Barracuda 2TB is failing

Evgeni04 · March 3, 2021

I use this as my main (and my only) drive since I built my brand new PC - August 2019. I had a habit to defragment both C:\ and D:\ volumes at least once per month. Recently though, the drive started having lots of bad sectors. LOTS. CHKDSK just made things worse. I've reached a point where part of the registry got corrupted and the UAC services got glitched. Soon I wasn't able to boot in Windows - stuck on black screen with cursor after boot. Logs from Event Viewer said that only stuff in C:\ was being corrupted. I decided to format C:\ and do a clean install of Windows while leaving my important data on D:\ volume. Unfortunately, this didn't fix my problem. Programs get corrupted now and then (only repairing them by setup fixes them), tons of error logs in Event Viewer, constant notifications saying "Restart your computer to fix errors". The last time I ran chkdsk on boot, my Photos app and Windows Store app got corrupted, too and they can't be opened. Also I started hearing some clicks that occur for a short period of time. During these clicks my system gets unresponsive. The question is... What should I do? I am planning to buy an SSD, move most of the data to the SSD and then return the drive for a possible replacement. This seems like the best decision for me.
Tried:
- reinstallation of Windows
- formatting C:\ volume
- using CHKDSK makes things worse
- Third-party disk management programs say drive has bad sectors and almost 0 health. (Lots of reallocated sectors, too)

Dedayog · March 3, 2021

Yeah, move to an SSD. Clone it if you can, or reinstall Windows and transfer data as normal.

Your Barracuda may be under warranty as well. Check that too.

Honestly, in this day and age.... anything 2TB and under should be SSD. 3TB+ for mass data storage is okay for HDD> My opinion, of course.

But using a HDD to boot... kind of like still using a fax machine to send documents

Archer42 · March 3, 2021

17 minutes ago, Evgeni04 said:

the drive started having lots of bad sectors. LOTS.

It is dead. You have to replace it, one way or another. If you still have warranty that's good, if not you'll have to buy something else. Messing with hdd with "LOTS" of bad sectors is a waste of time. It will never result in anything but data loss/data corruption.