How to force a remap of sectors reported in S.M.A.R.T C5 (Current Pending Sector Count)?











up vote
34
down vote

favorite
24












The S.M.A.R.T C5 value of my Samsung HM640JJ Hard Drive (in an HP Pavilion dv6 laptop) is "yellow status = caution"



C5 was 10 yesterday, and it's 21 today.



C4 (Reallocation Event Count) = 0 and 05 (Reallocated Sectors Count) = 0



How can I force the firmware to reallocate them?




  • I removed the partitions, recreated them again and formatted the entire drive.

  • I ran chkdsk /r /f

  • I ran the BIOS disk check utility and other diagnose/repair tools










share|improve this question
























  • I use boot disk spinrite6 on level 2 to do this....grc.com/intro.htm
    – Moab
    Jan 30 '12 at 23:03










  • superuser.com/questions/1218312/…
    – SDsolar
    Jun 12 '17 at 5:36















up vote
34
down vote

favorite
24












The S.M.A.R.T C5 value of my Samsung HM640JJ Hard Drive (in an HP Pavilion dv6 laptop) is "yellow status = caution"



C5 was 10 yesterday, and it's 21 today.



C4 (Reallocation Event Count) = 0 and 05 (Reallocated Sectors Count) = 0



How can I force the firmware to reallocate them?




  • I removed the partitions, recreated them again and formatted the entire drive.

  • I ran chkdsk /r /f

  • I ran the BIOS disk check utility and other diagnose/repair tools










share|improve this question
























  • I use boot disk spinrite6 on level 2 to do this....grc.com/intro.htm
    – Moab
    Jan 30 '12 at 23:03










  • superuser.com/questions/1218312/…
    – SDsolar
    Jun 12 '17 at 5:36













up vote
34
down vote

favorite
24









up vote
34
down vote

favorite
24






24





The S.M.A.R.T C5 value of my Samsung HM640JJ Hard Drive (in an HP Pavilion dv6 laptop) is "yellow status = caution"



C5 was 10 yesterday, and it's 21 today.



C4 (Reallocation Event Count) = 0 and 05 (Reallocated Sectors Count) = 0



How can I force the firmware to reallocate them?




  • I removed the partitions, recreated them again and formatted the entire drive.

  • I ran chkdsk /r /f

  • I ran the BIOS disk check utility and other diagnose/repair tools










share|improve this question















The S.M.A.R.T C5 value of my Samsung HM640JJ Hard Drive (in an HP Pavilion dv6 laptop) is "yellow status = caution"



C5 was 10 yesterday, and it's 21 today.



C4 (Reallocation Event Count) = 0 and 05 (Reallocated Sectors Count) = 0



How can I force the firmware to reallocate them?




  • I removed the partitions, recreated them again and formatted the entire drive.

  • I ran chkdsk /r /f

  • I ran the BIOS disk check utility and other diagnose/repair tools







hard-drive smart bad-sectors






share|improve this question















share|improve this question













share|improve this question




share|improve this question








edited Jan 30 '12 at 21:52









sblair

11.3k63968




11.3k63968










asked Jan 30 '12 at 20:59









edteke

293135




293135












  • I use boot disk spinrite6 on level 2 to do this....grc.com/intro.htm
    – Moab
    Jan 30 '12 at 23:03










  • superuser.com/questions/1218312/…
    – SDsolar
    Jun 12 '17 at 5:36


















  • I use boot disk spinrite6 on level 2 to do this....grc.com/intro.htm
    – Moab
    Jan 30 '12 at 23:03










  • superuser.com/questions/1218312/…
    – SDsolar
    Jun 12 '17 at 5:36
















I use boot disk spinrite6 on level 2 to do this....grc.com/intro.htm
– Moab
Jan 30 '12 at 23:03




I use boot disk spinrite6 on level 2 to do this....grc.com/intro.htm
– Moab
Jan 30 '12 at 23:03












superuser.com/questions/1218312/…
– SDsolar
Jun 12 '17 at 5:36




superuser.com/questions/1218312/…
– SDsolar
Jun 12 '17 at 5:36










7 Answers
7






active

oldest

votes

















up vote
103
down vote



accepted
+50










Short answer: Write something new to the sector (even zeros - which a long format does).



Long Answer



Hard drives today try to hide bad sectors from the host computer. The host computer simply asks the drive to return the contents of a particular sector number. Normally the drive reads the sector, returns it to the host machine, and everything is fine.



The hard drive knows if the value it read is valid or not, because the drive uses Error-correcting code (ECC) to validate that the contents it read are correct. If the drive detects that the contents of the sector are invalid, it will retry the read. The hope is that if it simply reads it again, it might get the correct sector contents. It will keep retrying until it gets a good value, or it's reached it's time limit (formally known as the Command completion time limit, or CCTL).



During these retries, the drive will appear dead; as it is no longer responding to commands.



Spare Sectors



Most modern drives contain a number of "spare" sectors (e.g. 1,024 spare sectors). If the drive recognizes a sector as bad, it will stop using it. Any requests to read or write to that damaged sector will transparently be redirected to a spare sector. This marking off of a bad sector, and reallocating its data to a spare sector, is called a Reallocation Event. And the total number of sectors that have been reallocated (and so how many of your spare sectors have been used up) is the Reallocated Sector Count.



In this example from one of my own hard drives, 64 sectors were found to be bad. That means that 64 of the drive's spare sectors have been called into use:



ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64


On this same hard drive, there have been 4 Reallocation Events. This means that there were four occasions where the drive marked sectors as bad, and used spare sectors instead.



ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
(C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4


What if it can't ever read the data?



These actions of re-reading sectors, consuming spares, all behind the computer's back is a good thing. It means the host operating system doesn't have to deal with the issue of failing sectors. The drive itself can handle those details itself.




Bonus Chatter: In the olden days, your hard drive shipped with a sticker fastened to it. This sticker contained the Factory Defect List; the list of all known bad spots on the drive.



enter image description here



If you performed a low-level format of the drive, you had to use a tool to type in all the Cylinder-Head-Sector locations of the bad spots.

SCSI drives have a command, IOCTL_DISK_REASSIGN_BLOCKS, to tell them to reallocate a bad spot on the drive after the operating system detects it. In IDE drives this all happens automatically, without the need for operating system intervention.




Ideally the drive would recognize the sector is failing, move the data to a spare sector, and never use the original sector again. But what happens if the drive hasn't been able to read the sector successfully?



This is what Pending Sectors are. The drive has detected that a sector is failing, and needs to be remapped to a spare. But it can't do that until it can successfully read the data. When the drive knows that a sector is bad, and needs to be remapped, but it cannot do that yet because it's waiting to get a good read from the sector, that's called the Pending Sector Count:



ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
(C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4
(C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 2


My hard drive has 2 sectors that the drive recognizes as bad, but that cannot be reallocated yet. If you were to attempt to read one of these ‘Pending sectors’, the drive would likely retry (and retry, and retry), and eventually return a read error to the host operating system as shown below:



enter image description here



Give up on the pending sector and it will get reallocated



There are two ways that the drive can finally reallocate the sector, and consume another spare sector:




  • it finally gets a good read

  • you don't care about the data in the sector anymore


If the drive finally read the sector, then it knows that it can reallocate the sector.



The other way the drive can reallocate the sector is if you let it know that the contents of that sector are irrelevant; and that you don't care what's in it anymore. How do you do that?



By writing something new to the sector.



Whenever you read from, or write to, a sector on a hard drive, you have to read/write the entire 512-byte sector (unless you have a 4K sector hard drive in which case it would be 4K bytes). You are not able to write only part of a sector. When the OS writes data to a sector, it has to specify the entire 512-bytes. If you tell the hard drive that you want this new data to replace this bad sector, the drive then knows that you don't even care what's currently in the bad sector. It can then Reallocate a bad sector to one of the spares, and then the sector is no longer Pending.



This is why when people ask about having some Current Pending Sectors, the common advice is to use a tool (such as Western Digital's Data LifeGuard) to write all zero's to the drive.



enter image description here



By writing zeros to every sector on the drive, you are telling the drive that it can finally reallocate all those pesky pending sectors. After the wipe, all of your Pending Sectors will become Reallocated Sectors:



ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 66
(C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 5
(C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 0


Note: It's not strictly necessary to use a "low level" tool like Western Digital's Data LifeGuard. If you instruct Windows perform a full format (i.e. non-Quick format) of a volume, it will writes zeros to every sector in the volume.



The OS filing system supports marking sectors as bad



Armed with this knowledge, we'll explore a commonly confusing scenario.



Before the advent of Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), the host operating system was responsible for detecting bad sectors, retrying the reads, moving data to another sector, and marking old sectors as bad.



If you were to run a chkdsk /r c: using the host operating system, it would recognize that the "pending" sectors are bad, and mark them as bad itself, and never try to use them again:



> C:Windowssystem32>chkdsk /r c:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is OS.

12 KB in bad sectors.


So assuming a 512-byte sector hard drive, 12 KB of ‘Pending Sectors’ or in this example 12KB marked by the OS as ‘bad sectors’, that would correspond to decimal 24 or hexadecimal 0x18 as would be shown by a S.M.A.R.T. disk utility such as Crystal Disk Information:



ID   Attribute Name            Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
(C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 18


NOTE: Western Digital’s Data LifeGuard v1.31 (latest as of 8/31/2017) utility does not appear to show the current S.M.A.R.T. ‘Raw’ counter values correctly. Not sure what the ‘Warranty’ column represents.



Now if you perform a full format:



enter image description here



which writes zeros to every sector in the volume, that means those sectors that were Pending are going to get reallocated. It is now safe for the filing system to use those sectors again. In order to instruct the filing system that those sectors are no longer "bad", you perform an option where it reevaluates bad sectors:



>chkdsk c: /B


where the command documentation says



/B              NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume
(implies /R)


Or



According to:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730714(v=ws.11).aspx



/B              NTFS only: Clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and 
rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors. /b includes
the functionality of /r. Use this parameter after imaging a
volume to a new hard disk drive.


This was a whole lotta writing, and a whole lotta screenshots, for something that will never be read.






share|improve this answer























  • I have a 200MB file that has a problem at 87%. I got 3 pending sectors. I tried hashing the file to get good reads and claim reallocated sectors, but they are not getting reallocated! Hashing results: ok, fail, ok, ok, fail, fail. Every time the OS generated several Disk Errors in the event viewer, and on ok hashings, it hung for half a minute at 87%. All hashes are equal. C5 is still 3 and C4 still 0. What's your take on this?
    – Mark Jeronimus
    May 11 '14 at 20:25












  • @MarkJeronimus Try using a file wiper, which will write all zeros (or all random data) to the file. That should get the drive to realize you don't care about those sectors anymore.
    – Ian Boyd
    May 11 '14 at 23:31










  • I did a full format, but still no change.
    – Mark Jeronimus
    May 14 '14 at 8:53






  • 2




    One thing I don't quite understand: is it possible to (a) show which files contain the current C5 sectors, and (b) 'nuke' those sectors, i.e. move them to C6, and stop trying to read them? I don't want my HDD to get stuck in an endless failing read cycle; would rather black out those sectors and delete the files in question (manually restoring them from some other source if they're important).
    – M.M
    Dec 29 '14 at 21:54








  • 1




    I don't want to zero the entire drive though, just work around the bad bit. Will have a look at that program , thanks
    – M.M
    Jan 1 '15 at 22:15


















up vote
5
down vote













You don't need to do anything - yet. The reallocation count means "disk found defective sector and successfully reallocated it". The firmware already fixed the issue.



You just need to be aware that the drive is starting to fail. At some point in the future, the drive won't have spare sectors left for the reallocation and you will lose data. If some important block is lost, you might lose all the data on the drive.



So keep an eye on this value or buy a new drive right away so you can forget about it.






share|improve this answer




























    up vote
    3
    down vote













    I had good experience with the method describe here https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/BadBlockHowto. My disk was making noise and stop working so I use smart report and the formula to calculate the bad block and use dd to clear it. I was lucky because smart is still reporting a current sector count but the disk is working since 2 years or so. I did bought a replacement but I've never used it. It seems to me that smart isn't that accurate either.






    share|improve this answer























    • oflag=direct option for dd when writing zeros to bad locations to force reallocation (as suggested in that link) was the part I was looking for. Thanks!
      – Anton
      Nov 24 at 17:55


















    up vote
    2
    down vote













    Maybe you do not know this tool:
    HD Sentinel




    Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS SSD and HDD monitoring and analysis software. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drive problems, report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer and in external enclosures (USB hard disks / e-SATA hard disks). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.




    This seems to be a great tool to do such actions. But take care, some run options can completely destroy data.






    share|improve this answer






























      up vote
      1
      down vote













      You need to use a tool that writes to every sector of the drive. Otherwise, there's no way to do it. If the drive allocated a spare sector and remapped, what data should it put in the spare sector? It has no idea, since its attempt to read from the existing sector failed. Only a write operation can clear the error.






      share|improve this answer





















      • Formatting the entire hard drive is a write operation to every sector? I already formatted the drive (windows-based format command, no 'quick format'). Thanks
        – edteke
        Jan 31 '12 at 0:29






      • 2




        A quick format is not a write operation to every sector, a regular format usually is. You can always use DBaN. Did the regular format at least reduce the count?
        – David Schwartz
        Jan 31 '12 at 0:32












      • I did a regular format (not a quick format), I expected the count down or a remap after the format, but number was the same. Thanks
        – edteke
        Jan 31 '12 at 0:40










      • That's very strange, actually. Was the partition you formatted the size of the entire drive?
        – David Schwartz
        Jan 31 '12 at 0:41










      • @edgh: A regular format doesn't help when you have such an error. I suggest you try my method.
        – Bytemain
        Jan 31 '12 at 1:07


















      up vote
      1
      down vote













      Zero write, otherwise known as Low Level Format. You can only do this with a manufacturer disk utility usually. If there is a hard drive failure causing this error it may come back almost right away.






      share|improve this answer




























        up vote
        1
        down vote













        Try Spinrite 6 or HDD regenerator bootable CDs. They do write surface tests so it should clear out the pending bad sectors and bump up the reallocated count.






        share|improve this answer




















          protected by bwDraco Aug 1 '15 at 21:51



          Thank you for your interest in this question.
          Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).



          Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?














          7 Answers
          7






          active

          oldest

          votes








          7 Answers
          7






          active

          oldest

          votes









          active

          oldest

          votes






          active

          oldest

          votes








          up vote
          103
          down vote



          accepted
          +50










          Short answer: Write something new to the sector (even zeros - which a long format does).



          Long Answer



          Hard drives today try to hide bad sectors from the host computer. The host computer simply asks the drive to return the contents of a particular sector number. Normally the drive reads the sector, returns it to the host machine, and everything is fine.



          The hard drive knows if the value it read is valid or not, because the drive uses Error-correcting code (ECC) to validate that the contents it read are correct. If the drive detects that the contents of the sector are invalid, it will retry the read. The hope is that if it simply reads it again, it might get the correct sector contents. It will keep retrying until it gets a good value, or it's reached it's time limit (formally known as the Command completion time limit, or CCTL).



          During these retries, the drive will appear dead; as it is no longer responding to commands.



          Spare Sectors



          Most modern drives contain a number of "spare" sectors (e.g. 1,024 spare sectors). If the drive recognizes a sector as bad, it will stop using it. Any requests to read or write to that damaged sector will transparently be redirected to a spare sector. This marking off of a bad sector, and reallocating its data to a spare sector, is called a Reallocation Event. And the total number of sectors that have been reallocated (and so how many of your spare sectors have been used up) is the Reallocated Sector Count.



          In this example from one of my own hard drives, 64 sectors were found to be bad. That means that 64 of the drive's spare sectors have been called into use:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64


          On this same hard drive, there have been 4 Reallocation Events. This means that there were four occasions where the drive marked sectors as bad, and used spare sectors instead.



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4


          What if it can't ever read the data?



          These actions of re-reading sectors, consuming spares, all behind the computer's back is a good thing. It means the host operating system doesn't have to deal with the issue of failing sectors. The drive itself can handle those details itself.




          Bonus Chatter: In the olden days, your hard drive shipped with a sticker fastened to it. This sticker contained the Factory Defect List; the list of all known bad spots on the drive.



          enter image description here



          If you performed a low-level format of the drive, you had to use a tool to type in all the Cylinder-Head-Sector locations of the bad spots.

          SCSI drives have a command, IOCTL_DISK_REASSIGN_BLOCKS, to tell them to reallocate a bad spot on the drive after the operating system detects it. In IDE drives this all happens automatically, without the need for operating system intervention.




          Ideally the drive would recognize the sector is failing, move the data to a spare sector, and never use the original sector again. But what happens if the drive hasn't been able to read the sector successfully?



          This is what Pending Sectors are. The drive has detected that a sector is failing, and needs to be remapped to a spare. But it can't do that until it can successfully read the data. When the drive knows that a sector is bad, and needs to be remapped, but it cannot do that yet because it's waiting to get a good read from the sector, that's called the Pending Sector Count:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 2


          My hard drive has 2 sectors that the drive recognizes as bad, but that cannot be reallocated yet. If you were to attempt to read one of these ‘Pending sectors’, the drive would likely retry (and retry, and retry), and eventually return a read error to the host operating system as shown below:



          enter image description here



          Give up on the pending sector and it will get reallocated



          There are two ways that the drive can finally reallocate the sector, and consume another spare sector:




          • it finally gets a good read

          • you don't care about the data in the sector anymore


          If the drive finally read the sector, then it knows that it can reallocate the sector.



          The other way the drive can reallocate the sector is if you let it know that the contents of that sector are irrelevant; and that you don't care what's in it anymore. How do you do that?



          By writing something new to the sector.



          Whenever you read from, or write to, a sector on a hard drive, you have to read/write the entire 512-byte sector (unless you have a 4K sector hard drive in which case it would be 4K bytes). You are not able to write only part of a sector. When the OS writes data to a sector, it has to specify the entire 512-bytes. If you tell the hard drive that you want this new data to replace this bad sector, the drive then knows that you don't even care what's currently in the bad sector. It can then Reallocate a bad sector to one of the spares, and then the sector is no longer Pending.



          This is why when people ask about having some Current Pending Sectors, the common advice is to use a tool (such as Western Digital's Data LifeGuard) to write all zero's to the drive.



          enter image description here



          By writing zeros to every sector on the drive, you are telling the drive that it can finally reallocate all those pesky pending sectors. After the wipe, all of your Pending Sectors will become Reallocated Sectors:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 66
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 5
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 0


          Note: It's not strictly necessary to use a "low level" tool like Western Digital's Data LifeGuard. If you instruct Windows perform a full format (i.e. non-Quick format) of a volume, it will writes zeros to every sector in the volume.



          The OS filing system supports marking sectors as bad



          Armed with this knowledge, we'll explore a commonly confusing scenario.



          Before the advent of Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), the host operating system was responsible for detecting bad sectors, retrying the reads, moving data to another sector, and marking old sectors as bad.



          If you were to run a chkdsk /r c: using the host operating system, it would recognize that the "pending" sectors are bad, and mark them as bad itself, and never try to use them again:



          > C:Windowssystem32>chkdsk /r c:
          The type of the file system is NTFS.
          Volume label is OS.

          12 KB in bad sectors.


          So assuming a 512-byte sector hard drive, 12 KB of ‘Pending Sectors’ or in this example 12KB marked by the OS as ‘bad sectors’, that would correspond to decimal 24 or hexadecimal 0x18 as would be shown by a S.M.A.R.T. disk utility such as Crystal Disk Information:



          ID   Attribute Name            Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 18


          NOTE: Western Digital’s Data LifeGuard v1.31 (latest as of 8/31/2017) utility does not appear to show the current S.M.A.R.T. ‘Raw’ counter values correctly. Not sure what the ‘Warranty’ column represents.



          Now if you perform a full format:



          enter image description here



          which writes zeros to every sector in the volume, that means those sectors that were Pending are going to get reallocated. It is now safe for the filing system to use those sectors again. In order to instruct the filing system that those sectors are no longer "bad", you perform an option where it reevaluates bad sectors:



          >chkdsk c: /B


          where the command documentation says



          /B              NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume
          (implies /R)


          Or



          According to:
          https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730714(v=ws.11).aspx



          /B              NTFS only: Clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and 
          rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors. /b includes
          the functionality of /r. Use this parameter after imaging a
          volume to a new hard disk drive.


          This was a whole lotta writing, and a whole lotta screenshots, for something that will never be read.






          share|improve this answer























          • I have a 200MB file that has a problem at 87%. I got 3 pending sectors. I tried hashing the file to get good reads and claim reallocated sectors, but they are not getting reallocated! Hashing results: ok, fail, ok, ok, fail, fail. Every time the OS generated several Disk Errors in the event viewer, and on ok hashings, it hung for half a minute at 87%. All hashes are equal. C5 is still 3 and C4 still 0. What's your take on this?
            – Mark Jeronimus
            May 11 '14 at 20:25












          • @MarkJeronimus Try using a file wiper, which will write all zeros (or all random data) to the file. That should get the drive to realize you don't care about those sectors anymore.
            – Ian Boyd
            May 11 '14 at 23:31










          • I did a full format, but still no change.
            – Mark Jeronimus
            May 14 '14 at 8:53






          • 2




            One thing I don't quite understand: is it possible to (a) show which files contain the current C5 sectors, and (b) 'nuke' those sectors, i.e. move them to C6, and stop trying to read them? I don't want my HDD to get stuck in an endless failing read cycle; would rather black out those sectors and delete the files in question (manually restoring them from some other source if they're important).
            – M.M
            Dec 29 '14 at 21:54








          • 1




            I don't want to zero the entire drive though, just work around the bad bit. Will have a look at that program , thanks
            – M.M
            Jan 1 '15 at 22:15















          up vote
          103
          down vote



          accepted
          +50










          Short answer: Write something new to the sector (even zeros - which a long format does).



          Long Answer



          Hard drives today try to hide bad sectors from the host computer. The host computer simply asks the drive to return the contents of a particular sector number. Normally the drive reads the sector, returns it to the host machine, and everything is fine.



          The hard drive knows if the value it read is valid or not, because the drive uses Error-correcting code (ECC) to validate that the contents it read are correct. If the drive detects that the contents of the sector are invalid, it will retry the read. The hope is that if it simply reads it again, it might get the correct sector contents. It will keep retrying until it gets a good value, or it's reached it's time limit (formally known as the Command completion time limit, or CCTL).



          During these retries, the drive will appear dead; as it is no longer responding to commands.



          Spare Sectors



          Most modern drives contain a number of "spare" sectors (e.g. 1,024 spare sectors). If the drive recognizes a sector as bad, it will stop using it. Any requests to read or write to that damaged sector will transparently be redirected to a spare sector. This marking off of a bad sector, and reallocating its data to a spare sector, is called a Reallocation Event. And the total number of sectors that have been reallocated (and so how many of your spare sectors have been used up) is the Reallocated Sector Count.



          In this example from one of my own hard drives, 64 sectors were found to be bad. That means that 64 of the drive's spare sectors have been called into use:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64


          On this same hard drive, there have been 4 Reallocation Events. This means that there were four occasions where the drive marked sectors as bad, and used spare sectors instead.



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4


          What if it can't ever read the data?



          These actions of re-reading sectors, consuming spares, all behind the computer's back is a good thing. It means the host operating system doesn't have to deal with the issue of failing sectors. The drive itself can handle those details itself.




          Bonus Chatter: In the olden days, your hard drive shipped with a sticker fastened to it. This sticker contained the Factory Defect List; the list of all known bad spots on the drive.



          enter image description here



          If you performed a low-level format of the drive, you had to use a tool to type in all the Cylinder-Head-Sector locations of the bad spots.

          SCSI drives have a command, IOCTL_DISK_REASSIGN_BLOCKS, to tell them to reallocate a bad spot on the drive after the operating system detects it. In IDE drives this all happens automatically, without the need for operating system intervention.




          Ideally the drive would recognize the sector is failing, move the data to a spare sector, and never use the original sector again. But what happens if the drive hasn't been able to read the sector successfully?



          This is what Pending Sectors are. The drive has detected that a sector is failing, and needs to be remapped to a spare. But it can't do that until it can successfully read the data. When the drive knows that a sector is bad, and needs to be remapped, but it cannot do that yet because it's waiting to get a good read from the sector, that's called the Pending Sector Count:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 2


          My hard drive has 2 sectors that the drive recognizes as bad, but that cannot be reallocated yet. If you were to attempt to read one of these ‘Pending sectors’, the drive would likely retry (and retry, and retry), and eventually return a read error to the host operating system as shown below:



          enter image description here



          Give up on the pending sector and it will get reallocated



          There are two ways that the drive can finally reallocate the sector, and consume another spare sector:




          • it finally gets a good read

          • you don't care about the data in the sector anymore


          If the drive finally read the sector, then it knows that it can reallocate the sector.



          The other way the drive can reallocate the sector is if you let it know that the contents of that sector are irrelevant; and that you don't care what's in it anymore. How do you do that?



          By writing something new to the sector.



          Whenever you read from, or write to, a sector on a hard drive, you have to read/write the entire 512-byte sector (unless you have a 4K sector hard drive in which case it would be 4K bytes). You are not able to write only part of a sector. When the OS writes data to a sector, it has to specify the entire 512-bytes. If you tell the hard drive that you want this new data to replace this bad sector, the drive then knows that you don't even care what's currently in the bad sector. It can then Reallocate a bad sector to one of the spares, and then the sector is no longer Pending.



          This is why when people ask about having some Current Pending Sectors, the common advice is to use a tool (such as Western Digital's Data LifeGuard) to write all zero's to the drive.



          enter image description here



          By writing zeros to every sector on the drive, you are telling the drive that it can finally reallocate all those pesky pending sectors. After the wipe, all of your Pending Sectors will become Reallocated Sectors:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 66
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 5
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 0


          Note: It's not strictly necessary to use a "low level" tool like Western Digital's Data LifeGuard. If you instruct Windows perform a full format (i.e. non-Quick format) of a volume, it will writes zeros to every sector in the volume.



          The OS filing system supports marking sectors as bad



          Armed with this knowledge, we'll explore a commonly confusing scenario.



          Before the advent of Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), the host operating system was responsible for detecting bad sectors, retrying the reads, moving data to another sector, and marking old sectors as bad.



          If you were to run a chkdsk /r c: using the host operating system, it would recognize that the "pending" sectors are bad, and mark them as bad itself, and never try to use them again:



          > C:Windowssystem32>chkdsk /r c:
          The type of the file system is NTFS.
          Volume label is OS.

          12 KB in bad sectors.


          So assuming a 512-byte sector hard drive, 12 KB of ‘Pending Sectors’ or in this example 12KB marked by the OS as ‘bad sectors’, that would correspond to decimal 24 or hexadecimal 0x18 as would be shown by a S.M.A.R.T. disk utility such as Crystal Disk Information:



          ID   Attribute Name            Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 18


          NOTE: Western Digital’s Data LifeGuard v1.31 (latest as of 8/31/2017) utility does not appear to show the current S.M.A.R.T. ‘Raw’ counter values correctly. Not sure what the ‘Warranty’ column represents.



          Now if you perform a full format:



          enter image description here



          which writes zeros to every sector in the volume, that means those sectors that were Pending are going to get reallocated. It is now safe for the filing system to use those sectors again. In order to instruct the filing system that those sectors are no longer "bad", you perform an option where it reevaluates bad sectors:



          >chkdsk c: /B


          where the command documentation says



          /B              NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume
          (implies /R)


          Or



          According to:
          https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730714(v=ws.11).aspx



          /B              NTFS only: Clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and 
          rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors. /b includes
          the functionality of /r. Use this parameter after imaging a
          volume to a new hard disk drive.


          This was a whole lotta writing, and a whole lotta screenshots, for something that will never be read.






          share|improve this answer























          • I have a 200MB file that has a problem at 87%. I got 3 pending sectors. I tried hashing the file to get good reads and claim reallocated sectors, but they are not getting reallocated! Hashing results: ok, fail, ok, ok, fail, fail. Every time the OS generated several Disk Errors in the event viewer, and on ok hashings, it hung for half a minute at 87%. All hashes are equal. C5 is still 3 and C4 still 0. What's your take on this?
            – Mark Jeronimus
            May 11 '14 at 20:25












          • @MarkJeronimus Try using a file wiper, which will write all zeros (or all random data) to the file. That should get the drive to realize you don't care about those sectors anymore.
            – Ian Boyd
            May 11 '14 at 23:31










          • I did a full format, but still no change.
            – Mark Jeronimus
            May 14 '14 at 8:53






          • 2




            One thing I don't quite understand: is it possible to (a) show which files contain the current C5 sectors, and (b) 'nuke' those sectors, i.e. move them to C6, and stop trying to read them? I don't want my HDD to get stuck in an endless failing read cycle; would rather black out those sectors and delete the files in question (manually restoring them from some other source if they're important).
            – M.M
            Dec 29 '14 at 21:54








          • 1




            I don't want to zero the entire drive though, just work around the bad bit. Will have a look at that program , thanks
            – M.M
            Jan 1 '15 at 22:15













          up vote
          103
          down vote



          accepted
          +50







          up vote
          103
          down vote



          accepted
          +50




          +50




          Short answer: Write something new to the sector (even zeros - which a long format does).



          Long Answer



          Hard drives today try to hide bad sectors from the host computer. The host computer simply asks the drive to return the contents of a particular sector number. Normally the drive reads the sector, returns it to the host machine, and everything is fine.



          The hard drive knows if the value it read is valid or not, because the drive uses Error-correcting code (ECC) to validate that the contents it read are correct. If the drive detects that the contents of the sector are invalid, it will retry the read. The hope is that if it simply reads it again, it might get the correct sector contents. It will keep retrying until it gets a good value, or it's reached it's time limit (formally known as the Command completion time limit, or CCTL).



          During these retries, the drive will appear dead; as it is no longer responding to commands.



          Spare Sectors



          Most modern drives contain a number of "spare" sectors (e.g. 1,024 spare sectors). If the drive recognizes a sector as bad, it will stop using it. Any requests to read or write to that damaged sector will transparently be redirected to a spare sector. This marking off of a bad sector, and reallocating its data to a spare sector, is called a Reallocation Event. And the total number of sectors that have been reallocated (and so how many of your spare sectors have been used up) is the Reallocated Sector Count.



          In this example from one of my own hard drives, 64 sectors were found to be bad. That means that 64 of the drive's spare sectors have been called into use:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64


          On this same hard drive, there have been 4 Reallocation Events. This means that there were four occasions where the drive marked sectors as bad, and used spare sectors instead.



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4


          What if it can't ever read the data?



          These actions of re-reading sectors, consuming spares, all behind the computer's back is a good thing. It means the host operating system doesn't have to deal with the issue of failing sectors. The drive itself can handle those details itself.




          Bonus Chatter: In the olden days, your hard drive shipped with a sticker fastened to it. This sticker contained the Factory Defect List; the list of all known bad spots on the drive.



          enter image description here



          If you performed a low-level format of the drive, you had to use a tool to type in all the Cylinder-Head-Sector locations of the bad spots.

          SCSI drives have a command, IOCTL_DISK_REASSIGN_BLOCKS, to tell them to reallocate a bad spot on the drive after the operating system detects it. In IDE drives this all happens automatically, without the need for operating system intervention.




          Ideally the drive would recognize the sector is failing, move the data to a spare sector, and never use the original sector again. But what happens if the drive hasn't been able to read the sector successfully?



          This is what Pending Sectors are. The drive has detected that a sector is failing, and needs to be remapped to a spare. But it can't do that until it can successfully read the data. When the drive knows that a sector is bad, and needs to be remapped, but it cannot do that yet because it's waiting to get a good read from the sector, that's called the Pending Sector Count:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 2


          My hard drive has 2 sectors that the drive recognizes as bad, but that cannot be reallocated yet. If you were to attempt to read one of these ‘Pending sectors’, the drive would likely retry (and retry, and retry), and eventually return a read error to the host operating system as shown below:



          enter image description here



          Give up on the pending sector and it will get reallocated



          There are two ways that the drive can finally reallocate the sector, and consume another spare sector:




          • it finally gets a good read

          • you don't care about the data in the sector anymore


          If the drive finally read the sector, then it knows that it can reallocate the sector.



          The other way the drive can reallocate the sector is if you let it know that the contents of that sector are irrelevant; and that you don't care what's in it anymore. How do you do that?



          By writing something new to the sector.



          Whenever you read from, or write to, a sector on a hard drive, you have to read/write the entire 512-byte sector (unless you have a 4K sector hard drive in which case it would be 4K bytes). You are not able to write only part of a sector. When the OS writes data to a sector, it has to specify the entire 512-bytes. If you tell the hard drive that you want this new data to replace this bad sector, the drive then knows that you don't even care what's currently in the bad sector. It can then Reallocate a bad sector to one of the spares, and then the sector is no longer Pending.



          This is why when people ask about having some Current Pending Sectors, the common advice is to use a tool (such as Western Digital's Data LifeGuard) to write all zero's to the drive.



          enter image description here



          By writing zeros to every sector on the drive, you are telling the drive that it can finally reallocate all those pesky pending sectors. After the wipe, all of your Pending Sectors will become Reallocated Sectors:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 66
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 5
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 0


          Note: It's not strictly necessary to use a "low level" tool like Western Digital's Data LifeGuard. If you instruct Windows perform a full format (i.e. non-Quick format) of a volume, it will writes zeros to every sector in the volume.



          The OS filing system supports marking sectors as bad



          Armed with this knowledge, we'll explore a commonly confusing scenario.



          Before the advent of Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), the host operating system was responsible for detecting bad sectors, retrying the reads, moving data to another sector, and marking old sectors as bad.



          If you were to run a chkdsk /r c: using the host operating system, it would recognize that the "pending" sectors are bad, and mark them as bad itself, and never try to use them again:



          > C:Windowssystem32>chkdsk /r c:
          The type of the file system is NTFS.
          Volume label is OS.

          12 KB in bad sectors.


          So assuming a 512-byte sector hard drive, 12 KB of ‘Pending Sectors’ or in this example 12KB marked by the OS as ‘bad sectors’, that would correspond to decimal 24 or hexadecimal 0x18 as would be shown by a S.M.A.R.T. disk utility such as Crystal Disk Information:



          ID   Attribute Name            Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 18


          NOTE: Western Digital’s Data LifeGuard v1.31 (latest as of 8/31/2017) utility does not appear to show the current S.M.A.R.T. ‘Raw’ counter values correctly. Not sure what the ‘Warranty’ column represents.



          Now if you perform a full format:



          enter image description here



          which writes zeros to every sector in the volume, that means those sectors that were Pending are going to get reallocated. It is now safe for the filing system to use those sectors again. In order to instruct the filing system that those sectors are no longer "bad", you perform an option where it reevaluates bad sectors:



          >chkdsk c: /B


          where the command documentation says



          /B              NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume
          (implies /R)


          Or



          According to:
          https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730714(v=ws.11).aspx



          /B              NTFS only: Clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and 
          rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors. /b includes
          the functionality of /r. Use this parameter after imaging a
          volume to a new hard disk drive.


          This was a whole lotta writing, and a whole lotta screenshots, for something that will never be read.






          share|improve this answer














          Short answer: Write something new to the sector (even zeros - which a long format does).



          Long Answer



          Hard drives today try to hide bad sectors from the host computer. The host computer simply asks the drive to return the contents of a particular sector number. Normally the drive reads the sector, returns it to the host machine, and everything is fine.



          The hard drive knows if the value it read is valid or not, because the drive uses Error-correcting code (ECC) to validate that the contents it read are correct. If the drive detects that the contents of the sector are invalid, it will retry the read. The hope is that if it simply reads it again, it might get the correct sector contents. It will keep retrying until it gets a good value, or it's reached it's time limit (formally known as the Command completion time limit, or CCTL).



          During these retries, the drive will appear dead; as it is no longer responding to commands.



          Spare Sectors



          Most modern drives contain a number of "spare" sectors (e.g. 1,024 spare sectors). If the drive recognizes a sector as bad, it will stop using it. Any requests to read or write to that damaged sector will transparently be redirected to a spare sector. This marking off of a bad sector, and reallocating its data to a spare sector, is called a Reallocation Event. And the total number of sectors that have been reallocated (and so how many of your spare sectors have been used up) is the Reallocated Sector Count.



          In this example from one of my own hard drives, 64 sectors were found to be bad. That means that 64 of the drive's spare sectors have been called into use:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64


          On this same hard drive, there have been 4 Reallocation Events. This means that there were four occasions where the drive marked sectors as bad, and used spare sectors instead.



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ===
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4


          What if it can't ever read the data?



          These actions of re-reading sectors, consuming spares, all behind the computer's back is a good thing. It means the host operating system doesn't have to deal with the issue of failing sectors. The drive itself can handle those details itself.




          Bonus Chatter: In the olden days, your hard drive shipped with a sticker fastened to it. This sticker contained the Factory Defect List; the list of all known bad spots on the drive.



          enter image description here



          If you performed a low-level format of the drive, you had to use a tool to type in all the Cylinder-Head-Sector locations of the bad spots.

          SCSI drives have a command, IOCTL_DISK_REASSIGN_BLOCKS, to tell them to reallocate a bad spot on the drive after the operating system detects it. In IDE drives this all happens automatically, without the need for operating system intervention.




          Ideally the drive would recognize the sector is failing, move the data to a spare sector, and never use the original sector again. But what happens if the drive hasn't been able to read the sector successfully?



          This is what Pending Sectors are. The drive has detected that a sector is failing, and needs to be remapped to a spare. But it can't do that until it can successfully read the data. When the drive knows that a sector is bad, and needs to be remapped, but it cannot do that yet because it's waiting to get a good read from the sector, that's called the Pending Sector Count:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 64
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 4
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 2


          My hard drive has 2 sectors that the drive recognizes as bad, but that cannot be reallocated yet. If you were to attempt to read one of these ‘Pending sectors’, the drive would likely retry (and retry, and retry), and eventually return a read error to the host operating system as shown below:



          enter image description here



          Give up on the pending sector and it will get reallocated



          There are two ways that the drive can finally reallocate the sector, and consume another spare sector:




          • it finally gets a good read

          • you don't care about the data in the sector anymore


          If the drive finally read the sector, then it knows that it can reallocate the sector.



          The other way the drive can reallocate the sector is if you let it know that the contents of that sector are irrelevant; and that you don't care what's in it anymore. How do you do that?



          By writing something new to the sector.



          Whenever you read from, or write to, a sector on a hard drive, you have to read/write the entire 512-byte sector (unless you have a 4K sector hard drive in which case it would be 4K bytes). You are not able to write only part of a sector. When the OS writes data to a sector, it has to specify the entire 512-bytes. If you tell the hard drive that you want this new data to replace this bad sector, the drive then knows that you don't even care what's currently in the bad sector. It can then Reallocate a bad sector to one of the spares, and then the sector is no longer Pending.



          This is why when people ask about having some Current Pending Sectors, the common advice is to use a tool (such as Western Digital's Data LifeGuard) to write all zero's to the drive.



          enter image description here



          By writing zeros to every sector on the drive, you are telling the drive that it can finally reallocate all those pesky pending sectors. After the wipe, all of your Pending Sectors will become Reallocated Sectors:



          ID                             Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (05) Reallocated Sector Count 192 192 140 66
          (C4) Reallocated Event Count 196 196 0 5
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 0


          Note: It's not strictly necessary to use a "low level" tool like Western Digital's Data LifeGuard. If you instruct Windows perform a full format (i.e. non-Quick format) of a volume, it will writes zeros to every sector in the volume.



          The OS filing system supports marking sectors as bad



          Armed with this knowledge, we'll explore a commonly confusing scenario.



          Before the advent of Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), the host operating system was responsible for detecting bad sectors, retrying the reads, moving data to another sector, and marking old sectors as bad.



          If you were to run a chkdsk /r c: using the host operating system, it would recognize that the "pending" sectors are bad, and mark them as bad itself, and never try to use them again:



          > C:Windowssystem32>chkdsk /r c:
          The type of the file system is NTFS.
          Volume label is OS.

          12 KB in bad sectors.


          So assuming a 512-byte sector hard drive, 12 KB of ‘Pending Sectors’ or in this example 12KB marked by the OS as ‘bad sectors’, that would correspond to decimal 24 or hexadecimal 0x18 as would be shown by a S.M.A.R.T. disk utility such as Crystal Disk Information:



          ID   Attribute Name            Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw  
          ============================= ======= ===== ========= ====
          (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 18


          NOTE: Western Digital’s Data LifeGuard v1.31 (latest as of 8/31/2017) utility does not appear to show the current S.M.A.R.T. ‘Raw’ counter values correctly. Not sure what the ‘Warranty’ column represents.



          Now if you perform a full format:



          enter image description here



          which writes zeros to every sector in the volume, that means those sectors that were Pending are going to get reallocated. It is now safe for the filing system to use those sectors again. In order to instruct the filing system that those sectors are no longer "bad", you perform an option where it reevaluates bad sectors:



          >chkdsk c: /B


          where the command documentation says



          /B              NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume
          (implies /R)


          Or



          According to:
          https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730714(v=ws.11).aspx



          /B              NTFS only: Clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and 
          rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors. /b includes
          the functionality of /r. Use this parameter after imaging a
          volume to a new hard disk drive.


          This was a whole lotta writing, and a whole lotta screenshots, for something that will never be read.







          share|improve this answer














          share|improve this answer



          share|improve this answer








          edited Nov 16 at 19:30

























          answered Dec 15 '13 at 18:06









          Ian Boyd

          12.7k38107158




          12.7k38107158












          • I have a 200MB file that has a problem at 87%. I got 3 pending sectors. I tried hashing the file to get good reads and claim reallocated sectors, but they are not getting reallocated! Hashing results: ok, fail, ok, ok, fail, fail. Every time the OS generated several Disk Errors in the event viewer, and on ok hashings, it hung for half a minute at 87%. All hashes are equal. C5 is still 3 and C4 still 0. What's your take on this?
            – Mark Jeronimus
            May 11 '14 at 20:25












          • @MarkJeronimus Try using a file wiper, which will write all zeros (or all random data) to the file. That should get the drive to realize you don't care about those sectors anymore.
            – Ian Boyd
            May 11 '14 at 23:31










          • I did a full format, but still no change.
            – Mark Jeronimus
            May 14 '14 at 8:53






          • 2




            One thing I don't quite understand: is it possible to (a) show which files contain the current C5 sectors, and (b) 'nuke' those sectors, i.e. move them to C6, and stop trying to read them? I don't want my HDD to get stuck in an endless failing read cycle; would rather black out those sectors and delete the files in question (manually restoring them from some other source if they're important).
            – M.M
            Dec 29 '14 at 21:54








          • 1




            I don't want to zero the entire drive though, just work around the bad bit. Will have a look at that program , thanks
            – M.M
            Jan 1 '15 at 22:15


















          • I have a 200MB file that has a problem at 87%. I got 3 pending sectors. I tried hashing the file to get good reads and claim reallocated sectors, but they are not getting reallocated! Hashing results: ok, fail, ok, ok, fail, fail. Every time the OS generated several Disk Errors in the event viewer, and on ok hashings, it hung for half a minute at 87%. All hashes are equal. C5 is still 3 and C4 still 0. What's your take on this?
            – Mark Jeronimus
            May 11 '14 at 20:25












          • @MarkJeronimus Try using a file wiper, which will write all zeros (or all random data) to the file. That should get the drive to realize you don't care about those sectors anymore.
            – Ian Boyd
            May 11 '14 at 23:31










          • I did a full format, but still no change.
            – Mark Jeronimus
            May 14 '14 at 8:53






          • 2




            One thing I don't quite understand: is it possible to (a) show which files contain the current C5 sectors, and (b) 'nuke' those sectors, i.e. move them to C6, and stop trying to read them? I don't want my HDD to get stuck in an endless failing read cycle; would rather black out those sectors and delete the files in question (manually restoring them from some other source if they're important).
            – M.M
            Dec 29 '14 at 21:54








          • 1




            I don't want to zero the entire drive though, just work around the bad bit. Will have a look at that program , thanks
            – M.M
            Jan 1 '15 at 22:15
















          I have a 200MB file that has a problem at 87%. I got 3 pending sectors. I tried hashing the file to get good reads and claim reallocated sectors, but they are not getting reallocated! Hashing results: ok, fail, ok, ok, fail, fail. Every time the OS generated several Disk Errors in the event viewer, and on ok hashings, it hung for half a minute at 87%. All hashes are equal. C5 is still 3 and C4 still 0. What's your take on this?
          – Mark Jeronimus
          May 11 '14 at 20:25






          I have a 200MB file that has a problem at 87%. I got 3 pending sectors. I tried hashing the file to get good reads and claim reallocated sectors, but they are not getting reallocated! Hashing results: ok, fail, ok, ok, fail, fail. Every time the OS generated several Disk Errors in the event viewer, and on ok hashings, it hung for half a minute at 87%. All hashes are equal. C5 is still 3 and C4 still 0. What's your take on this?
          – Mark Jeronimus
          May 11 '14 at 20:25














          @MarkJeronimus Try using a file wiper, which will write all zeros (or all random data) to the file. That should get the drive to realize you don't care about those sectors anymore.
          – Ian Boyd
          May 11 '14 at 23:31




          @MarkJeronimus Try using a file wiper, which will write all zeros (or all random data) to the file. That should get the drive to realize you don't care about those sectors anymore.
          – Ian Boyd
          May 11 '14 at 23:31












          I did a full format, but still no change.
          – Mark Jeronimus
          May 14 '14 at 8:53




          I did a full format, but still no change.
          – Mark Jeronimus
          May 14 '14 at 8:53




          2




          2




          One thing I don't quite understand: is it possible to (a) show which files contain the current C5 sectors, and (b) 'nuke' those sectors, i.e. move them to C6, and stop trying to read them? I don't want my HDD to get stuck in an endless failing read cycle; would rather black out those sectors and delete the files in question (manually restoring them from some other source if they're important).
          – M.M
          Dec 29 '14 at 21:54






          One thing I don't quite understand: is it possible to (a) show which files contain the current C5 sectors, and (b) 'nuke' those sectors, i.e. move them to C6, and stop trying to read them? I don't want my HDD to get stuck in an endless failing read cycle; would rather black out those sectors and delete the files in question (manually restoring them from some other source if they're important).
          – M.M
          Dec 29 '14 at 21:54






          1




          1




          I don't want to zero the entire drive though, just work around the bad bit. Will have a look at that program , thanks
          – M.M
          Jan 1 '15 at 22:15




          I don't want to zero the entire drive though, just work around the bad bit. Will have a look at that program , thanks
          – M.M
          Jan 1 '15 at 22:15












          up vote
          5
          down vote













          You don't need to do anything - yet. The reallocation count means "disk found defective sector and successfully reallocated it". The firmware already fixed the issue.



          You just need to be aware that the drive is starting to fail. At some point in the future, the drive won't have spare sectors left for the reallocation and you will lose data. If some important block is lost, you might lose all the data on the drive.



          So keep an eye on this value or buy a new drive right away so you can forget about it.






          share|improve this answer

























            up vote
            5
            down vote













            You don't need to do anything - yet. The reallocation count means "disk found defective sector and successfully reallocated it". The firmware already fixed the issue.



            You just need to be aware that the drive is starting to fail. At some point in the future, the drive won't have spare sectors left for the reallocation and you will lose data. If some important block is lost, you might lose all the data on the drive.



            So keep an eye on this value or buy a new drive right away so you can forget about it.






            share|improve this answer























              up vote
              5
              down vote










              up vote
              5
              down vote









              You don't need to do anything - yet. The reallocation count means "disk found defective sector and successfully reallocated it". The firmware already fixed the issue.



              You just need to be aware that the drive is starting to fail. At some point in the future, the drive won't have spare sectors left for the reallocation and you will lose data. If some important block is lost, you might lose all the data on the drive.



              So keep an eye on this value or buy a new drive right away so you can forget about it.






              share|improve this answer












              You don't need to do anything - yet. The reallocation count means "disk found defective sector and successfully reallocated it". The firmware already fixed the issue.



              You just need to be aware that the drive is starting to fail. At some point in the future, the drive won't have spare sectors left for the reallocation and you will lose data. If some important block is lost, you might lose all the data on the drive.



              So keep an eye on this value or buy a new drive right away so you can forget about it.







              share|improve this answer












              share|improve this answer



              share|improve this answer










              answered Sep 11 '12 at 10:05









              Aaron Digulla

              4,35153561




              4,35153561






















                  up vote
                  3
                  down vote













                  I had good experience with the method describe here https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/BadBlockHowto. My disk was making noise and stop working so I use smart report and the formula to calculate the bad block and use dd to clear it. I was lucky because smart is still reporting a current sector count but the disk is working since 2 years or so. I did bought a replacement but I've never used it. It seems to me that smart isn't that accurate either.






                  share|improve this answer























                  • oflag=direct option for dd when writing zeros to bad locations to force reallocation (as suggested in that link) was the part I was looking for. Thanks!
                    – Anton
                    Nov 24 at 17:55















                  up vote
                  3
                  down vote













                  I had good experience with the method describe here https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/BadBlockHowto. My disk was making noise and stop working so I use smart report and the formula to calculate the bad block and use dd to clear it. I was lucky because smart is still reporting a current sector count but the disk is working since 2 years or so. I did bought a replacement but I've never used it. It seems to me that smart isn't that accurate either.






                  share|improve this answer























                  • oflag=direct option for dd when writing zeros to bad locations to force reallocation (as suggested in that link) was the part I was looking for. Thanks!
                    – Anton
                    Nov 24 at 17:55













                  up vote
                  3
                  down vote










                  up vote
                  3
                  down vote









                  I had good experience with the method describe here https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/BadBlockHowto. My disk was making noise and stop working so I use smart report and the formula to calculate the bad block and use dd to clear it. I was lucky because smart is still reporting a current sector count but the disk is working since 2 years or so. I did bought a replacement but I've never used it. It seems to me that smart isn't that accurate either.






                  share|improve this answer














                  I had good experience with the method describe here https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/BadBlockHowto. My disk was making noise and stop working so I use smart report and the formula to calculate the bad block and use dd to clear it. I was lucky because smart is still reporting a current sector count but the disk is working since 2 years or so. I did bought a replacement but I've never used it. It seems to me that smart isn't that accurate either.







                  share|improve this answer














                  share|improve this answer



                  share|improve this answer








                  edited Nov 24 at 17:55









                  Anton

                  1384




                  1384










                  answered Jan 30 '12 at 21:29









                  Bytemain

                  1,38442442




                  1,38442442












                  • oflag=direct option for dd when writing zeros to bad locations to force reallocation (as suggested in that link) was the part I was looking for. Thanks!
                    – Anton
                    Nov 24 at 17:55


















                  • oflag=direct option for dd when writing zeros to bad locations to force reallocation (as suggested in that link) was the part I was looking for. Thanks!
                    – Anton
                    Nov 24 at 17:55
















                  oflag=direct option for dd when writing zeros to bad locations to force reallocation (as suggested in that link) was the part I was looking for. Thanks!
                  – Anton
                  Nov 24 at 17:55




                  oflag=direct option for dd when writing zeros to bad locations to force reallocation (as suggested in that link) was the part I was looking for. Thanks!
                  – Anton
                  Nov 24 at 17:55










                  up vote
                  2
                  down vote













                  Maybe you do not know this tool:
                  HD Sentinel




                  Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS SSD and HDD monitoring and analysis software. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drive problems, report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer and in external enclosures (USB hard disks / e-SATA hard disks). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.




                  This seems to be a great tool to do such actions. But take care, some run options can completely destroy data.






                  share|improve this answer



























                    up vote
                    2
                    down vote













                    Maybe you do not know this tool:
                    HD Sentinel




                    Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS SSD and HDD monitoring and analysis software. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drive problems, report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer and in external enclosures (USB hard disks / e-SATA hard disks). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.




                    This seems to be a great tool to do such actions. But take care, some run options can completely destroy data.






                    share|improve this answer

























                      up vote
                      2
                      down vote










                      up vote
                      2
                      down vote









                      Maybe you do not know this tool:
                      HD Sentinel




                      Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS SSD and HDD monitoring and analysis software. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drive problems, report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer and in external enclosures (USB hard disks / e-SATA hard disks). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.




                      This seems to be a great tool to do such actions. But take care, some run options can completely destroy data.






                      share|improve this answer














                      Maybe you do not know this tool:
                      HD Sentinel




                      Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS SSD and HDD monitoring and analysis software. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drive problems, report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer and in external enclosures (USB hard disks / e-SATA hard disks). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.




                      This seems to be a great tool to do such actions. But take care, some run options can completely destroy data.







                      share|improve this answer














                      share|improve this answer



                      share|improve this answer








                      edited Oct 18 '12 at 8:42









                      slhck

                      158k47436461




                      158k47436461










                      answered Oct 18 '12 at 8:38









                      Estevan TH.

                      211




                      211






















                          up vote
                          1
                          down vote













                          You need to use a tool that writes to every sector of the drive. Otherwise, there's no way to do it. If the drive allocated a spare sector and remapped, what data should it put in the spare sector? It has no idea, since its attempt to read from the existing sector failed. Only a write operation can clear the error.






                          share|improve this answer





















                          • Formatting the entire hard drive is a write operation to every sector? I already formatted the drive (windows-based format command, no 'quick format'). Thanks
                            – edteke
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:29






                          • 2




                            A quick format is not a write operation to every sector, a regular format usually is. You can always use DBaN. Did the regular format at least reduce the count?
                            – David Schwartz
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:32












                          • I did a regular format (not a quick format), I expected the count down or a remap after the format, but number was the same. Thanks
                            – edteke
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:40










                          • That's very strange, actually. Was the partition you formatted the size of the entire drive?
                            – David Schwartz
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:41










                          • @edgh: A regular format doesn't help when you have such an error. I suggest you try my method.
                            – Bytemain
                            Jan 31 '12 at 1:07















                          up vote
                          1
                          down vote













                          You need to use a tool that writes to every sector of the drive. Otherwise, there's no way to do it. If the drive allocated a spare sector and remapped, what data should it put in the spare sector? It has no idea, since its attempt to read from the existing sector failed. Only a write operation can clear the error.






                          share|improve this answer





















                          • Formatting the entire hard drive is a write operation to every sector? I already formatted the drive (windows-based format command, no 'quick format'). Thanks
                            – edteke
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:29






                          • 2




                            A quick format is not a write operation to every sector, a regular format usually is. You can always use DBaN. Did the regular format at least reduce the count?
                            – David Schwartz
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:32












                          • I did a regular format (not a quick format), I expected the count down or a remap after the format, but number was the same. Thanks
                            – edteke
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:40










                          • That's very strange, actually. Was the partition you formatted the size of the entire drive?
                            – David Schwartz
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:41










                          • @edgh: A regular format doesn't help when you have such an error. I suggest you try my method.
                            – Bytemain
                            Jan 31 '12 at 1:07













                          up vote
                          1
                          down vote










                          up vote
                          1
                          down vote









                          You need to use a tool that writes to every sector of the drive. Otherwise, there's no way to do it. If the drive allocated a spare sector and remapped, what data should it put in the spare sector? It has no idea, since its attempt to read from the existing sector failed. Only a write operation can clear the error.






                          share|improve this answer












                          You need to use a tool that writes to every sector of the drive. Otherwise, there's no way to do it. If the drive allocated a spare sector and remapped, what data should it put in the spare sector? It has no idea, since its attempt to read from the existing sector failed. Only a write operation can clear the error.







                          share|improve this answer












                          share|improve this answer



                          share|improve this answer










                          answered Jan 30 '12 at 21:22









                          David Schwartz

                          56.1k684128




                          56.1k684128












                          • Formatting the entire hard drive is a write operation to every sector? I already formatted the drive (windows-based format command, no 'quick format'). Thanks
                            – edteke
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:29






                          • 2




                            A quick format is not a write operation to every sector, a regular format usually is. You can always use DBaN. Did the regular format at least reduce the count?
                            – David Schwartz
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:32












                          • I did a regular format (not a quick format), I expected the count down or a remap after the format, but number was the same. Thanks
                            – edteke
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:40










                          • That's very strange, actually. Was the partition you formatted the size of the entire drive?
                            – David Schwartz
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:41










                          • @edgh: A regular format doesn't help when you have such an error. I suggest you try my method.
                            – Bytemain
                            Jan 31 '12 at 1:07


















                          • Formatting the entire hard drive is a write operation to every sector? I already formatted the drive (windows-based format command, no 'quick format'). Thanks
                            – edteke
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:29






                          • 2




                            A quick format is not a write operation to every sector, a regular format usually is. You can always use DBaN. Did the regular format at least reduce the count?
                            – David Schwartz
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:32












                          • I did a regular format (not a quick format), I expected the count down or a remap after the format, but number was the same. Thanks
                            – edteke
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:40










                          • That's very strange, actually. Was the partition you formatted the size of the entire drive?
                            – David Schwartz
                            Jan 31 '12 at 0:41










                          • @edgh: A regular format doesn't help when you have such an error. I suggest you try my method.
                            – Bytemain
                            Jan 31 '12 at 1:07
















                          Formatting the entire hard drive is a write operation to every sector? I already formatted the drive (windows-based format command, no 'quick format'). Thanks
                          – edteke
                          Jan 31 '12 at 0:29




                          Formatting the entire hard drive is a write operation to every sector? I already formatted the drive (windows-based format command, no 'quick format'). Thanks
                          – edteke
                          Jan 31 '12 at 0:29




                          2




                          2




                          A quick format is not a write operation to every sector, a regular format usually is. You can always use DBaN. Did the regular format at least reduce the count?
                          – David Schwartz
                          Jan 31 '12 at 0:32






                          A quick format is not a write operation to every sector, a regular format usually is. You can always use DBaN. Did the regular format at least reduce the count?
                          – David Schwartz
                          Jan 31 '12 at 0:32














                          I did a regular format (not a quick format), I expected the count down or a remap after the format, but number was the same. Thanks
                          – edteke
                          Jan 31 '12 at 0:40




                          I did a regular format (not a quick format), I expected the count down or a remap after the format, but number was the same. Thanks
                          – edteke
                          Jan 31 '12 at 0:40












                          That's very strange, actually. Was the partition you formatted the size of the entire drive?
                          – David Schwartz
                          Jan 31 '12 at 0:41




                          That's very strange, actually. Was the partition you formatted the size of the entire drive?
                          – David Schwartz
                          Jan 31 '12 at 0:41












                          @edgh: A regular format doesn't help when you have such an error. I suggest you try my method.
                          – Bytemain
                          Jan 31 '12 at 1:07




                          @edgh: A regular format doesn't help when you have such an error. I suggest you try my method.
                          – Bytemain
                          Jan 31 '12 at 1:07










                          up vote
                          1
                          down vote













                          Zero write, otherwise known as Low Level Format. You can only do this with a manufacturer disk utility usually. If there is a hard drive failure causing this error it may come back almost right away.






                          share|improve this answer

























                            up vote
                            1
                            down vote













                            Zero write, otherwise known as Low Level Format. You can only do this with a manufacturer disk utility usually. If there is a hard drive failure causing this error it may come back almost right away.






                            share|improve this answer























                              up vote
                              1
                              down vote










                              up vote
                              1
                              down vote









                              Zero write, otherwise known as Low Level Format. You can only do this with a manufacturer disk utility usually. If there is a hard drive failure causing this error it may come back almost right away.






                              share|improve this answer












                              Zero write, otherwise known as Low Level Format. You can only do this with a manufacturer disk utility usually. If there is a hard drive failure causing this error it may come back almost right away.







                              share|improve this answer












                              share|improve this answer



                              share|improve this answer










                              answered Jun 8 '12 at 21:34









                              Chris Abbott

                              111




                              111






















                                  up vote
                                  1
                                  down vote













                                  Try Spinrite 6 or HDD regenerator bootable CDs. They do write surface tests so it should clear out the pending bad sectors and bump up the reallocated count.






                                  share|improve this answer

























                                    up vote
                                    1
                                    down vote













                                    Try Spinrite 6 or HDD regenerator bootable CDs. They do write surface tests so it should clear out the pending bad sectors and bump up the reallocated count.






                                    share|improve this answer























                                      up vote
                                      1
                                      down vote










                                      up vote
                                      1
                                      down vote









                                      Try Spinrite 6 or HDD regenerator bootable CDs. They do write surface tests so it should clear out the pending bad sectors and bump up the reallocated count.






                                      share|improve this answer












                                      Try Spinrite 6 or HDD regenerator bootable CDs. They do write surface tests so it should clear out the pending bad sectors and bump up the reallocated count.







                                      share|improve this answer












                                      share|improve this answer



                                      share|improve this answer










                                      answered May 31 '13 at 11:13









                                      danwat1234

                                      372




                                      372

















                                          protected by bwDraco Aug 1 '15 at 21:51



                                          Thank you for your interest in this question.
                                          Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).



                                          Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?



                                          Popular posts from this blog

                                          Probability when a professor distributes a quiz and homework assignment to a class of n students.

                                          Aardman Animations

                                          Are they similar matrix