"Reallocated Sector Count".. What to do?

It's telling you there is a problem with that drive, replace it NOW.

As I said, I just bought a new 500GB hard disk as I was running out of disk space. If by "Replacing" you mean to buy a new one, I cant afford it. Moreover, I dont think that it is in warranty. I had bought it as a second hand drive and used it myself for about 2 years.

Is not there any way to repair it?

there's your answer from Linux

zeroing does not fix the problem it hides it till it comes back worse

zeroing is why it looks like that in disk management if it were functional you would reformat it now

for clarity that drive will not reliably store data and any program run from it is likely to corrupt what ever data is working with

you have another drive use that if need be

Reallocated sector means that your harddrive found a bad sector, and swapped it with a 'reserve pool' of sectors. After this swap, the medium should be free of bad sectors to the operating system. Its a technology designed to make failing sectors on the harddrive cause no trouble for the operating system because it'll just swap a new one whenever it finds that a particular sector is becoming weak (because it takes more time to read that sector than normal).

So "replace that drive now" may be an overreaction. You do need to make sure you have proper backups however, but a drive with reallocated sectors could last for years in good operation.

One exception to this is, if the number rises continuously, like every day it jumps a few. Then you've got a failing harddisk because once the 'reserve sector pool' runs out it cannot hide the bad sectors anymore from the operating system. And remember, a drive can only reallocte a sector if you write to it, or it can still be read from. So sometimes its necessary to do a zero-write on the drive to be able to let it swap the sector. Should the number not increase after a zero-write, your harddrive found no new potentially bad sectors that it wants to swap.

Allright. Thanks a lot for your detailed replies guyz... I think I will keep the hard disk under use for now and also keep looking at the Reallocated sectors count value. If it increases, I will try to make up some money to buy a new drive   ... Thanks once again..

Use spinrite 6.0 from grc.com

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey