Avoid installing on possible bad sector

[Kogure]

Hello. Instead of asking for a solution, I would like to kindly ask you hard drive experts for the validation of my theory and solution to a problem.

Long story short, my laptop fell few days ago. Boot straight into BIOS. Guy at the (cheap) repair store replaced the HDD amongst other things. Now I'm still having problems. Very frequent freezes. I ran chkdsk and chkdsk /f and it was all fine. HD Tune, however, found some bad blocks (appeared red), and froze for a few minutes when checking each one of those.
(Note: both drives are HDD's)

Now, the first time I haven't formatted the reserved system partitions, and it seemed to think the Windows 10 I installed was actually 8.1. I thought this is the problem so I formatted everything, and most stuff is fixed.

BUT. I download World of Warcraft, and it was freezing everything after pushing one specific button. Every time I tried. After a reinstall, it always freezes at character select. Scan and Repair also freezes it.

So here's what I thought. Could I delete WoW, install 30gb of games instead of it, and then install it again? Is this even how hard drives work?

Or do you think it'should a waste of time/there's a different problem?

 

[McHenryB]

Take it back to the shop. A new hard disk should not show errors like this.

 

[theunliked]

Take it back to the shop. A new hard disk should not show errors like this.

Yep. What he said. Its a new hard drive. RMA it.

 

[photonboy]

Umm...

I'm not saying that the HDD isn't a problem, however it seems odd that the laptop had problems, a drive was replaced and it STILL had problems.

I suspect either:
a) The HDD is bad AND the system has problems, or

b) The HDD isn't bad, and the defective system is reporting it that way.

If I was testing I'd start with memtest86 www.memtest86.com and do a full pass to test system memory (which could also mean a bad motherboard if it fails).

I hope it is "just" a bad HDD.

 

[Ra_V_en]

b) The HDD isn't bad, and the defective system is reporting it that way.

Sorry this doesn't happen in reality nowadays. I do remember times when some block was marked as bad but after low level format it was back to the valid pool, but that was rather a hdd firmware fault. When a block is getting below certain speed of readability and/or is getting CRC errors it should be marked by firmware as bad and a new block from sparse should be available. Today after firmware makes the job you won't even notice you have some bad blocks since it becomes remapped as soon as crap happen. If firmware is reporting it properly then this should be visible as relocated sector count and this is actually a first evidence HDD is going down.
I do know this because i had multiple Seagate drives dieing without any bad blocks reported by system but after deep investigation the story was not that bright.
From that days i'm using Hard Disk Sentinel software on all my machines (no it's a product advert, it's my personal recommendation).

Now back to the OP's questions. If your testing software actually reports bad blocks (red/black depending on the software) then this is certainly not a good sign. If the repair store guy did his job that wouldn't happen... so if he actually got payed then you should get back and punch the evidence of his laziness and lack of professionalism in the face, ask for a refund of doing nothing or a proper repair.

 

[CountMike]

If it has bad sectors that's not a good HDD, can't you return it for something better ?
If you can find where the bad sectors are/is, you could partition disk around them, leaving them in unpartitioned space.

 

[photonboy]

b) The HDD isn't bad, and the defective system is reporting it that way.

Sorry this doesn't happen in reality nowadays. I do remember times when some block was marked as bad but after low level format it was back to the valid pool, but that was rather a hdd firmware fault. When a block is getting below certain speed of readability and/or is getting CRC errors it should be marked by firmware as bad and a new block from sparse should be available. Today after firmware makes the job you won't even notice you have some bad blocks since it becomes remapped as soon as crap happen. If firmware is reporting it properly then this should be visible as relocated sector count and this is actually a first evidence HDD is going down.
I do know this because i had multiple Seagate drives dieing without any bad blocks reported by system but after deep investigation the story was not that bright.
From that days i'm using Hard Disk Sentinel software on all my machines (no it's a product advert, it's my personal recommendation).

Now back to the OP's questions. If your testing software actually reports bad blocks (red/black depending on the software) then this is certainly not a good sign. If the repair store guy did his job that wouldn't happen... so if he actually got payed then you should get back and punch the evidence of his laziness and lack of professionalism in the face, ask for a refund of doing nothing or a proper repair.

My point was the system might be defective, such as bad memory and there are all sorts of errors that can occur when that happens.

Also, you are totally wrong that you can't get bad sectors because they are automatically "remapped" as I've personally scanned many modern drives including new Windows 10 machines and had bad sectors appear.

For example: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/guide-to-using-check-disk-in-windows-vista/

Why do you think these commands still exist for checking for bad sectors? Again, I've ran them myself just this month and found bad sectors so that means the hard drive isn't completely correcting itself.

More info: http://windowsreport.com/bad-sectors-windows-8/

"From the start you should know that Windows system can’t fix bad sectors on a damaged hard drive. The OS can only detect these sectors and prevent from placing new data on the same. As you know, if your hard drive has bad sectors, then the data which is saved there might get lost, if of course you can’t manage to restore it. So, due to same reasons, during the guidelines from below I will first show you how to scan your Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 device in order to check if the hard drive is having bad sectors or not and the I will explain you how to recover these sectors and you data on a new hard drive."

 

[photonboy]

Update:
In case my last link wasn't read here's the next paragraph as it's important:

"Also note that installing or reinstalling your Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 system from scratch or choosing to repair or refresh your OS will not fix the bad sectors issues..."

Basically, if the drive has bad sectors (and isn't otherwise failing) it would be best to place it in another machine and do a proper full format to check it and rebuild the bad sector table (which will then properly isolate all discovered bad sectors).

After which you can then reinstall Windows.

Otherwise the drive doesn't necessarily know it has bad sectors (contrary to above opinion) which means when you reinstall Windows it can be corrupted from the start.

 

[CountMike]

There is a small chance that those or some bad sectors are caused by SW, like interrupted writes, sudden loss of power and in that case low level format can fix them. Emphasis on "Small".

 

[photonboy]

update 2:
I think the BAD SECTOR confusion is due to this (from Wikipedia)...

"Typically, automatic remapping of sectors only happens when a sector is written to..."

The problem is that sectors can go bad and not be detected because we don't overwrite data that's on the drive very often. So again, we can have bad sectors on a drive that aren't corrected unless we FORCE the drive to check (using CHECKDISK for example).

I hope that clears up the confusion.