Need Help Repairing 15000+ Bad sectors on hard drive

Your hdd is bad, replace it.

Take your HDD smash it to to prevent data recovery and replace it with a new one


You HDD is during and very close to death you can NOT recover a bad sector on a HDD at a guess being a laptop it's been knocked/dropped a few times and this has damaged the drive

Edit: you paid $100 for software? REALLY you should have replaced the HDD for that

Your drive is dying. Is it still under warranty?

It doesn't matter what the age of the drive is, when they go bad, they go bad. I've had drives go bad after only a day or two, right out of the box. Had an external drive that worked fine for two weeks, then failed. That's why they have warranties. The manufacturer gives you peace of mind, knowing that they will replace a drive that goes bad within the warranty period, whether it happens in the first few days, weeks, months, or even years, up until the warranty expires. Just because your drive is relatively new, in your eyes, that doesn't give it immunity from failure, as you are now finding out.

The fact is, your drive is dying... and It needs to be replaced ASAP.

Since you have had good luck with restoring the drive using HDD Regenerator, what I would recommend is to get yourself a new drive. Then run HDD regenerator to temporarily make your drive functional again. Then, IMMEDIATELY clone your drive to the new drive. Don't mess around trying to reinstall anything on the old drive, since you know it's unstable and unreliable. Simply clone it to save yourself all the reinstall time of putting the OS and all your programs, and reconfiguring and tweaking everything again. Then install the new drive in your machine and throw the old drive in the trash.

That's it.

...and if you can't clone your old drive, it's totally trashed anyway. In that case, you need to simply install the new drive, install your OS, install your apps, configure everything, make any tweaks you like, and after you've got it all just the way you like it, create an image and save it somewhere so if this drive ever goes bad on you, you have an image you can use to simply and conveniently image a new drive with, to save you all the time and effort it would take to install everything manually yet again.

Personally, when I rebuild my machine it's a nonstop marathon that takes right around 14 hours to get everything reinstalled again manually. This is back to back installs with no breaks.

Imaging a drive using a saved image, on the other hand, takes less than an hour and the machine is perfect and back in optimum operating condition with nothing at all needing to be done afterward other than possibly copying over your most recent emails again if you have an email client installed on your machine.

So, there ya go... there's no getting around the fact that the drive is failing and needs to be replaced. The only question is can you get it working again temporarily by running HDD Regenerator one more time and clone the drive, or will you have to do a more tedious and time consuming manual install of everything. But there's no question that your drive has gone bad and needs to be replaced, and needs to be replaced now.

@gamesonk, HDD Regenerator is snake oil, according to data recovery professionals. They will tell you that, when a drive has a head/media problem, the safest approach is to clone it, sector by sector, with a tool (eg ddrescue) that understands how to work around bad sectors. Then run data recovery software against the clone, if necessary.

BTW a bad sector is a physical hard disk error. I'm betting that your drive's SMART report will be full of them.

I don't use HDD Regenerator, but a good surface scanning tool should identify "slow" sectors, ie those that are difficult to read. That appears to be the symptom that the drive is displaying. HDDScan will identify these problematic sectors, as will MHDD (DOS, better).

15000 BAD SECTORS?!!

Why don't you just replace the Hard Drive? Like mentioned, a sector is a physical location on the Hard Drive. It's not going to get better by writing more to those bad holes, it makes it worse by probably giving problems to the locations around it.