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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Uncorrectable sector count - CrystalDiskInfo. Is it doomed or still possible to save? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The good news is that there's no reallocated sectors. However, 2E5 is 741 decimal value, which is a lot of pending sectors, I'd be surprised if they weren't bad sectors, and more to follow. I wouldn't trust it to safely retain any data. Backup your data immediately.

If you want to try to see how bad it is, do a full format and see what happens with those pending sectors and uncorrectable sectors. They may go away completely or they may end up as reallocated sectors (attribute 05) in which case it is likely on its way out.

Either way it's a 500GB drive 10-12 years old. Replace it with a 1 or 2TB SSD and call it a day. A drive that old with that many power on hours has a very limited life remaining regardless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Uncorrectable sectors are bad.
Get a new drive, 500GB models are cheap/free. Buy three. Main+Backup+Backup minimum if you aren't already.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

You might be able to save the data, with minor chunks missing. The drive, not so much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

As long there are no reallocated sectors the drive may still be fine (your current data certainly has some damage, you better have a backup here.) Basically a "uncorrectable" is a sector that can't be read anymore for various reason.… aka the data is bad currently. It does not automatically mean the sector/disk structure itself is broken.

The proper operation in this case is to full wipe the drive with a proper format (zero fill). Don't do a quick format! Only afterwards you will know for sure the drive is bust or not. In case there's permanent damaged sectors those "pending" ones would convert to "reallocated" sectors. If there was just some bad data the "pending" ones simply will disappear. If your disk collects reallocated sectors then it's probably time to look for a new disk (albeit a low count of reallocated sectors that stays stable isn't the end of the world either).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

If you familiar with mhdd or victoria, you can try to enforce internal controller to replace pending sectors, there are chances it would succeed, but the disk itself must put replaced ASAP. You also would need some computer which you can turn from AHCI/RAID mode to plain IDE to be able to issue raw commands while recovering disk