100% Active Time on External HDD

[Mr777Nick]

A couple days ago, my PC restarted itself and at the BIOS, I saw some kind of message which said "SMART restart the PC because of Power Supply surge" or something like that. I ignored that because I didn't know anything about it.

Then just 2 days ago, I found out I can't read some of my files on my External HDD (Toshiba 500 GB) and it run incredibly slow due to bad sectors. A quick view via Task Manager showed that the active time of the HDD is 100% with 0 disk transfer rate (sometimes it showed a few hundreds of KBs). Here's the picture: http://i1237.photobucket.com/albums/ff479/Mr777Nick/100.png

I've backed up all the data into another HDD and looked for way to be able to use it again. I tried HDD Regenerator (It found 7034 bad sector) but the HDD still runs very slow. I tried to use Minitool Partition Wizard to fill sectors with zero, delete partition, and reformat it again; still no success. I tried to do a full format with Disk Management inside Windows, still no success.

I thought that doing a full format will mark the bad sectors as unused, but the HDD still runs very slow and whenever I re-run the HDD Regenerator, it show bad sectors again (although on previous attempt, it said that it has recovered all bad sectors).

A scan via HD Tune showed that the HDD has 16376 of Reallocated Sector Count with a status of 'failed' and 963 of Reallocated Event Count with status of 'warning' while all other status are 'OK'.

Is there anyway I can fix it? also what's the meaning of the SMART message above?

A help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks! And sorry for my english.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Mr777Nick,

Unfortunately, this drive could fail at any time. I doubt that it could be fixed. 🙁
You will need to replace it. In case it is under warranty, you can just RMA it.

It may be a good idea to test your primary HDD as well.

I guess there could be something wrong with your PSU as well.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[BadAsAl]

Run Seagate Tools for DOS or Windows and test the external drive. If any failures are reported then the drive is bad and you need to replace it.

 

[Mr777Nick]

Hi there Mr777Nick,

Unfortunately, this drive could fail at any time. I doubt that it could be fixed. 🙁
You will need to replace it. In case it is under warranty, you can just RMA it.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

Well, it has been used for around 5 years, and of course it is no longer under warranty.
I don't care if it could fail at any time, all I want is just use it normally even if it's just for temporary as I usually used it only for temporary files.
Thanks anyway.

 

[Mr777Nick]

Run Seagate Tools for DOS or Windows and test the external drive. If any failures are reported then the drive is bad and you need to replace it.

I just tried it, the HDD failed at all test (Short Drive Self Test, Short Generic, Long Generic).
Is my HDD dead? I can still open it though, it just run very slowly.

 

[D_Know_WD]

I doubt that you will be able to use it normally as even the writing zeros process did not help.

D_Know_WD

 

[Mr777Nick]

Yeah, I think I should find a new one.
Even just copy-ing a few GBs requires more than 10 minutes.

 

[BadAsAl]

The only other possibility other than a failing drive is the enclosure itself is bad. I would take the hard drive out of it and connect directly to the computer or use another external enclosure and test again. If it is still slow or fails tests then replace it.

 

[D_Know_WD]

I doubt that. The S.M.A.R.T. report shows clearly that the HDD itself is failing due to multiple bad sectors.
Yet, as there is nothing you can really lose, you can try taking it out. This may not work in case the drive has some sort of a proprietary connector.

D_Know_WD