WD HDD Failing as a OS hard drive

[slack3rdav3]

So, my hard drive (500gb WD Caviar Blue) is beginning to fail. I am currently using it as my OS drive (soon to be replaced) and i was wondering if it would give me issues if i used it as a storage drive after wiping and reformatting it. It seems to have about an 8k bad sector. Currently have it partitioned into 2, an 80gb and then the rest.

So do you think this hard drive will still be alright for use as a storage drive or no?

 

[xcomvic]

Buy a Crucial M4 128GB and you'll be in heaven. Take my word for it

 

[bucknutty]

I would not use a HD with bad sectors. In my experience once there is 1 bad sector there will be more and before you know it you have file corruption and a huge headache.

 

[slack3rdav3]

meh, basically my plan was to copy a bunch of movies and *** onto it, put it in an external enclosure, and ship it off to my brother in Afghanistan. Figured it would last a while in those circumstances considering after the movies are copied nothing will be transferred again, basically a read only after that. So hopefully it will last long enough for that.

What do ya think?

 

[slack3rdav3]

and buck i just bought an OCZ Vertex 3 120gb SSD. It's on its way now. cant wait!

 

[iam2thecrowe]

you can run a diagnostic program, or microsofts checkdisk to do a scan and flag any bad sectors. the flags prevent the bad sectors from being used. you dont need to throw away a drive that has bad sectors. another tool you can use is HDD regenerator which can fix bad sectors. Many bad sectors are not due to a physical problem with the drive, much of the time they are caused by hard powering off/resetting a PC without shutting it down properly.

 

[slack3rdav3]

awesome info man, hopefully when i get my new OS drive, i can do this and have a stable drive for my brother.

another reason might be that my mobo's sata controller is failing and causing a lot of problems. every time i restart all of my hard drives not connected to the marvell controller arent showing up, and i have to power cycle for them to show up. but im not really worried, since my parts are coming in shortly.

Any guidance on doing a checkdisk scan? my computer has recognized an issue with the hard drive and suggested doing one a few times (which i've done) but im not sure if it flagged the bad sectors, or if i need to do that after wiping it.

 

[cadder]

It is not a good idea to keep using a drive that may be failing. Especially for storage which implies that you are storing data on there that is important to you. You're almost safer using a questionable drive for an OS drive because if it fails you can get a new drive and reinstall your OS and programs. If your storage drive fails then you lose your data. If your data is not important then go ahead and push your luck with a questionable drive.

WD has tools that you can download from their site to test your drive with. I think I would rely on them more than on checkdsk but I haven't tried them myself.

 

[arunphilip]

For your specific use (one-time copy of only movies, subsequent usage as read-only drive), what you've got in mind is alright. Just do the chkdsk routine suggested by iam2thecrowe. Bear in mind that even then, not everything might be usable - so its likely that a few movies might not be readable, or a section of a movie, and you'll have to seek forward to skip it. But its a meaningful way of using a drive rather than junking it.
Two things:
a) Don't put anything valuable on it (unless you have other copies)
b) Don't ever copy data off it - you can't trust it (don't especially replace data on another drive with data from the bad drive)

 

[bucknutty]

I think thats a great use of an old drive. If its just for putting movies on and sending over seas it should work fine. Chances are it will get dropped or stepped on before it actually fails. You can get a usb enclosure for it for around 10 bucks. Might make it easier to work with for your bro.

 

[slack3rdav3]

that was the plan, and actually the WD diagnostic is failing to show the results for whatever reason. so now i just have to figure out how to go about doing the checkdisk properly.

 

[bucknutty]

just plug it into the computer and use the windows check disk. Right click on it hit tools and check disk for errors. check all the boxes. The after you load your movies do it again.