Bad sector bizarro-ness.

[fleggett1]

About a month ago, Scanner reported that two of my drives were exhibiting unreadable sector issues.  I evacuated and removed them from the pool, but kept them installed intending to do something about the pair "later" (I'm a master procrastinator).

Since they remained installed, Scanner could still access them and do surface scans.  As such, all this time, the Scanner tray icon has been gold (I think it's gold) indicating continuing drive problems.

Until today.  I woke up today with the Scanner icon blue.  Weird.  I initiated a manual scan of both drives and no unreadable sectors were found.

I'm more than a little confused.  Did the drives automagically fix themselves at some point?  Is it possible the onboard drive firmware remapped the bad sectors to good sectors when my back was turned?  Do I dare try to use them at this point or should they still be tossed?

I should note that I did a long format of the drives shortly after Scanner reported the bad sector issues.  I was hoping that might trigger a remapping, but it didn't seem to do anything, as Scanner still reported that both drives had bad sectors after a scan.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

StableBit Scanner won't repair the drives.  Eg, it never writes to the drive (the exceptions being the settings store, and if you run file recovery)

That said, it will rescan the drives, and update the results.   

The important bit here is the long format, though.  This writes to the ENTIRE drive, and can/will cause the drive to reallocate or correct bad sections of the disk.  As for not correcting right away, it has to run the scan again, and unless you manually cleared the status, it won't do this right away, but will wait for the 30 days  (or whatever it is configured to)

 

[fleggett1]

Hmmm.  I thought I ran another scan shortly after the long formats were complete, but a lot has been going on in my life for the past couple of months and I can't say with 100% certainty that I did so.

So, if the bad sectors were remapped as part of the long format and Scanner is now showing them green across the board, would you re-add them back to the pool or get rid of them?

[Chris Downs]

On 9/6/2023 at 7:55 PM, fleggett1 said:

Hmmm.  I thought I ran another scan shortly after the long formats were complete, but a lot has been going on in my life for the past couple of months and I can't say with 100% certainty that I did so.

So, if the bad sectors were remapped as part of the long format and Scanner is now showing them green across the board, would you re-add them back to the pool or get rid of them?

You could put the drive through some read/write operations, perhaps using a disk benchmarking tool. See if any other issues arise - if not, probably fine to use again, but I'd keep unduplicated files off it. It's fairly normal for a disk to end up with bad sectors, and it sounds like it's re-mapped the disk to exclude them. Once the drive firmware has re-mapped, scanner won't see the errors (nor should it be capable).

[bhoard]

Quote

The important bit here is the long format, though.  This writes to the ENTIRE drive, and can/will cause the drive to reallocate or correct bad sections of the disk.

Could this be confirmed via S.M.A.R.T. attributes?

I came across this post while searching for answers to an odd situation I had the other day. I swapped out a bad drive and filled its replacement with several TB of data; everything was looking good at this point. However, the next day, I was having some power issues and my machine rebooted multiple times in quick succession. Following this, Scanner reported unreadable sectors on the new drive. But, after marking those sectors as unchecked, Scanner reported them as good once it scanned them again. This has me worried that I ended up with a defective drive.

[Shane]

Hi bhoard, I think it's likely the drive was able to recover from whatever the power issues did to it. If Scanner still doesn't pick anything up on the next scheduled scan, personally I'd be comfortable continuing to use the drive. Also maybe consider getting a UPS if power issues are an ongoing problem in your area?