HD Tune damaged block - PC freezing issues

courtney4

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Jan 31, 2006
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I ran a scan on my laptop hdd using HD Tune Pro and it found a single damaged block. In the 'Health' tab it also has three warnings as seen in this image:

http://i.imgur.com/lPOb3D5.png

What does this mean?

I have been having trouble with my laptop freezing temporarily, being slow and unresponsive. (in safe mode + in clean mode). Could this be the cause?

Booting up using a linux pendrive, I can access all my files on the harddrive fine, it would seem.
 
Solution
The Drive Fitness Test will probably not show any SMART errors.
Tools from HDD manufacturers usually only report errors or warnings when the threshold of a SMART attribute has been reached.
The worst SMART error in the HD Tune screenshot is C5 Current Pending Sector count. It shows the drive cannot read 162 sectors which means data is already lost forever. This will be visible in the HD Tune (full) error scan.
The threshold for this parameter is 0 so the normalized values (current/worst) can never get below this threshold and simple tools like DFT will show no warnings with the SMART parameters even though there's a major issue.
I would not bother testing any further and replace the HDD.
First important task is to backup all your important files to an external hard drive or to DVD-R discs, whichever is more convenient for you. Then test the hard drive with Hitachi Drive Fitness Test for DOS which runs from a bootable CD (since you cannot properly test your Windows drive with Windows-based software). Hitachi DFT for DOS will give you a "second opinion" and more reliable results as to the condition of the drive. Get the bootable CD image here: http://www.hgst.com/support/index-files/simpletech-legacy-downloads#DFT

If DFT flags anything up as "Failed", you need to replace the drive.
 


The SMART status of a drive is read directly from the drive. It has nothing to do with windows. Even your motherboard can report the SMART status of a drive.

@OP: Your drive is failing. Backup your data as phil22 suggested, then replace your drive.
 



I made no reference to SMART in my previous post. I was referring to fully testing the drive with diagnostic software, not simply reading the SMART data from it. I feel your criticism is therefore unjustified.

 


Yes, my apologies. I see now that the OP said he ran a scan using HDTune where as I thought he said that HDTune was reporting a SMART error, in which case Drive Fitness Test should have reported the same smart errors.
 

Mimoso

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Oct 30, 2009
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The Drive Fitness Test will probably not show any SMART errors.
Tools from HDD manufacturers usually only report errors or warnings when the threshold of a SMART attribute has been reached.
The worst SMART error in the HD Tune screenshot is C5 Current Pending Sector count. It shows the drive cannot read 162 sectors which means data is already lost forever. This will be visible in the HD Tune (full) error scan.
The threshold for this parameter is 0 so the normalized values (current/worst) can never get below this threshold and simple tools like DFT will show no warnings with the SMART parameters even though there's a major issue.
I would not bother testing any further and replace the HDD.
 
Solution