panathas, CDI lists the exact number of bad sectors(giving an idea of how bad off you are). I replace drives at the first one because it is guaranteed to get worse after the first one.
Once you trigger a smart threshold, you have no more room for errors(thus the warning). I just like to replace sooner because I do not want to loose date.
A friendly message.
If you can not afford to loose data, ALWAYS have multiple backups.
Everything can fail.
A quick guide to cloning has been requested. For this I will be using Reflect by Macrium because it works very well and has a free for personal use version.
The steps to clone your drive involve having the 2 drives(failing and the replacement) in your system or another system.
Remember
Source is the failing drive
Destination is the replacement drive(same size or larger please.).
Startup Reflect
Select your Failing drive.
Under the drive select the option called Clone this disk...
You will see a Window with a Source and Destination section.
Move down to the Destination section and select a disk to clone to...
You will see a list of drives in the system. Select the one you want to clone to.
You will be asked to select a disc geometry. Use the source disk(this is to keep the smaller partitions at the start the same when you clone them). Messing with System Reserved or uEFI partitions can make a system fail to boot.
Next you want to select the Checkbox on the left side of the Source disk(make sure this is the failing drive.). You want to copy ALL the partitions because Windows uses a smaller partition at the start of the drive for booting and your PC maker may have recovery partitions.
You can now select Copy selected partitions in the destination section(the check from the last step will clear, but do not worry about that.).
If everything goes well, you should see what the new partition layout on the destination disk will look like. If you are using a larger drive you will see an empty section(gray) at the end.
You are now ready to select Next. Since you are not running a scheduled backup(unless you want to. Some users may want to have 2 identical drives by cloning at a set time so if a drive fails they can boot the second one while waiting for a replacement.) you can hit next again and then select Finish(you will see a preview of what is happening).
Make 100% sure you have your source and destination setup correctly and have backup up any files from the destination drive(you will not get to do this after you clone the disk).
Once everything is done, Shut down and disconnect the failed drive. Try to start the system. If it does not start, you may have to check the bios to ensure the right drive is set to boot the system.
Once you are 100% sure your system is working fine on the new drive you can either erase the old drive to dispose(if it is under warranty, you may be able to get a replacement) of it(since it contains data still) or destroy it in a fun way(maybe take it apart to get some powerful magnets ).
If you can post a screenshot of your partition layout I would be interested in seeing it(since many systems have other partitions kicking around). You can see your partition layout with the built in disk management(start + R then type diskmgmt.msc and hit enter) in Windows
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