Bad disk sectors on HDD

Nay

Member
Jun 3, 2010
65
2
71
Hello,

I just recently experienced getting sector errors, so i googled it and found the software CrystalDiskInfo.

Heres a picture of how it looks like: (The other 2 are my external hdds)

05 Reallocated Sectors Count
C5 Current pending sectors count
C6 Uncorrectable sector count
All shows yellow

I would really appreciate some help as im not sure what to do now or what it actually means. Reading off what people said, the HDD is failing, but is there anything i could do?

I also read that the chkdsk /r or chkdisk /r /f, can possibly fix it, but will the issue return?
Havent tried this yet as im backing up stuff on my external hdd q_q

Thanks!
 
Last edited:

Nay

Member
Jun 3, 2010
65
2
71
SSDs still seems expensive per GB, dont know all of its benefits but i dont use the PC to such length to require really fast loading speed
 

sub.mesa

Senior member
Feb 16, 2010
611
0
0
You have 12 bad sectors which are unreadable by the host operating system. This is a major problem.

You also have 77 reallocated sectors, which are weak or really bad and not in use anymore because their function is taken over by reserve sectors. These reallocated sectors can no longer cause problems, because they are invisible.

Your harddrive also reached a temperature of up to 62 degrees Celsius - far too high in my opinion.

My recommendation: backup your data and replace this harddrive under warranty.
 

tweakboy

Diamond Member
Jan 3, 2010
9,517
2
81
www.hammiestudios.com
Hello,

I just recently experienced getting sector errors, so i googled it and found the software CrystalDiskInfo.

Heres a picture of how it looks like: (The other 2 are my external hdds)

05 Reallocated Sectors Count
C5 Current pending sectors count
C6 Uncorrectable sector count
All shows yellow

I would really appreciate some help as im not sure what to do now or what it actually means. Reading off what people said, the HDD is failing, but is there anything i could do?

I also read that the chkdsk /r or chkdisk /r /f, can possibly fix it, but will the issue return?
Havent tried this yet as im backing up stuff on my external hdd q_q

Thanks!

You can fix bad sectors with full version app called HDD Regenerator. I bought it, It has fixed over 30 bad sectors in total looking at the past. so when you type chikdsk it will now say 0 bad sectors. The process takes a while. App is called HDD Regenerator ..... GL
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
10,376
762
126
Yeah, backup ASAP, and RMA it.
You can't save any HD once it starts getting bad sectors.
 

Nay

Member
Jun 3, 2010
65
2
71
Oh wow.. that sounds really bad, even though i dont really understand all of it.
So i checked my Seagate on their website and it seems its not under warranty anymore, guess my only choice is to get a new one.

How do i check which sectors are bad / the reallocated sectors? No idea how to read this info from CrystalDiskInfo, would be cool so i learn something from it =P

Ive had my HDD for like 2 ½ years now. Is it usual for it to get bad this fast? Or what could i have done to prevent such issues?

Thanks a lot for the replies!
 

tweakboy

Diamond Member
Jan 3, 2010
9,517
2
81
www.hammiestudios.com
Yeah, backup ASAP, and RMA it.
You can't save any HD once it starts getting bad sectors.


Yes you can. As I said HDD Regenerator fixes the bad sectors. Its not free app, I bought it. now when you type chkdsk you will get 0 bad sectors. And you shouldnt get any more once HDD regenerator fixes it.

I am doing it have done it, so your wrong here Elixer,, thx gl
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
10,376
762
126
Heat is just one factor, but for the root cause, you need to take it to a pro, so they can examine it.

You can use a linux boot CD to have access to some low level info on the HD, but it isn't worth it, since it wouldn't really make much sense.

Yeah, HDs can fail at any time, and now with Seagate going to a 1 year warranty, that shows how much they trust in their products.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
Oh wow.. that sounds really bad, even though i dont really understand all of it.
Modern HDDs have reserved unused sectors on the platter, so that if a sector gets too weak, or otherwise gives errors, they can work to read the data, then move it, and then you don't lose your stuff. This is good. However, it should not happen often.

Reallocated sector count should be the count of sectors moved to spare ones. High values indicate a hardware problem, usually the HDD itself (but sometimes PSU, or a bad overclock).

Uncorrectable sector counts should be the count of sectors for which data recovery was not successful. This should be very low...like 0-5 on a several-year-old otherwise-functional drive in a stock-speed system. Occasional blips happen, but 12? I've never seen that high, before. I've probably encountered drives that bad, but I typically don't bother with SMART when the drive has obviously gone bad, based on other symptoms. The highest I've ever seen on a non-OC'd system with what seemed like a healthy HDD was 3, I think, and that was enough to make me run the full self-diag on it and make sure data was backed up . This value being more than 1 or 2 is a big red flag to backup and replace (1 or 2 would be big red flags, if it were not 2+ years old).

Pending sector count is a count of sectors waiting to be remapped--IE, it will remap them time they are read or written (usually just when written, for some odd reason).

However, if Windows sees bad sectors, then you could be losing data.

Occasionally, sectors get weak and you'll have one re-allocated. I've seen some drives with 1 or 2 sectors re-allocated, and then never again. Generally, though, it's a symptom of an unstable overclock (common 'round these parts), bad PSU, or HDD going south, especially with high values, or the value increasing over time. With so many of them, backup your data ASAP.

If the HDD is going bad, chkdsk could do more harm than good.

How do i check which sectors are bad / the reallocated sectors?
The HDD's, you don't. There are probably utilities that can tell you by reading, and you could find out by inference, with the right read testing, if you wanted to take the time. Windows definitely has a bad sector list for NTFS, but even if you find it, it won't do you much good, because you'd then have to find what if any, files overlapped those sectors. A several-year-old HDD with 1-2 remapped is probably OK, but you've got some much higher values, there.

One thing that will help, though, as a human, is to go set the raw values to show up as decimals. Function->Advanced feature->Raw values->10 DEC.

Here's this computer's several-year-old Seagate HDD, for a comparison:


Ive had my HDD for like 2 ½ years now. Is it usual for it to get bad this fast? Or what could i have done to prevent such issues?
It tends to be random, from our end, as consumers, which drives will go bad early, which ones after a few years, and which ones after the PC is obsolete. Preventing it would be almost impossible. The best thing to do is realize that we don't preach backup plans for nothing. it wouldn't hurt to read this thread, and find your best balance between extra cost and time, and data safety.
 
Last edited:

sub.mesa

Senior member
Feb 16, 2010
611
0
0
Pending sector count is a count of sectors waiting to be remapped--IE, it will remap them time they are read or written (usually just when written, for some odd reason).
That is not odd. The harddrive doesn't just forfeit your data; perhaps it is very important? Who is the harddrive to make such a decision?

That decision should be up to the host. The harddrive says: I cannot read sector 437862. The host can respond with writing zeroes to that sector. Once the harddrive has been given the command to overwrite the unreadable sector, then it knows the old contents don't matter any more. At that moment the sector may be reallocated and swapped by a reserve sector.

Now what you have explained is perfectly right. But you've described the traditional bad sector which is physically bad. Those will be reallocated as seen in Reallocated Sector Count raw value.

However, the new kind of bad sector is the one that is caused by insufficient ECC bitcorrection. When this occurs, you will find Current Pending Sector have a non-zero raw value. When overwriting the sector (by long formatting the drive i.e. a zero write) this kind of bad sector will not remap to a reserve sector when overwritten. The Current Pending Sector will simply disappear, with Reallocated Sector Count untouched.

The former - the REAL bad sector with physical damage - today is much less common than the new kind of bad sector that is caused by insufficient ECC bitcorrection. Harddrive manufacturers have increased the data densities over the years, without allowing the ECC capabilities grow with them. The only bump was from 50-byte ECC when harddrives used 512-byte sectors, to 100-bytes per 4096-byte sectors. For comparison: modern SSDs use more than half of their raw storage space as bitcorrection/ECC/overhead or whatever you like to call it.

For high capacity drives (2TB+) in particular, this means you have to live with current pending sectors now and then. But the software like RAID layer and filesystem are not designed to cope with this. If your harddrive can't read a small fraction, things go to hell. In the era where the storage device itself is not perfectly reliable, you need intelligent software to work around that. That is why ZFS exists and today's legacy storage is basically incompatible with today's consumer hardware.

PS. Can't they change the default to decimal instead of hex in Crystal Disk Info?
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
That is not odd. The harddrive doesn't just forfeit your data; perhaps it is very important? Who is the harddrive to make such a decision?
If the data is already in a questionable state, and it knows it, then it should try to recover it, which it can do better than the software on top of it. If it can't be read, the data has already been forfeited; if it can be read, it should be re-written with sufficient correct/strong bits.

Making good use of the in-between state necessitates having trust in the drive, which is something I would prefer block device drivers, RAID controllers, and file systems to not do (luckily, that is the trend, now, though networking guys can smugly say, "we told you so." ). Likewise, the drive shouldn't, "hope for the best," if it can't prove it. If it is in the list (hard/impossible to read), but could be read correctly, why wasn't it re-written correctly, right then? Hoping for a subsequent correct read, but not doing it, when the subsequent read might fail, doesn't give me the warm fuzzies. It could allow problem blocks to offer recurring errors, without "real" error value increases, and leaves the correctness of that data in limbo, when it could ascertain a condition with certainty. It's a case of a failure-prone system being willing to leave a sector in limbo, rather than ascertain whether it is faulty or not, and to assume that recurring minor faults might be perfectly OK.

Physically damaged sectors that don't quickly multiply and cause problems (possibly what the OP has) have been rare for a long time, now. I doubt that even the small number of reallocated sectors in otherwise healthy drives are physical platter problems, usually, so much as writes or reads during minor power events (low voltage for a fraction of a second, blinking off and reclosing, etc.), or while the CPU is changing power states, with a marginal PSU, or something like that.
 
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sub.mesa

Senior member
Feb 16, 2010
611
0
0
Reading the affected bad sector will trigger recovery. Desktop drives do 120 seconds per request, TLER drives typically do 7 seconds. AV drives do 0 seconds - no recovery at all. In many cases the host retries the I/O on first failure, so a second recovery attempt will commence.

Current Pending Sectors means that the harddrive has tried to read this sector in the past but failed, because the raw data exceeded the bit correction capabilities of the ECC data. Hence, the data can not be recovered without dataloss. It could return partially corrupt data, but the ATA standard prohibits this. Harddrives are specifically designed to leave the decision to the host.

If the data is really important, you want to do surface recovery in a cleanroom. But in most cases, reading the affected sectors for extended periods of time might eventually pay off with one time that the signal was good enough for the correction to kick in. Spinrite is a commercial application that tries to do this, but you can do it with simple 'dd' in Linux or BSD as well.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
It might be recovered, with a mystical convergence of events, that rarely can occur. If the data is really important, the user should treat it that way, and not rely on a single HDD's copy to safeguard it .

If the OP is lucky, all of the ones in that 1.5TB drive will be in free space, temp files, lock files, etc.. But by now, the data is already gone, as far as the user and Windows are concerned, regardless of the physical health of the sector on the platter.
 

Nay

Member
Jun 3, 2010
65
2
71
I see thanks for all the information, althought i should read a bit more about this to fully understand =P Gonna have to check that link u posted.
Currently i can still transfer files to my external HDD, so trying as fast as i can. After changing the Raw Values to decimals, i noticed the high 12-values.

I noticed the problem first on utorrent, giving the error, so soon i can expect this to happen with regular file transfering from my HDD? Then i guess the HDD is pretty much gone?

So my problem is actually a physical damage on the HDD? Could the heat factor been playing a big role as you said, it went up to 62 celcius before?
My old Case was really old, and i didnt have really good cooling for it (esp HDD cooling), which probably had it run up to 62 quite some time. I just recently bought a new case to put everything in and i suspect every since (~2-3 weeks) its been low around 27-32 celcius.

I didnt really understand the ECC bitcorrection part, what does it really mean? Is it like a temp memory that read/writes from, and when like you said raw data exceeds the ECC bitcorrections capacity, it fails? When this happens tons of times it starts to damage the HDD?

Is it possible to read from the values about how long i got before the HDD totally shut off or is it much random and quite soon?
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
So my problem is actually a physical damage on the HDD? Could the heat factor been playing a big role as you said, it went up to 62 celcius before?
Factor, yes; cause, no. Better to have HDDs a bit cooler, for longevity, but this was probably a factory problem, and has been quietly getting worse for a long time, but only recently to a point that you noticed.

I didnt really understand the ECC bitcorrection part, what does it really mean?
Data is being written very fast, to spaces that are really small. Over the years, the signal to noise ratio has been going down. So reading and writing is a lot like listening to a staticy radio signal, or talking to somebody in a metal building on their cell. Data is written with sideband data to make up for this, the error-checking and correction codes.

Say your data is {822,211,433,988}, and you can't be sure it will be written or read correctly. Maybe next time it gets read as {822,211,434,988}, instead. So, on the side, store a sum for the whole. Now you have {822,211,433,988}, {2454}. If any data gets read incorrectly, you'll know, because you're comparing it to that checksum. But, the data is simply lost, if incorrect. Hmph.

So, now, you really need to be able to correct the results. Well, since 822+211+433+988=2454, then 2454-988-822-433-211=0. So, with both of those pieces of information, if each data part is checksummed, you could use the difference to correct it (the difference the result is from 0 is how far off it is, but then you need to know which was bad). So now, you're looking at:
{822,211,433,988}, {12,4,10,25}, {2454} (per-digit checksum).

If the data gets read as {822,211,434,988}, {12,4,10,25}, {2454}, and after not matching 2454 when summed as a whole, each segment can be checked against its own sum (if all those sums match, the checksum itself must be the bad part). 4+3+4=11, rather than 10, so that one is wrong. So, knowing it is the wrong one, but having the rest read correctly, it can be deduced by using the previous identity:
2454-988-822-X-211=0
2454-988-822-211=X
X=433

Now, keep improving that, with binary-centric operations, for >50 years, and you'll have the kind of stuff they actually use, some of which is well beyond me. Though, they do sometimes skimp a bit. In the above case, FI, more than 1 segment of data not matching its checksum would be uncorrectable. After so many bits of incorrect data, you reach a point where it's just not possible to be sure, or you could be sure it's wrong, but not have enough information to fix it.

Lots of uncorrectable errors are a sign that damage has occurred. Normally, you need scientific notation to describe uncorrectable errors over time.
 
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tweakboy

Diamond Member
Jan 3, 2010
9,517
2
81
www.hammiestudios.com
Modern HDDs have reserved unused sectors on the platter, so that if a sector gets too weak, or otherwise gives errors, they can work to read the data, then move it, and then you don't lose your stuff. This is good. However, it should not happen often.

Reallocated sector count should be the count of sectors moved to spare ones. High values indicate a hardware problem, usually the HDD itself (but sometimes PSU, or a bad overclock).

Uncorrectable sector counts should be the count of sectors for which data recovery was not successful. This should be very low...like 0-5 on a several-year-old otherwise-functional drive in a stock-speed system. Occasional blips happen, but 12? I've never seen that high, before. I've probably encountered drives that bad, but I typically don't bother with SMART when the drive has obviously gone bad, based on other symptoms. The highest I've ever seen on a non-OC'd system with what seemed like a healthy HDD was 3, I think, and that was enough to make me run the full self-diag on it and make sure data was backed up . This value being more than 1 or 2 is a big red flag to backup and replace (1 or 2 would be big red flags, if it were not 2+ years old).

Pending sector count is a count of sectors waiting to be remapped--IE, it will remap them time they are read or written (usually just when written, for some odd reason).

However, if Windows sees bad sectors, then you could be losing data.

Occasionally, sectors get weak and you'll have one re-allocated. I've seen some drives with 1 or 2 sectors re-allocated, and then never again. Generally, though, it's a symptom of an unstable overclock (common 'round these parts), bad PSU, or HDD going south, especially with high values, or the value increasing over time. With so many of them, backup your data ASAP.

If the HDD is going bad, chkdsk could do more harm than good.

The HDD's, you don't. There are probably utilities that can tell you by reading, and you could find out by inference, with the right read testing, if you wanted to take the time. Windows definitely has a bad sector list for NTFS, but even if you find it, it won't do you much good, because you'd then have to find what if any, files overlapped those sectors. A several-year-old HDD with 1-2 remapped is probably OK, but you've got some much higher values, there.

One thing that will help, though, as a human, is to go set the raw values to show up as decimals. Function->Advanced feature->Raw values->10 DEC.

Here's this computer's several-year-old Seagate HDD, for a comparison:


It tends to be random, from our end, as consumers, which drives will go bad early, which ones after a few years, and which ones after the PC is obsolete. Preventing it would be almost impossible. The best thing to do is realize that we don't preach backup plans for nothing. it wouldn't hurt to read this thread, and find your best balance between extra cost and time, and data safety.

That is way hot almost 40c at idle,,, As long as its not 45 to 50c then I can assure you it will have a short life.
 

Nay

Member
Jun 3, 2010
65
2
71
Ah i see, thanks for explaining that! Didnt understand how everything works but i get the big idea.

I managed to save everything on my external hdd, so now its just seeing how long till the hdd stops working i guess hehe.
Still stuff seem to work, although when downloading bigger files from utorrent, such as when i was going to dl this game from website, it gave me error.

Thanks for all the help once again, really appreciate it!
Might have further questions later on again =P
 

guskline

Diamond Member
Apr 17, 2006
5,338
476
126
Time for a new HD.:| In addition to the install woes, if it holds your OS, reinstalling the OS will take time. Good luck.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,452
10,120
126
Bad sector error can be vital at times.However did you run your disk defragmenter regularly?
If not try to do that.
Hope it helps

If a drive is throwing bad sectors, the LAST thing that you should be doing to that drive is defragmenting.

You want to clone the drive first, get your important data off, before writing any more to the drive.
 

sub.mesa

Senior member
Feb 16, 2010
611
0
0
Bad sectors either disappear when overwriting them with new data (ECC weak sector) of are swapped for reserve sectors if physically damaged. Either way, overwriting solves all (current) bad sectors on the drive. However, if a disk is truly bad, it will continue to generate new bad sectors.

Low level format is something that does not exist for a long time any more. In most cases, people simply mean a zero-write, which is the same as a long format in modern Windows versions.
 

paul878

Senior member
Jul 31, 2010
874
1
0
BAD sectors = Replace the Hard Drive!
It has been that way since the IDE drive was invented.
Low Level format are for the MFM RLL SCSI drives back in the 80 and early 90s.

I am surprise this thread has gone on for so long.
 
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