Damaged blocks and Windows events

UltimateBadger · 3 Jan 2011 at 19:32

Guys,

I have two Sammy HDD's 1x500GB OS/Game drive and 1x1TB data drive.
Tonight my PC threw up a couple of errors:

Windows Disk Diagnostic detected a S.M.A.R.T. fault on disk SAMSUNG HD103SJ ATA Device (volumes D:\). This disk might fail; back up your computer now. All data on the hard disk, including files, documents, pictures, programs, and settings might be lost if your hard disk fails. To determine if the hard disk needs to be repaired or replaced, contact the manufacturer of your computer. If you can't back up (for example, you have no CDs or other backup media), you should shut down your computer and restart when you have backup media available. In the meantime, do not save any critical files to this disk. (Critical event)

The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, has a bad block. (Error event)

So upon receiving the Critical event for D:\ I downloaded HD Tune Pro 4.60 and ran a health check and full error scan. And it was...completely clean :confused:

I don't know what to do now...I'm tempted to wait and see if I get another alert at some point?

Running the same checks on C:\ shows that I have some bad blocks. I guess Windows or NTFS has some kind of bad block policy whereby no attempted writes will be performed here? Does it just mark them as unavailable? Are there any tools available to attempt to fix them or should I just leave this and ignore?

Any advice welcome.

wonko · 3 Jan 2011 at 22:26

I suspect the message you received was a SMART warning from the hard drive.
Modern hdds have a pool of spare blocks that they can use if bad blocks are detected, so you can have disk errors that are automagically 'hidden' up to the point where the pool of spares has been used up. As bad blocks tend to appear in bursts as a disk starts to have problems, I'd take it as a heavy hint that your disk(s) may be failing.
It depends on how much your data is worth to you and how much of a risk you want to take, of course, but personally I'd make sure I had backups of anything important asap, and given the cost of a new 1.5 or 2TB drive would swap them out. You could run Samsung's own ESTOOL diagnostics on the disks and see what it says - if you intend to RMA then you'll be expected to run this anyway.
Hope this helps.

Edit: if you could post the SMART health data from hdtune for each disk it might be illuminating.

Ch3m1c4L · 3 Jan 2011 at 23:44

even just running vista/win 7 chkdsk with the /b parameter will tell you if it has a bad block that has been remapped, and it will attempt to recover it etc.

UltimateBadger · 4 Jan 2011 at 16:40

Thanks for the replies so far guys:

C:\

D:\

As you can see there are some errors on the C:\ drive and there are events in the event viewer relating to bad blocks. However, there appears to be nothing at all wrong with the D:\ drive despite Windows thinking I had a critical SMART exception? :confused:

Running chkdsk now against C:\ ...

UltimateBadger · 4 Jan 2011 at 16:46

chkdsk has come back clean. Running a full error scan on C:\ from HD Tune...

UltimateBadger · 4 Jan 2011 at 19:44

OK things are becoming a little clearer now: More in-depth analysis shows that Windows fixed the SMART error itself. Hence why I can no longer see a problem on the D:\ drive (phew)

The C:\ drive has 3 damaged 190MB chunks according to HDTune. They are right near the beginning of the disk too (which would explain why Windows wouldn't boot properly the other day)
Question is - should I think about replacing the drive - it could soldier on for a while yet and it's only the boot drive. I am taking the precautionary steps of moving all my Steam folders to D:\ Not sure there's much else on this drive worth worrying about.

I think an upgrade to an SSD might be in order in the nearish future...

Ch3m1c4L · 4 Jan 2011 at 20:08

its a good excuse to upgrade to an ssd

While it is advisable to replace a drive that develops bad sectors, all drives have spare sectors so they can tolerate a certain amount of faults, Ive had drives that got a couple of faults (to the point where iwndows coulnt spin up the drive) and after a good chkdsk still work 6 years later absolutly fine and havent developed any more faults etc. So, you could carry on and be fine, or you might lose the drive/data. up to you whether you can afford another drive, or just backup the stuff on it etc.