Help with the bad sector

[ilysaml]

Hello guys, I have a second hand 500 GB WD Blue drive, I tested it yesterday with the chkdsk /r command stage 5 took about 5 hours and it showed the following;

8 KB in 13 indexes
2504 KB in bad sectors
Is there anyway to fix this amount of bad sector? Is there anyway to allocate this bad area?
Any help would be appreciated.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

That drive is actively failing, replace it immediately and transfer the data while you still can. Once bad sectors appear there's nothing you can do.

 

[smorizio]

there are tools if you google them.. on hard drives it called the glist and plist. there are programs that will mask out the bad sectors to the glist. doing so may cause smart failure of the drive or a warning. if the amount your trying to mask out is larger then the vendor sets. the issue the other posted is valid. is the drive failing...ie are the heads hitting the platter and making these dead spots. if it were me i would see if the drive is under warranty and rma it.

 

[nullifier]

As the others have mentioned, you can flag certain sectors with some programs and prevent them from being used; bad sectors are indicative of a failing drive and I would not want to store any data on a drive that has flagged sectors, you just never know when the drive is going to completely go.

I would check the warranty status like smorizio said.

 

[ilysaml]

It's 2 years old, can't RMA it. The drive isn't in a critical condition, i scanned it with WD lifeguard software and it passed 85% of the extended test, so the bad sectors have a small amount of the drive...i know the drive is failing, but is there any way to allocate this dead area as you said, guys? Can i know the specific sectors that cause the trouble and leave them as unallocated space?

 

[rgd1101]

when you run chkdsk, it already mark the bad sectors and will not be used.

 

[ilysaml]

Are you sure of this? I ran it with the command /f first then with /r

 

[Paperdoc]

Yes, any sectors that Windows says are "Bad Sectors" will have been blocked off by Windows so that they are never used. However, that applies only to Windows - if you tried to use the drive with some other OS, that might try to use them. From your post, I suspect this is not something you'd do, anyway.

Try using the WD Lifeguard utility to check the SMART status of the drive - usually one of the first and quickest checks. IF it says SMART status has been tripped and lists fault types, assume you should replace the drive ASAP before the damage increases and you start to lose data. But if SMART is OK, worry much less. Just record the number of Bad Sectors, and keep track - does that number change (upwards) quickly? That would alert you to fix things (replace) before it's too late.

 

[ilysaml]

Thank you mate, that was very helpful. SMART Status is okay, green checks of everything.

Just record the number of Bad Sectors, and keep track - does that number change (upwards) quickly? That would alert you to fix things (replace) before it's too late.

I'll do this.

EDIT: Do you mean the number shown in the bad sectors analysis in the CMD command?

 

[ilysaml]

Best answer selected by ilysaml.