HDD putting out bad sectors, unable to image

howtobeironic · Jun 25, 2018

I have a Samsung HM500JI 500 GB HDD, FAT32 formatted (probably very old, ~5 years) that I use as a backup external HDD. Contains some precious data such as my old Windows 7 backup image as a failsafe to the Windows 10 I recently installed, and family photos(currently copying what I can)

I was just fine a week ago, I deployed that backup once. Today, it started to act up when I tried to extract the 72 GB Wikipedia copy to my laptop(NTFS), telling that cyclic redundancy check failed, and slaps an error 23 on my face.(Drive has some cable issues, but only affected if lifted up, and always plugged out properly) No funny noises. I know that if data gets corrupted I should avoid writing anything to the disk, and only things I did is deleting, imaging it, and copying from it. I ran, respectively:

chkdsk d: -Windows has found some errors but won't fix without /f parameter is given

chkdsk d: /f -one truncation, one bad cluster flag

chkdsk d: /r -some bad clusters reallocated, no action is needed to be taken

Running CrystalDiskInfo along with them: -Disk overheats to ~55 degrees, only warning value is C5: Current Pending Sector Count, which was 71, fell to 69 after chkdsk /r, and 66 now when I plugged it back once more. Surface check points some read errors.

I tried to tell Macrium Reflect to ignore bad sectors while imaging, when I tried an image it fell to 13 KB/sec ,and when I halted it it already logged 217 cluster fails in two minutes.

Question is: Any hope to get this hard drive back working as normal? Or should I buy another one?
How can I know if the clusters are hard broken or soft broken? And should I leave it as-is and pass it to professionals?

hang-the-9 · Jun 28, 2018

Get another drive. With the cost of a replacement being so cheap, would be a huge waste of money to try to have it repaired.

mdd1963 · Jun 28, 2018

When your drive is heading south, doing lengthy checkdisk procedures often forces the heads to read/write over potentially damaged areas, just hastening it's departure...

get what you need from it while you can....; toss in trash

howtobeironic · Jun 28, 2018

I saved the most important parts. Luckily bad sectors hit only to Wikipedia project (which means 72 GB of data) and my games folder(Thanks to Lord Gaben this has lost importance). I saved pictures and the backup, and will proceed to buy a new one. Any recommendations for an external HDD?

hang-the-9 · Jun 29, 2018

If you needed to copy files off the drive to "save" the data, that is not a backup drive, that is your primary drive. A backup drive is a place you keep a second copy of your files. If you only have that single drive for that, unless you don't care about the files on it, you would want a second drive. Really any drive brand still around is good, product failures tend to go with model numbers. I have been using Samsung solid states even for my backup drives and secondary storage drives 500GB ones are not too expensive.

howtobeironic · Aug 25, 2018

I took the advice and bought a WD My Passport 1TB. It's greatly working and I get to have the backups to it. Now that I actually don't think the old one is stepping to trash, I would like to dig deep into what can be the problem.

Now the first thing is the external case connection is done for. It will randomly disconnect at all times (There we go, main problem at all) so first thing I need to do is replacing it. I may use some cheap advices there.

Then, I read somewhere that zero-bombing a drive will cause soft sector errors to fix themselves (at the cost of time and data gone) and force the drive to remap the hard sectors. Am I right? How do I do this?

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HDD putting out bad sectors, unable to image

howtobeironic

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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

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mdd1963

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howtobeironic

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hang-the-9

Titan

howtobeironic

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