Windows 10: Hard Drive question

Hello Guys, I know this sounds like a hardware question, but I couldn't find the Ten Forums version of the Seven Forums ''Seagate for Dos, how to use'' anywhere after a search.

If I may.. does anyone here know how the bad sector repair functions? After performing a long test I do come up with a bad sector, and the software is able to fix it just fine, re run the test and pass it. But upon running the long test again, another sector comes up with an issue, it can also be repaired successfully.

I guess my question is, do I need to keep running the test until no more bad sectors are detected and are repaired, if possible? One would think the test would run completely, and then offer to fix all the bad sectors, not one by one.

Any confirmation would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

:)

 

Hard drive question

Hello,

Thanks for your last response. Tried suggestions (all), and one appears to have cleared error of opening the unwanted uninstalled video. Tried running VLC several times without the error starting up. It maybe premature to thinking matter solved, certainly
at the moment feel confident that it is.

Your help has certainly been appreciated, my sincere thanks.

 

hard drive question

Care to be more specific?

 

Have you been making full-image backups of your OS partition and your data partition before this began happening? I hope you have. If not, immediately, carefully make at least one if not two OS partition backup images and at least one if not two data partition backup images, and keep all the images, past and present -- on any external hard-drive, or 2nd hard-drive if built-in.
Reason for my advice: you just possibly might be heading for a hard-drive SMART failure, restorable backups should have routinely already been made, if not, make them now.

 

Thanks, let me give you a little insight as to why I believe these are soft bad sectors. The latest Microsoft W10 updated destroyed my installation to such an extent that I would get HDD lockups, HDD warnings, no use of my start and notification center, and driver corruption.

I had to do a repair install to get function of my computer again as ALL my HDD problems began during this update, as I performed an in place upgrade reinstall, some sectors may still be problematic from the past installation.

 

Bad sectors come from hardware failure, not software. That's the basis behind RolandJS's advice to make backups now. The bad sectors appear during updates/upgrades because some system files that are normally just read and not written to are being written to during the update/upgrade. Increased usage of all areas of the disks places more stress on the hard drive internal mechanisms, thus causing the hardware failures to become more apparent/prominent.

 

I appreciate the clarification.

Could you elaborate on why some programs and utilities have an option to ''fix'' a bad sector? Does it just make the system ignore it to avoid writing data to it?

 

The ability to "sniff out" a going-bad or a bad sector and to "tell" the hard-drive to:
-- attempt moving data out of marginal or bad sector into another known-good sector
-- lock out said marginal or bad sector
is a good thing; every hard-drive has extra sectors/clusters for this very reason.
However, when the process happens [que FDR] again and again...then it's time to purchase & install a new hard-drive.
Now, go do your backups *Smile [and hold onto the ones you made before this began happening].

 

The software marks the location as 'not available' in the disk index , this makes the drive skip that particular spot next time if tries to write to it.

Early on (20+ years ago) the drive manufacturers used to make it so the index for that sector pointed to a different part of the drive to 'replace' that bad sector , but they now just mark it as bad and leave it at that.