My SATA HDD (Hitachi DeskStar 7K160) seems to have 1 bad sector. Is it possible to try to fix it? I checked Hitachi's drive tools and all of them are diagnostic tools, so I don't know how much help they will be.
I can buy a new drive but first I really want to try to fix it since I don't want the hassle to setup Windows 7 & Ubuntu again (both are on this disk).
Presuming you haven't yet lost any data, buy the new disk and clone across to it. Then you don't have to deal with setup again. You can connect the new disk and use dd from Ubuntu to clone it. There are multiple sites covering the process. As for recovering the sector, there are programs that claim they can, and some people claim to have good luck with them, I personally did not.
Your report is indicating you have one bad sector. This is not an emergency situation. Occasionally a disk can develope a bad sector for all sorts of reasons, and this is why disks come with a spare pool that automatically remaps the bad sector. This is what has happened with your disk.
Unfortunately the data on that sector is lost. To put this in perspective, depending on the sector size, in all liklihood you're talking about 4k of data, which could easily be some temp file that was created.
There are tools like spinrite that can sometimes retrieve data from drives that are failing by trying to read the sector repeatedly, but for one sector it's not worth the trouble unless you were to determine this was a vital data file.
The important thing is that you have backups of all of your important data files, and that you keep an eye on the drive. If you start to get additional problem sectors, then you should consider the advice provided by the other respondents, about getting a replacement.
If it is formatted as NTFS you can try using chkdsk /r to repair the drive, but I'm not sure how much that will help you in the long run. If the drive is failing, this could be an early warning sign. Backup everything you want. I suggest using dd to avoid having to manually copy everything over.
Generally bad sectors are signs of physical damage to the drive and are unfixable, some file systems will allow you work round them but mostly they cannot be repaired. Sometimes the damage is localised but often they are indicators of more trouble to come, so if you plan to continue to use the drive take frequent backups.
If HARD DISK is dying, then it should be replaced. Believe me, it will bother you from time to time.
However, if you want to use it for non-important data(for temporary uses only), then you can try to "correct" its SOFTWARE damages (like re-allocating bad sectors and trying to "fix" them or etc)..
At first try to format the drive with NTFS,FULL FORMAT. If you are lazy to do that, then skip this step (this step is not "MUST", but I think it may be good)
run Chkdsk /f /r (restart may be required)
use 3rd party softwares. Many people like:
Spinrite (Commercial)
HDD Regenerator (Commercial)
MHDD (Free command-line tool) (Mirror + instruction)
