Question AOMEI - WD 4TB drive full of bad sectors - reformatted - drive now OK. Unsure.

Pentacore · Sep 19, 2024

I've had this 4TB WD passport external for years. It recently started flaking out on me, giving me read/write errors, often wouldn't mount in Windows, etc. I could see the directory listing of the contents of the drive, but trying to read or copy or browse the drive would lock up Windows.

AOMEI reported nothing but bad sectors as shown here:

I kissed the data on there goodbye and was about to throw the drive away when I decided to try deleting the NTFS partition, then reformatting it in exFAT. After doing this the drive is now working perfectly fine. I have copied small and large files to and from it without any issue. AOMEI now shows this:

Then I also checked the drive by running WD Drive Utilities and it shows everything is perfectly fine:

So now I'm a bit confused. Why was the drive reporting bad sectors before, and now after reformatting, everything seems to be working fine? I'm weary of trusting the drive with anything but large files I don't mind losing if the drive were to die, but I'd like to get some advice.

Thanks all!

Seba · Sep 19, 2024

In such cases I perform a zero-fill (using WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows - no longer available from WD, but can be downloaded from other places) and go from there.

Pentacore · Sep 19, 2024

Seba said:
In such cases I perform a zero-fill (using WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows - no longer available from WD, but can be downloaded from other places) and go from there.

Thank you for that. I decided to run the WD Utilities Complete Drive test. It said it may take several hours, but it's been 3 hours and it's still only at 10%. I'll let that finish and then find that other version to give the zero fill a shot.

mikeymikec · Sep 19, 2024

Since bad sectors don't just disappear, I'd check the SMART stats to see if they've been reallocated and run a complete drive check either with that app you're already using or chkdsk driveletter: /f /v /r

gea · Oct 12, 2024

Seba said:
In such cases I perform a zero-fill (using WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows - no longer available from WD, but can be downloaded from other places) and go from there.

It is on the Hirens USB bootstick (Win11 PE) together with many other useful tools

Hiren's BootCD PE

mindless1 · Oct 12, 2024

It's a portable so no external power supply to fail, right?

Has anything else changed? My point is that you describe no other changes, that it worked fine for years and all of a sudden problems. This makes it unreliable. Whatever was going wrong, reformatting doesn't really fix that.

Maybe it has removed bad sectors, as it is designed to and this is why you no longer see them, but do as mikeymikec suggested to see the health of the drive. Odds are, it's not got long left in this world before more bad sectors and data loss.

As much as anyone, I like to reuse/repair instead of replace things, but when it comes to HDDs, better to cut your losses at the first sign of problems, except getting any data off that you can. Internal SATA drives, I'd also check the cables, and I suppose that is true for a USB external too, if the USB port it's plugged into happened to get bumped and wrecked the solder joints, but that is consistent with difficulty accessing it, not so much bad sectors.

fzabkar · Oct 13, 2024

I would perform a full surface scan using Victoria for Windows or HDDScan. These tools will identify any "slow" sectors, ie those that require one or more error recovery attempts.

Question AOMEI - WD 4TB drive full of bad sectors - reformatted - drive now OK. Unsure.

Pentacore

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Seba

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Pentacore

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mikeymikec

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gea

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mindless1

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fzabkar

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