[SOLVED] Crystaldiskinfo health status "Bad" of portable drive

[FrenchyfromPA]

Hi,

I was checking the health of a few of my portable hard drives this morning and I got that info in CrystalDiskinfo :

red dot in front of line 04 start/stop code current 100 worst 100 threshold 140 raw values 000000000901

yellow dot in front of line C5 current pending sector count current 100 worst 100 threshold 0 raw values 000000000008

What does that mean? Should I already backup all the data to another drive?

Thanks for your help,

Serge

 

[fzabkar]

The start/stop count numbers don't make sense :-?

The pending sector count is telling you that 8 sectors (= 1 physical sector) are waiting to be replaced with a spare.

 

[FrenchyfromPA]

Hi Fzabkar,

Thanks for your message. I plugged my portable drive again a few minutes ago and now I don't see anymore the "Bad" status and only "Caution". Also no more information with a red dot on line 04, I have no clue what happened... May be when I plugged it in the last time something wrong I don't know... About the pending sector is there anything I can do to replace that sector with a spare?

Serge

 

[fzabkar]

The drive automatically spares the bad sector when the OS next writes something to that location.

 

[Jonathan_Steadman]

Hi Fzabkar,

Thanks for your message. I plugged my portable drive again a few minutes ago and now I don't see anymore the "Bad" status and only "Caution". Also no more information with a red dot on line 04, I have no clue what happened... May be when I plugged it in the last time something wrong I don't know... About the pending sector is there anything I can do to replace that sector with a spare?

Serge

I had one pending sector count on my hdd. So I wrote zeros to the sector and that seemed to fix the issue for me. So low level format might help. But if you want to zero fill the whole drive then it could take a long time. The advantages of low level format is that it will force the sector to remap a lot quicker. But your drive will anyway soon deal with the bad sector anyway. Also if you always back up then you have no issue. The main thing is if you back up. all the time.
To fix bad sectors on Windows this command might help:
CHKDSK /R. (on command prompt).
Warning low level format will delete all your data.