[anionic]

I am looking for ways to retest (under XP SP3) an NTFS filesystem's bad clusters after cloning onto a new disk which is free of bad sectors.

Any chance that Windows 7's chkdsk can be copied to an XP system and run there? I realise its bad-cluster-reviewing facility may depend upon newer NTFS drivers in Windows 7...

What impact will spurious cloned bad clusters have? Do they just waste a bit of space and cause minor fragmentation?

[Thomas]

Apart from the wasted space and the possible fragmentation there are no negative effects from the bad cluster list.

Bad clusters in NTFS are assigned to a special file that cannot be defragmented and most likely also not be written to in Windows. This way there is no remapping necessary. Instead the bad clusters are marked as 'in use' and Windows just does not allow anybody to write to them.

I don't know if chkdsk from Windows 7 or Windows Vista will run in Windows XP. But you could try to connect the target disk to a Windows 7 system and run chkdsk there.
By the way, the command line parameter to reevaluate bad clusters is /B

[anionic]