HDD reporting failure, how to repair

Question

How can I replace the bad sector's on my HDD drive? I have Toshiba HDD in my laptop. I have run the HD Tune Pro and It says I have:2027 replaced damaged sectors.

I have run tests and it says there is no error on disc. But S.M.A.R.T. is giving me message to replace my hdd, and it's a year and the half old laptop.

What can I do?

Solution 1

You can replace your hard drive. Bad sectors are not objects that you can physically remove and replace. Windows has tools (Chkdsk, for example) that can locate these bad sectors, mark them as bad, and have the drive actually avoid using them in the future.

A failing hard drive, after only a year and half is bad... but not outside the realm of possibility. Typically, most hard drives (laptop or desktop) are good for 2 to 4 years... Western Digital and Seagate making better drives that usually last 3 to 5 years... either way, this is not written in stone. Many unforeseeable factors can cause drive failure.

So, what can you do? If you wish to save the data on your drive AS IT IS, you can use the Windows backup software to back it all up to DVDs or an external hard drive. You can also purchase a new hard drive (of the same size), a cheap portable external hard drive enclosure, and use free drive cloning software like Clonezilla to clone your existing drive onto the new replacement. You would need the cheap portable enclosure to be able to connect both drives to the same computer, at the same time.

Or, you could support your local community, and pay a professional at a local computer shop to do this for you.

Solution 2

SMART is telling you that it's running out of 'spare' sectors on the disk that are used in place of sectors found to be damaged (practically all modern hard drives have spare sectors for this purpose).

It's telling you that if any more bad sectors develop, it's not going to be able to replace them and the drive may fail outright.

Replace the drive.

If the notebook still has warranty with Toshiba it will be replaced for free, just make sure you make a backup of your data before the drive dies, and/or before you turn it in for replacement.

Comments

[LawrenceC]

Replace the drive.

[user123_456]

okay thank you, btw. chkdsk is not giving me any error

[user123_456]

I have tried windows check disc option which has been working all night and I didn't get any error. And I have tried tune-up utilities, hard disc doctor and still I have no error reported.

[user123_456]

HD-tune pro gave no error as well

[Bon Gart]

CHKDSK only reports bad sectors that it finds, not bad sectors that are bad and have already been flagged as such. You would need to run Chkdsk with the /b flag (NTFS only: Clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors. /b includes the functionality of /r. Use this parameter after imaging a volume to a new hard disk drive.). New drives can also be shipped with identified and flagged bad clusters/sectors.

[user123_456]

can you explain where do I need to run this command. from CMD? something like shkdsk /b ?

[Bon Gart]

Yes. From the command line. Just run CMD as Administrator, and use CHKDSK c: /B This assumes two things... 1) this is your C drive we are talking about (c:) and 2) you are using Vista or Windows 7, since the /b flag doesn't exist for the chkdsk shipped with XP