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n00b; SMART Unstable Sector


JazzMan

Question

I'm getting the following error:

1  Current Unstable Sector Count

"There is currently 1 unstable sector on the hard disk. An unstable sector is a sector that can't be read. The drive will automatically swap the bad sector for a good one whenever new data is written to it, however, the original data may be lost."

How can I either force a write to the sector for the drive to make up its mind to mark it bad, or force the drive to mark it bad even if its good so I don't keep getting this warning for this sector?

I assume the scanning process doesn't "fix" this?

Is there an easy way to run a scan on just one disk?

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Click on the affected drive in Scanner. Then click on the plus sign next to it. If any part of the disk is grey instead of green or red, click the Start Check button on the left (hover over the buttons to see the tooltips if needed) so that it can complete scanning (this can take a long while). Once all of the disk is colored there should be three green ticks below (indicating the disk is now healthy), however if there is a red cross instead of the first green tick click the underlined text beside it. This should bring up the File Scan window. Start the file scan to proceed with checking for damaged files and attempting to recover them.

https://stablebit.com/Support/Scanner/2.X/Manual?Section=File Recovery

Note: after you've used Scanner to run file recovery, if the disk is still complaining and you want to force the disk to go ahead and confirm the unused sector as good/bad, open a command prompt and run the command "chkdsk driveletter: /r" as an administrator (where driveletter is the drive letter of the affected drive). This will take a considerable amount of time however.

 

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1 hour ago, Shane said:

Click on the affected drive in Scanner. Then click on the plus sign next to it. If any part of the disk is grey instead of green or red, click the Start Check button on the left (hover over the buttons to see the tooltips if needed) so that it can complete scanning (this can take a long while). Once all of the disk is colored there should be three green ticks below (indicating the disk is now healthy), however if there is a red cross instead of the first green tick click the underlined text beside it. This should bring up the File Scan window. Start the file scan to proceed with checking for damaged files and attempting to recover them.

Thanks, I'll proceed with this info.  I find some of the UI confusing.

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I got this resolved, but not using chkdsk.  "chkdsk /r" got to about 95% complete and the computer did a BSOD style hard reboot.  The SMART warning was still there.

Instead, referring to this info about this SMART warning;
https://harddrivegeek.com/current-pending-sector-count/
I removed the drive from the pool and formatted it with all zeroes.

That process brought the Current Pending Sector Count back to 0 and did not increase the Reallocated Sectors Count or Reallocation Event Count, which are also still both zero.  I don't know how frequently the Scanner information gets refreshed, but the message seemed to disappear sometime after the drive was 95% formatted.

Although I'll continue to monitor the drive, for now I think this was more of a "false positive" warning than a true disk failure portent.  If Scanner, Format, etc work from outer tracks to inner tracks, it seems like the offending sector was near the inner part of the disk and the warning would have stayed around for a long time until the drive got 95%+ full.

It's unfortunate I had to evacuate the disk to do the format, then go through the rebalancing after adding the zeroed disk back, but because of the BSOD, I can't confirm if "chkdsk /r" would have fixed this or not.  Because the drive apparently did not need to reallocate the sector, I'm having a hard time imagining the BSOD at about 95% and chkdsk hitting the potentially bad sector are related, but I didn't want to run it again to find out.

 

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YMMV but I wouldn't trust that drive for storing anything particularly precious that wasn't backed up or duplicated elsewhere; chkdsk /r should not BSOD on a good drive. My guesses:

  • the BSOD happened because the chkdsk ran into the bad sector, tried to recover data from it and the drive behaved in an unexpected way (e.g. maybe it sent back "potato" when the code was only programmed to handle "apple" or "banana"). That's basically what a BSOD is after all - the OS going "something happened that I don't know how to handle, so I'm stopping everything rather than risk making something worse".
  • the drive has either #1 replaced the bad sector with a spare from a reserve that the drive doesn't count as a reallocation (according to the drive manufacturer anyway), #2 performed its own internal repair of the sector and satisfied itself that the sector is no longer bad, or #3 zeroing the sector didn't trip the problem, so as far as it cares all is well in drive land.

Anyway glad you haven't lost anything!

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