Hard Disk Errors

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Something has happened to my hard disk.  Ages ago there was a storm which damaged the motherboard; it lost HDMI out and didn't know it had a network port, despite me updating drivers, rolling back drivers, device manager didn't even see either of them.
 
I ran Hard Disk Sentinel which tells me:
 

The drive found 9 bad sectors during its self test.
There are 65526 weak sectors found on the disk surface. They may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk.
At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the health drops further.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.

 
Disk health is reporting 49%.  Others in the same machine are at 100%.
 
The disk is partitioned into two drives, one being Windows.  I've ran a check disk on both sections although I am not sure if it fixed the errors (I don't think so).
Can anyone tell me what this means and should I be worried?

[i11usive]

In my experience - that is the beginning of the end. Software "fixes" will mark bad sectors on the disk / partitions so the operating system doesn't save info to them, but generally speaking, the disk will continue to degenerate until you won't be able to boot the computer (seeing as one of the partitions is your boot partition). I recommend you backup any important data held on that disk and either wait for it to gradually fail or replace it as soon as. I should also point out that Windows performance will be affected as time goes on.

[philcruicks]

Bad sectors is one of those annoying things,

If its on a sector where Windows is then it could bring your whole PC crashing down, however equally you could run for another 5 years without problems if nothing is on those sectors as now they'll be marked and won't be written to.

 

Ideally you should replace the drive, but providing you have a backup of your important data (as everyone should) then there's no massive rush.

The other question is have you had any odd behaviour from the PC, random crashes, BSOD's, slow load times or long read/write times on files...if you're getting these then replace sooner rather than later.

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Not really noticed any slow downs or other errors as yet.

I'll back up the important stuff and leave it until it's really broken, or hard disk prices are back to pre-expensive - it's a 2Tb drive.

[Phouchg]

 

At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the health drops further.

I especially like this part - it's borked allright, but they won't acknowledge that it's borked till that spinning rust spins no more. I currently have a 3 TB drive with 428 reallocated sectors (really bad access times and freezes) sitting on the desk and I can't find the words to tell the guy that Seagate showed him the finger - it passes all Seatools tests, you know! It takes 10x more time to do so, but a pass is a pass! I shall appeal and insist on bad performance, but who knows if I'm just wasting time :crazy:

 

 

So, yeah, clone the system off to some other drive, pull the important bits data and use it for some crap data while it slowly rusts away its time.

[+Warwagon MVC]

Just keep yo ###### backed up and run spinrite on the drive. I'm actually running spinrite on a customers laptop hard drive right now.