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I am using hd sentinel to monitor smart status and it reporting that currently 9 sectors are pending that may be reallocate later. I don't know what causes this error but is it possible to repair these errors? My hard disk is a western digital 160gb and i am using it as external drive through a tech-com usb-sata adapter.

And if there isn't any solution for this please tell me a software that can visualize hdd sectors so that i ignore these sectors and make partitions again excluding these 9 bad sectors, cause i observe that disk isn't creating any more bad sectors but these sectors often corrupt my data often

There arn't any more errors of any type in hd sentinel smart monitor and reallocated sectors and event both are "0"

I just want to ignore these sectors and create partitions for regular use no matter if i lose a little space

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  • You can't fix bad sectors on a mechanical drive, its a physical defect, software can't fix physical defects. There are tools that can help the firmware determine which sectors are actually bad or which sectors that had soft-failures and were marked bad.
    – Ramhound
    Aug 28, 2014 at 15:56
  • ok agree, but i just want to ignore them for a while, cause i think that these aren't physical probs, i didn't heard clicking sound drive is working perfectly spin up time response time all is good, i think that these are caused by mess up of data on that sectors i just want to ignore that particular sectors and make partitions on rest of drive is it possible ? Aug 29, 2014 at 2:53
  • @harshitmishra worth noting that the click of death wouldn't last long. It's just a famous thing one might hear moments before a drive dies. Most drives in bad shape aren't giving the click of death. I suppose gparted could create partitions with you specifying location very specifically.. you could boot a linux os off usb. knoppix can run off usb. I haven't used gparted much
    – barlop
    Aug 29, 2014 at 11:02

2 Answers 2

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I've actually run a hard drive with failing sectors for a while. I primarily used it for transient data, and one day, poof. It stopped working. This is a VERY BAD IDEA

Lets start with the 300 pound gorilla. You will need to replace the drive sooner rather than later. The data corruption is a result of the same sort of issues that are causing the bad sectors. Get a new drive.

In the short run, I found that a full format resulted in the drive being usable again - In my case I formatted the drive in linux (the badblocks command may be useful here), and back to windows with a full format. In short, your formatting tool should sort of do the grunt work for you

However, eventually the drive will die, either suddenly (leaving you with data loss) or gradually (which ALSO leaves you with data loss). I wouldn't store anything I cared about on the drive.

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    +1 You can't trust a drive with bad sectors. It will eat away at data placed upon it. Aug 28, 2014 at 14:31
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Bad sectors are most commonly physical damages on the platter of the drive. Small scratches cause air pockets on the platter and sometimes cause the read/write head to bounce off that pocket and land somewhere else on the platter, causing more bad sectors. You can isolate and relocate those sectors, cutting that drive's space a bit, but this only postpones the complete failure of the drive. Drives with bad sectors are considered unsafe for data storage and it is recommended to back up all data as soon as possible. Formatting or writing 0s on a drive might extend its life a bit more but nevertheless, it would still be unsafe for storing data and would die rather sooner than later.

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