Skip to main content

Bad Sectors in Laptop HD

Thread needs solution

I have a laptop hard drive with 48KB of bad sectors.

Should I replace the hard drive?

If I replace the hard drive, what is the best way to get the data to the new hard drive using Acronis but without the bad sectors?

Or should I just reinstall everything.

Thank you.

 

0 Users found this helpful

Most likely, yes, your drive is close to end of life.  I would definitely take a full disk image (offline with rescue boot media if possible - not necessary though).  Get that done first to make sure you have a backup before something happens.

Once the backup is done, run 

chkdsk /f /r 

on the bad drive from within Windows.  It will try to repair them.  If it can't, it shoudl mark the bad sectors and move data from them and prevent writes to those spaces.

I would then take one more full backup (the first one was just in case something goes bad sooner than later and/or after running chkdsk).

You can then restore that second backup to your new drive.  Most likely, you wil be just fine after that.  Bad sectors will not transfer from one disk to another through backup and recovery.  The data will just get written to free sectors on the new disk as it's copied over.  However if any data is corrupted on the older drive as a result of the bad sectors, that bad data would get copied and put on the new drive.  

I think you'll be OK if things are working OK now, but there's no way to be 100% sure.  Once you copy the data over to the new drive and boot from it, you'll probably be fine though.  You can then run 

sfc /scannow

on the new disk and let Windows see if it detects any errors and/or repairs them if it does.  SFC /scannow sometimes detects errors it can't repair though, but does not mean that your OS is unusable either - it's just a tool to try and reapir OS anomolies. 

Michael, 48Kb of bad sectors doesn't sound like a reason to either replace the drive or reinstall everything but we only have very basic information here to understand the context for your question?

Are you seeing particular problems that you believe are caused by bad sectors on the laptop drive?

Do you have ATIH 2015 installed on the laptop and can you make backups of the entire laptop drive without any errors being reported?

If you do have a good full backup of the laptop hard drive created by ATIH 2015, then you could use this when the drive needs to be replaced by a new one and not have to reinstall everything.

Thanks.

Yes, I have run: chkdsk /f /r 

I ran chkdsk again and it is reporting that 48kb bad sectors but no other issues with the drive.

CrystalDiskInfo is reporting:

Reallocated sector count: 1

Current Pending sector count: 66

Yes.  I can do full backups without errors.

Maybe try the trial of hard disk sentinel and see if it displays the percentage of hard disk life left on the drive. If things are working OK, an Windows has detected the bad sectors and marked them, hopefully all is well.  Never hurts to run some additional diagnostics to try and confirm though. 

http://www.hdsentinel.com/download.php

 

Sounds good.   Just keep an eye on it and be sure to take frequent backups, just in case.