When attempting to run CHKDSK on a drive, many Windows users encounter the error “disc does not have enough space to replace bad clusters.”
The majority of affected users claim that despite numerous attempts to repeat this process, the outcome remained the same. The problem isn’t specific to any one version of Windows; it occurs on all of them, including Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.
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The “Disc Does Not Have Enough Space to Replace Bad Clusters” Problem is Brought on by What?
You must first realise that the “free” space that the CHKDSK utility refers to is not the same as standard disc space. Every hard drive has a small amount of extra, unallocated space that will be used when replacing corrupted sectors.
On any given hardware, a unique number is given to each sector. There are some additional, unnumbered sectors at the drive’s end. When a sector malfunctions and needs to be replaced, these extra sectors are used.
By taking the number out of the problematic sector and assigning it to one that doesn’t have one, CHKDSK fixes bad sectors. It’s most likely because there are more identified bad sectors than there are extra sectors if the utility displays the error message “the disc does not have enough space to replace bad clusters.”
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We looked at various user reports and the repair methods they employed to work around this specific CHKDSK error as part of our investigation into this issue. According to our research, the following common situations could result in CHKDSK displaying this specific error message:
- The error was brought on by a crash: of the littoral disc. This specific problem may be occurring as a result of a littoral disc crash brought on by a power outage or an unexpected machine shutdown. If that’s the case, the rest of your drive will be fine if you wait patiently while the CHKDSK scan is finished.
- Hard disc drive failure A failing drive will typically have multiple failing sectors. There is a good chance that your hard drive will soon stop working if CHKDSK or a similar tool consistently finds new bad sectors. If this situation applies, a backup and drive replacement are advised.
Important: Hard drives are made to have unlimited spare sectors for the duration of their recommended lifetime (5). If your hardware is significantly more recent, then it is obvious that something is producing a lot of bad sectors on your drive. To prevent data loss in this scenario, we advise you to create a backup.
This article will give you a number of troubleshooting techniques if you’re trying to figure out how to fix the “disc does not have enough space to replace bad clusters” error. You can find a list of techniques used by other users who have encountered this particular problem successfully down below.
Method 1: Permit the Procedure to Finish
Don’t rush to close the CHKSKD and stop the process if you receive the “Disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters” error. There is still a chance that the problem will be fixed at the conclusion of this scan because the utility will keep attempting to repair the drive.
Be prepared to wait for at least four hours, but keep in mind that the process will take some time (especially if your drives need to replace a lot of sectors).
Continue to the next method below if the process is complete and the CHKDSK utility is still unable to fix the bad sectors.
Method 2: Regenerating Problematic Clusters Using Victoria
With any luck, you’ll discover that the rest of your hard drive is still trustworthy even though CHKDSK was unable to fix some of the bad sectors on it. You can design a partition layout so that the problematic sectors are no longer a part of any partitions using one trustworthy isolation technique.
You can do this with a lot of different paid software programmes, but we’re going to use a free alternative that works just as well (with a little more configuring). Victoria is a free programme that can identify and repair damaged sectors on your internal or external hard drive (traditional or SSD).
- Download the Victoria archive with the most recent version. You can find it on various download directories, but we suggest downloading a version before 4. 2. Here are some links for downloading:
MajorGeeks \sSoftpedia \sSoftFamous
- After the archive has been downloaded, extract its contents into a useful folder using a programme like WinZip or 7-Zip.
- To make sure Victoria.exe has administrator rights, right-click on it and select Run as administrator.
- Select the hard drive from the right-hand panel by going to Standard and choosing the drive that is causing the “Disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters” error.
- Instead, click the Get SMART button under the Smart tab to get a detailed analysis of your drive’s condition. While we are here, we need to focus on two things. Check the Reallocated sector count after the analysis is finished. It is obvious that the error is not a false positive and that you are actually dealing with bad sectors if the number is higher than 10. Check your drive’s condition as well (near the Get SMART button); if the status is GOOD, there’s a good chance you can fix the problem and keep using the HDD.
- Select the Tests tab and then click Scan to start checking your drive for issues. If you know where the bad sectors are, you can change the Start LBA and END LBA attributes to narrow the search. By default, the utility is set up to scan the entire drive.
- After the scan has started, select the Remap toggle from the list in the menu that appears below the write speed. By using this mode, you can be sure that the programme will swap out the problematic sectors for healthy ones from the drive’s reserved area.
- Close Victoria after the scan is finished and run another CHKDSK scan to see if the problem has been fixed. If the problem persists, launch Victoria Gain and perform a new scan as instructed at step 7, but this time select Refresh. Any software-level sectors that are damaged will be repaired as a result.
If the “disc does not have enough space to replace bad clusters” error still appears during the subsequent CHKDSK scan, restart your computer.
Move on to the method below if you discover that the first is still being used.
Method 3: Creating a Drive Backup and Replacing the Malfunctioning Drive
It is obvious that your hard drive is failing if the methods mentioned above failed to help you fix the error message. It is obvious that you have an alarmingly high number of corrupted sectors if both the CHKDSK utility and Victoria were unable to replace the bad sectors with additional sectors.
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You can’t really stop a failing disc from failing, which is the issue with this. The number of problematic sectors will keep growing, eventually consuming your data.
In this situation, backing up your drive as soon as you can and replacing the failing drive with a new one are the best courses of action.
Conclusion
Making a backup for your failing drive is simple because there are many tools available to you. We recently published a fantastic article on the top data backup software that can be used for cloning. Look at it here.
