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Hard Disk Sentinel is showing that my hard disk has 3 days to live. Can I repair it?

This is what I got after a disk check from Windows:

Any ideas?

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  • 13
    Back up your data and get a new drive.
    – Daniel Beck
    Jun 9, 2012 at 13:31
  • @Daniel Preach the truth!
    – Bigbio2002
    Jun 13, 2012 at 16:51

3 Answers 3

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Sectors marked as "bad" do not necessarily mean physical damage, an unreadable sector is marked as "bad" but may just be that, unreadable due to corrupt/weak bit signatures, bits that are neither 1 or 0, buy lie somewhere in the middle.

Other smart data shows it has other problems than bad sectors also, the drive is malfunctioning for other reasons than bad sectors. It could be a bad power supply or power connection to the drive causing all the problems, weak power to the drive will cause writes to the drive to be weak also, causing this "bad" sector problem.

. enter image description here

You should have backups of you data on another drive, if not, back it up Now until you determine if it is a bad drive or a power issue.

I would connect the failing drive to another PC as a secondary drive and run Spinrite6 on Level 5, see if it can recover the bad sectors, (level 5 will check all sectors, even the ones marked "bad" and mark them as good if there is no physical damage, if Spinrite recovers a high percentage of the bad sectors, then you know it is not physical damage but more than likely a power issue, a bad PSU in the original PC or too many devices on one 12v rail of the PSU. Lastly, the controller board (PCB) on the hard drive is bad.

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  • I have everything important backed up anyway. I did a windows disk check for a few hours. This is what I got: i.imgur.com/loZni.jpg Any ideas?
    – ChristianM
    Jun 9, 2012 at 18:10
  • It would have been better to use spinrite6, chkdsk is dumb when it comes to recovering bad sectors.
    – Moab
    Jun 9, 2012 at 18:26
  • Well, it may be dumb. But it did do it's job. I couln't make a .torrent file with the files that you see in the photo. Now it worked with no problem. I think I should just clear up some space on the hard drive and chkdsk again so it can repair all the bad sectors. If that doesn't work I'll go for Spinrite, wich I don't really understand how it works. But thank you for the help!
    – ChristianM
    Jun 9, 2012 at 18:42
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No, because there is physical damage on that disk. Repair would require replacement and/or high precision readjustment of moving parts. Unless your disk is covered by warranty, just replace it. Even if you could find somebody who offers repair for your disk, it would be uneconomic.

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Quite honestly, whether you trust your software or not, the very first thing to do is to create a complete backup of your drive before you try any repairs whatsoever.

Also ask yourself if you have noticed any problems with your HDD. Funny noises, slowdowns, glitches, etc. These are all indications of a failing drive, but sometimes a HDD will just fail outright with no warning. The key is to regularly backup, preferably with a bit-by-bit solution such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. But if you don't care about imaging your drive, then just backing up your important files to an external drive will also work.

Once you have a complete backup, you can try running some other HDD diagnostic tools, such as:

  • Date Lifeguard Diagnostic
  • Hard Disk Sentinel
  • Crystal Disk Info
  • SpinRite

Then if they're all saying the same thing, it's probably time to order a new one. The one thing to note is that the image you provided stated performance was perfect, whereas health was nearly dead. But in some of the errors, it states your PSU or cables might also be at fault. The long spin-up associated with low power supply would reduce performance, so I would suggest that you get second opinions from other tools as that diagnosis is a little too contradictory for my liking.

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  • All the important files are back-up up with GoodSync anyway. Everything I have there I can get back from torrents. The funny thing I couldn't make a torrent file a few weeks ago and today I find out this is the problem I can't create the torrent file.
    – ChristianM
    Jun 9, 2012 at 13:45

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