Anyway to fix my 7yr old 2tb hdd that's showing caution in crystaldiskinfo?

[avidgamer121]

so tried to fix bad sectors on my hdd with hdd regentator it fixed two problems then caused the one below in SS. I tried full disk checking and i think both processes stressed my hdd alot but still i went on with them. Now my problem which never occurred before, i had great success with hdd regenerator in the past but this time i fucked up real bad because something looked like it hanged and it was utilizing my hdd but i forcefully closed it in task manager and overlooked that fact unexpectedly closing down something like that can cause issue. Now i am thinking about running diskgenius which is acclaimed to be a rare specie to fix bad sectors but from what i see it seems very slow would take alot longer than hdd regenerator or chkdsk utility. So i don't want to risk completely ruining my drive in the process. What would be the ideal way to treat my drive, warranty is long gone and i can't buy a new one it si full of games that i rarely play. Should i just call it a day?

[Dutch_Master]

For consumer HDD's, 7 years is quite long! Consider replacing it, urgently.

 

You can get a 2TB SSD for about $100-150 these days.

[avidgamer121]

5 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

For consumer HDD's, 7 years is quite long! Consider replacing it, urgently.

 

You can get a 2TB SSD for about $100-150 these days.

my 1tb hdd is almost 2 yr more older than it, it didn't fail due to it's age. I have already mentioned the reason in OP.

[kokosnh]

the thing is, you can't fix that Caution, as the SMART raw values of 05 parameter, are not reversible, they can only increase in value....

The Caution is at 05 parameter, that counts the reallocated bad sectors, that are already reallocated "fixed" but that just that, the surface is still damaged there.

 

 

So for now, just give us while SMART table screenshots, from crystaldiskinfo, not half of it, like above. 

 

10 minutes ago, avidgamer121 said:

Now i am thinking about running diskgenius which is acclaimed to be a rare specie to fix bad sectors but from what i see it seems very slow would take alot longer than hdd regenerator or chkdsk utility.

I use MHDD and victoria, and yes, the real deal is slow, as it has to test all the sectors one by one...

 

If there will be no problems in SMART, other then the bad sectors,. we will do a whole surface disc latency test, to see it's condition (it will take hours), or better yet two, with error login to exclude the NCQ errors.
Then we will again check the updated SMART values in crystaldiskinfo.

And only after that, we can tell something about the condition of the HDD, and what to do next. 

[avidgamer121]

4 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

the thing is, you can't fix that Caution, as the SMART raw values of 05 parameter, are not reversible, they can only increase in value....

The Caution is at 05 parameter, that counts the reallocated bad sectors, that are already reallocated "fixed" but that just that, the surface is still damaged there.

 

 

So for now, just give us while SMART table screenshots, from crystaldiskinfo, not half of it, like above. 

 

I use MHDD and victoria, and yes, the real deal is slow, as it has to test all the sectors one by one...

 

If there will be no problems in SMART, other then the bad sectors,. we will do a whole surface disc latency test, to see it's condition (it will take hours), or better yet two, with error login to exclude the NCQ errors.
Then we will again check the updated SMART values in crystaldiskinfo.

And only after that, we can tell something about the condition of the HDD, and what to do next. 

here is the full ss

 

i don't understand your last phrase, you're telling me to run a disk surface scan in diskgenius and provide the report here?

[Needfuldoer]

There really isn't a way to "fix" drives like that. The reallocated sector count is only going to keep going up as it uses spare sectors to replace ones that go bad. If that count starts going up quickly, a failure is imminent.

 

The best you can do is back up all your data to a new drive. That 2TB might be fine as one element of a 3-2-1 backup solution, but you may not want to trust it anymore.

[kokosnh]

From SMART there are 3 problems. 
C7, BB, and 05. 
BB is probably related to 05. 
but c7 is different, it indicates, problems with communications, and lots of them... 
If the raw value of the C7 is increasing, then you should try to swap, SATA data cable, to a new one, and change SATA pot on the motherboard  (if it's the HDD that's is the problem, you can't fix it, so do the two above, if the raw value will increase)

 

 

21 minutes ago, avidgamer121 said:

i don't understand your last phrase, you're telling me to run a disk surface scan in diskgenius and provide the report here?

yes, just best to do it from bootable iso of it, so we don't have false positives... 
just be sure to backup anything important, like save files, before disk surface latency scan.  
It's relatively low stress for the HDD, and its sequential read, but just in case. 

Remember, do not repair it, just scan, and log the sector numbers

 

 

if we have the sectors numbers, we can double check them, and if needed, repair it later, quickly (as we know the LBA, so no need to scan it again).

[avidgamer121]

14 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

From SMART there are 3 problems. 
C7, BB, and 05. 
BB is probably related to 05. 
but c7 is different, it indicates, problems with communications, and lots of them... 
If the raw value of the C7 is increasing, then you should try to swap, SATA data cable, to a new one, and change SATA pot on the motherboard  (if it's the HDD that's is the problem, you can't fix it, so do the two above, if the raw value will increase)

 

 

yes, just best to do it from bootable iso of it, so we don't have false positives... 
just be sure to backup anything important, like save files, before disk surface latency scan.  
It's relatively low stress for the HDD, and its sequential read, but just in case. 

Remember, do not repair it, just scan, and log the sector numbers

 

 

if we have the sectors numbers, we can double check them, and if needed, repair it later, quickly (as we know the LBA, so no need to scan it again).

so you're saying i should change sata cable before running the test? because that might be the actually problem. As your sentence is in brackets it's making me confused.

[kokosnh]

the problem is, we don't know when the errors occurred, we just know there is lots of them. Only when they start to increase the raw value, we will know if they are occurring now, or not.

If you do have a new SATA data  cable laying around, do change it, and also the SATA port on the motherboard if you have a free ones. As it's better to change it before, if you have a free one.

If you don't have any, do the test, and we will check the SMART later, to see if the raw value of C7 increased, and you have to buy a SATA data cabble.

[avidgamer121]

32 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

the problem is, we don't know when the errors occurred, we just know there is lots of them. Only when they start to increase the raw value, we will know if they are occurring now, or not.

If you do have a new SATA data  cable laying around, do change it, and also the SATA port on the motherboard if you have a free ones. As it's better to change it before, if you have a free one.

If you don't have any, do the test, and we will check the SMART later, to see if the raw value of C7 increased, and you have to buy a SATA data cabble.

well i tried replacing sata cable alot used alot of force but it didn't came out from my motherboard, my brother is not well rn he will do it for me tomorrow, thanks for the heads up. Also, my hdd ports feels weary no click feel when inserting both sata power and data.

[mariushm]

There's a couple scenarios where you could do something about it and fix it , or prevent it from becoming worse, but even then the drive should no longer be used for anything critical, storing data you care about (use it for music, movies, stuff you can download again if needed, not documents and stuff you really care).

 

If the sectors are marked incorrectly by the drive as weak / bad, maybe because of some power failure or random hiccup, there's a chance you can "recover" them by telling the drive to retest the surface and revalidate them.  The problem is that the way to do it is by erasing the whole surface of the drive so you will lose EVERYTHING on the drive without a chance to recover the data.

 

You can use a tool like WD data lifeguard diagonstics : https://download.wdc.com/windlg/WinDlg_v1_37.zip

 - yes, it's made by WD by it works with any SATA drive so doesn't matter that your drive is made by Seagate

install it and run it, right click on the drive, select run diagnistics and select the ERASE option ... it will force drive to erase everything and retest sectors. SHut down, start pc,  wait 10-15 minutes on desktop screen (give the drive time to update the smart info and everything if it wasn't down) , shut down, start again and the smart info should be updated with the new number of bad sectors.

 

If the sectors are still bad, you can run a tool like HD Tune to see where the sectors actually are located on the surface. If they're all concentrated around a narrow area of the drive (let's say in a 50 GB region) that could mean a psysical area of the disks (platters) inside the drive is weak, and the drive has a hard drive  controller has a hard time writing data or reading data from that area or maybe there was a mechanical shock in that particular region of the platter inside. 

You could extend the life of the drive by making sure you're not writing or reading data in that area.

 

For example, let's say you run the software and it gives you a picture like this :

The red rectangles are regions with bad sectors, where data can not be read or written reliably, and you can see at the bottom that the last error was at 41039 MB (41 GB).

So what you could do is to go in Disk Management, select this drive, delete the 2 TB partition, then create a partition big enough to cover the area with bad sectors, and a bit of margin, like... let's say 2-3 full rows of green below the last red rectangle. Then create another partition with the rest of the space on the drive and only give a drive letter to this partition.  The first partition will never be used because it won't have a drive letter.

 

In the example of the picture, I would say create a 75 GB partition from the start of the drive, and a 400 GB (remaining space) as a second partition that gets a letter.  Now you can use those 400 GB to store stuff you don't care much about (movies, music you can download again etc )

 

 

 

[avidgamer121]

i changed the sata cable and now it shows start / stop count 4c29

1 hour ago, kokosnh said:

the problem is, we don't know when the errors occurred, we just know there is lots of them. Only when they start to increase the raw value, we will know if they are occurring now, or not.

If you do have a new SATA data  cable laying around, do change it, and also the SATA port on the motherboard if you have a free ones. As it's better to change it before, if you have a free one.

If you don't have any, do the test, and we will check the SMART later, to see if the raw value of C7 increased, and you have to buy a SATA data cabble.

[avidgamer121]

48 minutes ago, mariushm said:

There's a couple scenarios where you could do something about it and fix it , or prevent it from becoming worse, but even then the drive should no longer be used for anything critical, storing data you care about (use it for music, movies, stuff you can download again if needed, not documents and stuff you really care).

 

If the sectors are marked incorrectly by the drive as weak / bad, maybe because of some power failure or random hiccup, there's a chance you can "recover" them by telling the drive to retest the surface and revalidate them.  The problem is that the way to do it is by erasing the whole surface of the drive so you will lose EVERYTHING on the drive without a chance to recover the data.

 

You can use a tool like WD data lifeguard diagonstics : https://download.wdc.com/windlg/WinDlg_v1_37.zip

 - yes, it's made by WD by it works with any SATA drive so doesn't matter that your drive is made by Seagate

install it and run it, right click on the drive, select run diagnistics and select the ERASE option ... it will force drive to erase everything and retest sectors. SHut down, start pc,  wait 10-15 minutes on desktop screen (give the drive time to update the smart info and everything if it wasn't down) , shut down, start again and the smart info should be updated with the new number of bad sectors.

 

If the sectors are still bad, you can run a tool like HD Tune to see where the sectors actually are located on the surface. If they're all concentrated around a narrow area of the drive (let's say in a 50 GB region) that could mean a psysical area of the disks (platters) inside the drive is weak, and the drive has a hard drive  controller has a hard time writing data or reading data from that area or maybe there was a mechanical shock in that particular region of the platter inside. 

You could extend the life of the drive by making sure you're not writing or reading data in that area.

 

For example, let's say you run the software and it gives you a picture like this :

The red rectangles are regions with bad sectors, where data can not be read or written reliably, and you can see at the bottom that the last error was at 41039 MB (41 GB).

So what you could do is to go in Disk Management, select this drive, delete the 2 TB partition, then create a partition big enough to cover the area with bad sectors, and a bit of margin, like... let's say 2-3 full rows of green below the last red rectangle. Then create another partition with the rest of the space on the drive and only give a drive letter to this partition.  The first partition will never be used because it won't have a drive letter.

 

In the example of the picture, I would say create a 75 GB partition from the start of the drive, and a 400 GB (remaining space) as a second partition that gets a letter.  Now you can use those 400 GB to store stuff you don't care much about (movies, music you can download again etc )

 

 

 

ok i will try that

 

43 minutes ago, avidgamer121 said:

i changed the sata cable and now it shows start / stop count 4c29

@kokosnh

[kokosnh]

41 minutes ago, avidgamer121 said:

i changed the sata cable and now it shows start / stop count 4c29

And what did you expect, for the value, that counts the HDD start stop count not to increase?

As I said earlier, only 05, BB, and C7 are the one, you should focus on now.
 

1 hour ago, avidgamer121 said:

well i tried replacing sata cable alot used alot of force but it didn't came out from my motherboard

there are some SATA data cable, with latches on the ends, do not force it! press the latch, to disable the lock, and only then just pull with light force... 

 

 

 

[avidgamer121]

1 minute ago, kokosnh said:

And what did you expect, for the value, that counts the HDD start stop count not to increase?

As I said earlier, only 05, BB, and C7 are the one, you should focus on now.

expect? i don't even understand it correctly, now i see it i guess c stands for count but i don't it's my motherboard or sata cable because my pc is barely 6 months old (considering mobo and cpu) and this hdd was thrashed right from the start, considering the sata connectors on it feel clunky i can pretty much say that's it.

[kokosnh]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

if the sectors are marked incorrectly by the drive as weak / bad, maybe because of some power failure or random hiccup, there's a chance you can "recover" them by telling the drive to retest the surface and revalidate them. 

There are no such sectors here right now, according to SMART data.
Why zeroing the HDD, before gathering data, from whole surface daley test? it could cover the problematic sectors, and it could be a problem, later on, then they contain the data.
why use HD Tune, when it's not showing the delay time, or sector  LBA, and do not enable you to erase, it, o remap it, like MHDD, victoria, or diskgenius do. 

ehh I don't like that copy paste...
 

Ps.  I'm still going for it, from the perspective, it's HDD for older games, no critical data, we just have to see if it's usable for it, or not. 

you don't want to use it for anything else, right?

[kokosnh]

8 minutes ago, avidgamer121 said:

i guess c stands for count

it's in hexadecimal... it increase by 2, from one CDI screenshot, to another.

[avidgamer121]

4 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

There are no such sectors here right now, according to SMART data.
Why zeroing the HDD, before gathering data, from whole surface daley test? it could cover the problematic sectors, and it could be a problem, later on, then they contain the data.
why use HD Tune, when it's not showing the delay time, or sector  LBA, and do not enable you to erase, it, o remap it, like MHDD, victoria, or diskgenius do. 

ehh I don't like that copy paste...
 

have a look again

now interestingly

current, worst, threshold are some as other healthy drive for start / stop count.

[kokosnh]

well yes, and that why, you almost never look at them (there are only couple attributes, that the value of current, worst, threshold matter), and look at the RAW values of attributes. But well, you have to know how to read them, and interpret them.

[avidgamer121]

3 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

well yes, and that why, you almost never look at them (there are only couple attributes, that the value of current, worst, threshold matter), and look at the RAW values of attributes. But well, you have to know how to read them, and interpret them.

i have started running the diskgenius scan, will show you report after it's finished.

[Ryker Robb]

@avidgamer121 Assuming the crc error count is benign, and you don't get any "current pending sectors" from your scan, you should be fine to keep using the drive. The reallocated sector count isn't going away(It's a count of bad sectors that have been replaced with new ones internally), but as long as it isn't increasing regularly over time, it shouldn't be a problem. I've used drives like this for years, and have never had any problems.

[Ryker Robb]

You can also change the raw values to decimal in crystaldiskinfo by going to Function>Advanced Feature>Raw Values. I believe 10[dec]-2byte will better show certain values, like temperature, read error rate and seek error rate.

[kokosnh]

8 minutes ago, Ryker Robb said:

and you don't get any "current pending sectors" from your scan

why would we relay on the SMART, to catch the slow/bad sectors, if we are doing daley test with sectors log? one, should reflect other, but the scan will always be more precise. And it will also give us the location of the problem sectors. 

13 minutes ago, Ryker Robb said:

Assuming the crc error count is benign

it should remain unchanged. Any increase in raw value in C7 means there are CRC errors.  Don't know what you ment with "benign", not my first language. 

[avidgamer121]

25 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

why would we relay on the SMART, to catch the slow/bad sectors, if we are doing daley test with sectors log? one, should reflect other, but the scan will always be more precise. And it will also give us the location of the problem sectors. 

it should remain unchanged. Any increase in raw value in C7 means there are CRC errors.  Don't know what you ment with "benign", not my first language. 

all my drives except a new one i added recently show some kind of crc error in smart reading

the diskgenius scan went well without any prob 99.9% sectors were excellent and tiny bit of remaining ones were good

[Ryker Robb]

22 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

why would we relay on the SMART, to catch the slow/bad sectors, if we are doing daley test with sectors log? one, should reflect other, but the scan will always be more precise. And it will also give us the location of the problem sectors.

I didn't say not to check the error log? I meant to say check the smart afterwards.

25 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

it should remain unchanged. Any increase in raw value in C7 means there are CRC errors.  Don't know what you ment with "benign", not my first language.

Benign: (of a disease) not harmful in effect.