The story of the misfit sectors

[eagleknight]

I hope this may help other's if you have a tricky sector that doesn't want to be fixed.

 

I had a Samsung 2TB drive give a warning of 1 current pending sector count. I ignored the error because when it would be written again it should be reallocated and the number wasn't going up. When the file scan ran on the drive it identified one bad block. This kicked off drivepool to start moving files off the drive, which I like that feature. So I first tried doing the repair through scanner and this said it completed, but the bad block still remained. Since drivepool wanted to keep data off this drive until it showed healthy again I wanted to get that sector reallocated. I removed it from the drivepool at this point. After searching I found that running chkdsk should find the sector and fix it. The first time I ran chkdsk I only ran it with the /r parameter. Then found I should have probably included the /f as well. After running each time I marked all blocks as unchecked and kicked off another scan and the block still came back damaged. Long process considering it takes 6+ hours on each of these attempts. After this didn't work I tried Seatools, but it kept giving me the error when I ran the fixes from the program it couldn't read the serial.

 

 

• Final fix was I formatted the disk and I downloaded Eraser. I ran the psedorandom 1 pass across the disk to force a write to each sector and this finally cleared that pending sector. I then ran another stablebit scan and it seemed to return a false positive marking a bad block still. This time I marked the bad block as unchecked and ran the scan again and it came back as the drive healthy. As a safe measure I marked the whole drive unchecked once more and ran a scan and it returned as healthy. I then added it back to the drivepool.

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, unfortunately, every time I've seen "current pending sector count" on one of my drives... it's steadily increased.  

 

As for chkdsk, the /r switch implies /f, so you don't need both, just the one.  

 

 

However, StableBit Scanner doesn't repair the damaged sectors. It will only check to see if there are any files affected, and attempt to recover any affected files. A chkdsk may fix the issue, but not always. Another option is a full (not quick) format, as that writes zeros to the entire volume, and may fix the pending sector.

 

 

Either way, I'm glad to hear that you were able to recover the affected sector.