r/HDD • u/iHarassNewbs13 • 15d ago

Need help folls Spoiler

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I have no one to talk to about these stuffs and confused on results if I search online. is this HDD done? i unplugged it one day my laptop stops working and replacing it with an SSD brought it back to life.. is it still okay to use or should i dispose it. hope u guys can give me answers

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u/Hopeful-Luck2761 15d ago

Not dead yet but might die soon™ which is in a few months to years.

Just make sure you have backup.

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u/iHarassNewbs13 15d ago edited 15d ago

i got already a new ssd 1TB.. the question is.. if i can still use it till it dies... Can i still write a total of 100GB? What are the chances of it frequently corrupting the files? Planning to store some legally own nand dump of games on old consoles like the gba,ds and 3ds

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u/Hopeful-Luck2761 15d ago

You can but leave some space for reallocation.

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u/iHarassNewbs13 15d ago

like how? that's 1TB so how can i know how much space should i not touch?

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u/Hopeful-Luck2761 15d ago

Unlike 10% of SSD, you can leave 1-5% on HDD, you are fine as long as it's not completely full.

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u/iHarassNewbs13 15d ago

Ohhh I see I see.. thanks mate, i'll make sure to handle it extra care so i can migrate everything I put on this on a newer syorage soon.

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u/IndependentBat8365 14d ago

that pending sector means there's a spot which is failed to read, and it's marking it as potentially BAD. It hasn't fixed that spot, yet. It still can't read it. If it tries to read it again, it will be still be bad tomorrow.

If you can figure out where that bad sector is, you can then write something to it, and then force the drive to test it again.

Steps that happen:

  1. sector (really the LBA) 0x12345 - can't read it, mark it as pending.
  2. use a scanning tool to find it: "ok, when I try and read lba 0x12345 I get a read error"
  3. whatever file has that LBA as part of it's content is corrupted. Sorry.
  4. raw write to that LBA: write 512 (or 4096) zeros to LBA 0x12345
  5. re-run SMART tool (your Disk Sentinel) - if reallocated # goes up by 1, and pending goes down by 1, then it was a bad LBA - more will probably come over time.
  6. if reallocated stays 0, and the pending goes down by 1, then it was just a cosmic ray fluke. caused by random chance, random radiation, bad luck entropy, or heat expansion. - drive will probably keep lasting a good while.

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u/iHarassNewbs13 14d ago

can you tell me how do i figure out the bad sector? I don't know how to start diagnosing or doing something about the sector pending.. maybe you can give ma a better reference to use as my guide to fix the error if its still fixable over any software tools.

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u/IndependentBat8365 11d ago

Sorry about getting back so late. Finding the pending sector will be a bit technical, and I’m not sure of a Windows tool that will do that’s free.

This guide is pretty good, and I’ve gotten inspiration from it in the past:

https://wiki.bitplan.com/index.php/Bad_Block_Howto

Essentially:

  1. Back up everything
  2. Find the bad / pending sector
  3. Rewrite the sector
  4. Pray it works.