Hard Disk Problem - is my disk dying..?

[palladium]

Hello all,

My rig ( see sig) has a Seagate ST3500320AS 500 GB HD, which I have partitioned it into C: and E:. Yesterday I noticed some corrupted files ( fortunately they are non-critical) on the E: partition, so I did a couple of investigations including running chkdisk and SpeedFan to view the S.M.A.R.T status of the drive. chkdisk revealed a bad sector on E: ( C: was normal) and SpeedFan's SMART report revealed that the drive has 1 offline uncorrectable sector. Don't know if this is relevant, but a few months ago I tried to use Gnome Partition Editor to increase the size of my C: partition, but it failed due to a power failure. Immediately after that Windows ran chdisk on C: ( not sure if it did on E🙂 and fixed a whole bunch of corrupted files.

Apart from the corrupted files my computer is running as smooth as it could be.

So, is my hard disk dying, or is the uncorrectable sectors due to the failed partition resize?

Thanks for helping.

 

[starams5]

Try a low level format of the entire drive including boot sectors, if this don't solve the problem I would RMA the drive. I personally use Paragon which is paid software, see if you can find some freeware at the link below.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/...partitioneditors.shtml

 

[Nothinman]

So, is my hard disk dying, or is the uncorrectable sectors due to the failed partition resize?

It means there's a sector that the drive couldn't physically read. Actually it means there's more than 1 because all drives these days have a pool of spares so you only get notified about bad ones when the pool is empty.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: starams5
Try a low level format of the entire drive including boot sectors, if this don't solve the problem I would RMA the drive. I personally use Paragon which is paid software, see if you can find some freeware at the link below.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/...partitioneditors.shtml

low level formats haven't been possible in commercial drives for about a decade. Modern drives are low level formatted in special machinery before assembly, as their heads are simply incapable of that level of accuracy.

If you are showing even 1 bad sector on a modern drive, it means that all the "spares" have been used up, which indicates a serious problem and is a reason to replace the drive.