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I had a Seagate Expansion 2TB(1,862.64514923095703125GiB) external HDD, about a week and half ago my computer freezes at random intervals, it becomes completely irresponsive to keyboard and mouse inputs, screen freezes(onscreen clock doesn't change), power button malfunctions, but I can do hard resets by pressing "reset button" found on the case(I don't know what it is called).

I then ran some tests using Seatools and DiskGenius on my disks, the internal disk was fine, the external disk failed Seatools tests SMART, Short DST and Short Generic, and DiskGenius reports random bad sectors located in different cylinders each time I ran the test; But about 2.5 weeks ago when I ran the same tests, my external HDD had passed all of them, and nothing can physically harm my external HDD had happened...

I thought the USB convertor(I don't know its name) must have had malfunctioned, I opened the case of the disk, and bought a SATA data cable after finding out there was no spare SATA cable in my computer, plugged in and made the disk internal;

I then ran some more tests, this time, things were very different; The 2TB disk passed SMART, Short DST and Short Generic every time I use Seatools to test it, never failed, and it passed the tests faster than the boot disk...But DiskGenius reports a total of 163 bad cylinders with cylinder numbers fixed, and I can't get SMART data; The errors were mostly I/O Device Timeout, others were Data Error;

I know I/O Device Timeout means the bad sector is physical, I tried using DiskGenius to fix the bad sectors to no avail;

I then used this batch file and made it run over night:

diskpart /s %userprofile%\desktop\wipedisk.txt

File wipedisk.txt

select disk 1
clean all
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs
assign letter=G
quit

The script had succeeded, I then used DiskGenius to fix the bad sectors and all bad sectors were fixed successfully, and there is SMART data again, I then checked the areas where there were bad sectors and had confirmed the bad sectors were indeed fixed, the "Damaged" cylinders are now "Good" cylinders, the bad sectors were really fixed, but then comes the question: Can this disk be trusted?

Edit:

OK, this is the SMART information of said drive; There are a total of 10319 reallocated sectors(bad sectors), rated 81 in a total of 100, there are 3097029168 sectors, bad sectors/total sectors is 0.00000333190274945450562188570256307, how close is the countdown? enter image description here

Ξένη Γήινος
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1 Answers1

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To my knowledge bad sectors are usually not fixed, but mapped out from the space. So basically your disk should shrink to the number of bytes of bad sectors after the fix.

For me, the fact itself that the bad sectors started to arise, would alert me that my HDD is old enough and I wouldln't put too much trust on that drive and backup the most important data somewhere else.

LPVOID
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