Bad sectors on HDD

[Dinoslawski]

Greetings!

Two days a go I noticed some bad sectors on my relatively new HDD. Issue was brought up by Guild Wars 2 which on the 2nd day of playing gave me an read disk error. I didn't really think much of it and wrote it off to buggy fresh game. After the reinstall it again worked fine for a day and the next same error appeared.

This bugged me so I decided to check my HDD with HD Tune. After running diagnostics I found out I have a few bad sectors towards the end of the HDD (HDD in question is Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB - which is actually made by Seagate) and my HDD was getting quite full.

Now this all is new to me, I never had any HDD problems in my life. So I ran chkdsk c: /r and that didn't fix the sectors. So today I left it running again (this time I ran it from disk tools - error checking) and went to work.

No idea what to expect when I get home, but I have a bad feeling about it. My question is, if chkdsk doesn't fix the bad sectors, what can? And also, is this type of failure covered by the seller since HDD is almost 6 months old?

Thank you for any kind of help,
Dino

 

[yassarikhan786]

Have you heard of a free tool called HDAT2 that scans and repairs bad sectors on drives? It could be worth a try. I've not tried it myself, but it's worth a go:

I think it's best if you download "Hiren's Boot CD" as it has a bunch of useful programs including HDAT2:

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

Just burn the ISO to a CD and off you go

Or if you aren't able to do that just download HDAT2 from here:

http://www.hdat2.com/download.html

 

[Dinoslawski]

Thanks for the help mate, but it didn't work. HDAT2 was running for 18 hours, but bad sectors are still there. HD Tune shows em and that was just a quick scan.

I think I'll just partition the HDD so it loses the last 5-8GB. I'd rather do that than go through the ordeal of sending the drive to claim warranty (which could take up to a month).

Just hope the sucker doesn't die on me

 

[yassarikhan786]

It was worth a try. From what I've read it's difficult sometimes to get rid of the bad sectors. Partitioning may be your best bet. Although there are other programs that supposedly get rid of bad sectors, which you could try before you do that.

 

[KaraMurat]

Create a boot cd or usb with Hiren's, (not from within windows) under DOS Programs, Hard Disk Tools run HDAT2. Turn off ACHI by setting your HDD to compatibility / IDE / ATA mode before you run HDAT2.

Personally i'v never seen HDAT2 run for more than a few hours, it should take no more than 2 hours on a 500GB HDD unless it is riddled with bad sectors.

The bad sectors you have will be reallocated, assuming HD Tune is correct 3 bad sectors aren't too bad, but I would send that drive under warranty regardless as bad sectors tend to get worse months done the line.

Under the Hiren's menu you could also boot into Parted Magic which has disk health checking and a quick read / write testing tool you can use.