I have Bad Sectors but I can't find them

[hmil2011]

Hard Disk Sentinel is telling me that I have 376 bad sectors (368 two days ago) but I cannot find them.
Chkdsk or a Hard Disk Sentinel surface test or HD Tune Pro test doesn't show any. HDD SMART shows 376 Reallocated Sectors Count.
The problem occurred about 4 days ago due to a power failure. The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB.
How can I find and perhaps fix them?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

HDDs have a store of spare sectors. When the drive detects a sector has failed, it tries to salvage any data from the failed sector and puts it into one of these spares. All future reads and writes for that sector go to the spare.

The reallocated sector count is the number of times this has happened. 300+ is VERY HIGH, and a sign that your drive is likely to fail soon. Back up everything, check if it's in warranty, and send it back.

When a tool tries to 'repair' a bad sector, all it's doing is telling the drive to search for bad sectors and re-allocate them. For one-off failures, this works OK. For large numbers, there's something wrong with the drive and it will continue to generate bad sectors, and rapidly run out of spares.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

^^ What he said. There are a lot of spare sectors in a drive and if a sector goes bad, it gets remapped to a 'clean' sector out of the spare area. This applies to both HDDs and SSDs these days.

Now, if you're having remapping issues (one or two is no big deal, 300+ is a LOT), you need to plan for replacing the drive soon. There's no hard and fast rule as to how many spare sectors are available, and if you run out, you could start losing data. If it's just a play-puter and you don't care, then don't worry about it and just buy a new one when it dies.

If however the data is important, get a new drive and get cracking on cloning the data over (clonzilla is good, if you have an idea on how to use unix-y interfaces and terminologies...).

 

[hmil2011]

I'm broke and fucked but hey at least I know I'm fucked

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Well, if the drive is still going, you're not f'cked yet. As for a drive, you can get a new 1TB drive for what? $50.00?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

That drive is also quite a new model by memory - it's probably still in warranty, and this is a pretty clear case of something that should be covered.

Seagate should have a warranty checker that you can enter your serial number into.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Yeah - I actually just got a replacement drive through Seagate. It was about 2 months from going out of warranty, so I downloaded their tools, ran the checker, and it simplified the whole process by doing a lot of auto-filling. Highly recommended.

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

 

[hmil2011]

Thanks for the answers and help and sorry for being rude, I expected the forum to censor it.
It's out of warranty.