been ... So an elective test may report ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Bad Clusters
    ... >present on the disk after chkdsk finished. ... If bad clusters were found, ... Bad clusters contain physically bad sectors, ... BIOS can report S.M.A.R.T. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Bad Clusters
    ... >>present on the disk after chkdsk finished. ... If bad clusters were found, ... > even though the summary says "OK", there have been x sectors that had ... So an elective test may report ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Bad sectors on hard drive
    ... drive conditions W2k can detect at boot. ... Simply marking bad sectors by any method ... such will probably report bad problems. ... If I run plain CHKDSK ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.hardware)