How to solve the bad sector problem in my laptop

[JSIBD]

Hey guys,

Fairly new to the LTT forum but my friend suggested that I would get good advice for my problem.

I have Intel i5 Dell Inspiron. I have been using it for 4 years and for the past year or so, my boot and loading times have become horrible.

I asked a local electronic repair shop to take a look into it and they said that it has bad sectors.

What are bad sectors and what to do to remove them??

[mariushm]

If it's a mechanical hard drive ...

 

Bad sectors are areas of your drive's platters that have problems and can't reliably store data anymore. The drive moved data from those areas in other parts of the drive and keeps going, but those areas can increase over time and there may be other areas with problems yet undiscovered by your drive.

When an area is weak, the drive's heads has problems reading the data, so it has to read the same track several times in order to determine if what it reads is correct or not and that slows down your hard drive when it reads the data from such areas.

 

Sometimes bad sectors are incorrectly detected when there's power failures or mechanical shocks and these bad sectors can be recovered using specialized software, but to do this process, all the data on the drive would be erased... so you need to copy the stuff to another drive before you attempt to "fix" such incorrect bad sectors.

 

Basically, your only option is to replace your mechanical drive with something better, and I recommend buying a SSD as it has no moving parts and consumes a bit less power, and it's much faster than a mechanical hard drive.

 

 

[samcool55]

To keep it simple, bad sectors are like rust spots on a car.

But you can't repair them. Only solution is to replace the drive.

 

Back-up everything ASAP (it might even be too late for the data that lives on those bad sectors) and replace it.

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, samcool55 said:

To keep it simple, bad sectors are like rust spots on a car.

But you can't repair them. Only solution is to replace the drive.

 

Back-up everything ASAP (it might even be too late for the data that lives on those bad sectors) and replace it.

Uhhh, you can repair rust on a car.... You don't buy a whole new body if you have a spot of rust on a car...

[wgaca]

Bad sectors are not repairable. Bad sectors are excluded by the drive itself from usage. 

Usually once you have a bad sector better throw away the drive if you care about your data.

 

If you have pending sectors, which are bad sectors that the drive can't exclude from usage for one reason or another your computer will freeze every time it's trying to write or read data from that sector.

 

You can keep on using drives with reallocated sectors, i've seen people reaching 30-40k reallocated sectors somehow without the drive completely dying. But when they bring it to me once it gives up and I tell them it's "faulty" they just keep on saying "but it was working".. it will work until it die completely.

 

Hope that helps.