Damaged Drive Always Damaged?

[Dizzy]

My PSU died on me and messed up my HBA and caused some bad sectors on some of my drives.  I have two 18TB drives with bad sectors that are less than 3MB.  That's a fraction of a fraction of the space on the drive, and in my mind I'd almost consider it insignificant.  

I ran a chkdsk fix on the drive and it now comes back clean, but it's still damaged in Scanner.  If the # of bad sectors isn't increasing I think the drive is OK, and I'd like it to be used normally.

Is there any way to clear or reset the "Damaged" indication or something?  Reset would be nice, so it would only pop up again if there are more issues.  

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Are the bad sectors showing up under the sector/surface scan part?   If so, the only way to permanently clear them is to write to those locations, which should force the disk to remap/reallocate those sectors.  

However, StableBit Scanner doesn't have that ability, intentionally.  We activately avoid writing to the disk, to fix issues, as it can prevent data recovery from working properly. 

That said, a "chkdsk /b" pass may help here... but worst case, a full (non-quick) format will get the job done (and possible find and fix other sectors that havent been identified as bad, yet). 

[Dizzy]

I can't check the sector scan until it scans again.

I'm offloading the data from the drive right now.  Then I'll do a format via Windows but UNCHECK the 'Quick Format' checkbox.  Then I'll see how it looks.

 

[Dizzy]

Geez, I had no idea it would take so long.  I'm 14 hours into the format, looks like about another 4 left.  About an hour per TB.

I did the chkdsk on my smaller 3TB to fix the File System Damage and it took 9hrs.

 

[Dizzy]

Well 30 hours later, and both drives I did the SLOW format on are still giving me errors:

• There is currently 1 reallocated sector on the hard disk. A reallocated sector is created when a sector cannot be read or written to. In such a case, the next time the sector is written to it is swapped in for a good one from the spare sector pool. Having reallocated sectors decrease read/write performance and indicates drive trouble.
• ATA ST16000NM001G-2K SCSI Disk Device - 245 MB unreadable (502035 sectors) - The rest of the disk is still being scanned

ONE reallocated sector?  (sigh)

The other one is 65% into scanning the 18TB drive.

I want to continue to use these drives, and want the scanner to evacuate them if there are further issues, but use the normally until then.  I've done chkdsk, and the slow ass format and they are showing the exact same issues.  I have 5 more drives I need to do this to and I don't want to waste an entire week if it isn't going to work.

[Divine Warrior Ninjutsu]

On 9/29/2021 at 6:11 PM, Christopher (Drashna) said:

Are the bad sectors showing up under the sector/surface scan part?   If so, the only way to permanently clear them is to write to those locations, which should force the disk to remap/reallocate those sectors.  

However, StableBit Scanner doesn't have that ability, intentionally.  We activately avoid writing to the disk, to fix issues, as it can prevent data recovery from working properly. 

That said, a "chkdsk /b" pass may help here... but worst case, a full (non-quick) format will get the job done (and possible find and fix other sectors that havent been identified as bad, yet). 

/b seems to just clear the damaged sectors, but what is needed is a way to acknowledge the damaged sectors but stop reporting it in Scanner.  I had the same problem and I don't want my disk to stop being used unless the damage is significant.  There needs to be a method in Scanner to mark a damaged drive as healthy again, the same way you can mark a damaged file system as healthy again.