"many bad sectors" => rma?

JonJ678 · 26 Nov 2009 at 17:30

I have a 750gb Samsung with lots of data on, about 98% full. It's failing smart testing, Ubuntu is pretty sure its dying.

I'm currently trying to get all my data off it, basically copy & paste onto another drive. Two questions,
1/will I now have massive data corruption to look for
2/does this definitely mean rma time, or will a zero and reformat solve the problem?

Advice much appreciated

edit: more usefully, it's on 77 reallocated sectors but is otherwise looking ok. It's at 12 degrees, and has spent 232 days running. I think this counts as a premature death.

AbsenceJam · 26 Nov 2009 at 17:42

RMA if it has bad sectors, don't chance it developing more.

Nameless_87 · 26 Nov 2009 at 17:50

what did you use to test if your HDD was good or bad?

I'm asking because I'm practically in the same situation... windows 7 saying that it detected a hrad disk problem and to backu my files immediately.

G J · 26 Nov 2009 at 18:39

Nameless_87 said:
what did you use to test if your HDD was good or bad?

I'm asking because I'm practically in the same situation... windows 7 saying that it detected a hrad disk problem and to backu my files immediately.

If you go to the hard drives vender's website, they'll have a program that you can use to test various aspects of the drive.

Nameless_87 · 26 Nov 2009 at 18:48

G J said:
If you go to the hard drives vender's website, they'll have a program that you can use to test various aspects of the drive.

I did... I used the ES tool of samsung... and I ran a diagnostic check...

every test passed with no problem... yet windows 7 continues to tell me that there is a hard disk problem...

JonJ678 · 26 Nov 2009 at 20:09

The tool is one which ships with Karmic, seems to be called palimpsest. It thinks one drive is healthy, one has a few bad sectors, one has many. I'm currently backing up everything from the many bad sectors to the one with none. While I have no reason to doubt the tool, Google is complaining about it throwing false positives so I think I'll try a few others before rma. Probably whatever the samsung recommended one is, alongside badblocks.

@nameless if you don't have any data on the drive which isn't backed up its worth running a destructive read-write test on it. Last time I ran one of these it took about a day, but at least it was thorough. The hirins bootcd will do this for you, or badblocks from linux. Windows probably has a tool as well. If it passes the manufacturers test but is still faulty there's a fair chance they'll reject the rma, which would suck.

Cheers. If these aren't false positives (i.e. another program agrees) I'll rma it.

keyser · 26 Nov 2009 at 21:28

HD Tune can check for bad sectors. 1 bad sector is enough to RMA it

Nameless_87 · 27 Nov 2009 at 09:00

I used it and all was green.... so it was ok...

but windows did tell me about 6 times that there is a hard disk problem and I should backup my files immediately "/

very strange.