External Seagate Hard Drive Suddenly has Weak Sectors, Errors

wrecklesstechn0 · 27 Jun 2019

Hi everyone,

I'm concerned about the health of my Seagate 8TB Desktop drive. I have owned this drive since 03/16/2019 and have been regularly checking up on it through Hard Disk Sentinel - the status was always PERFECT, up until 06/20/2019, when something happened and the health went down to 45% and the lifespan was reduced to only a year remaining.

There was a bit of a hiccup in some file transferring I did between the 8TB Seagate and my internal C: drive. Some data was lost during the dragging and dropping and file explorer was acting peculiar. This was a few days before I saw the new Sentinel report, so I would estimate the occurrence to have been around 06/16/2019.

It says there are 40 bad sectors and 121 errors have occurred during the data transfer. I ran a surface test with disk repair, a test which ran 15 hours. I am attaching images of the results. 1 bad sector was found out of 10,000. I don't understand how that can explain the 45% health.

I could not figure out how to go about repairing the sector upon completion of the test. Was it supposed to repair itself? Why didn't it? What else can I do to repair my hard drive? Are there more tests?

External Seagate Hard Drive Suddenly has Weak Sectors, Errors-hdstest062619_00.jpg

External Seagate Hard Drive Suddenly has Weak Sectors, Errors-hdstest062619_01.jpg

External Seagate Hard Drive Suddenly has Weak Sectors, Errors-hdstest062619_02.jpg

dalchina · 28 Jun 2019

Great that you're using HD Sentinel.

The disk is clearly at risk of failure. Whilst HDDs automatically reallocate weak sectors from a pool of spare ones, there is a limit to that. Should part of the surface fail in such a way that data or part of the file system is damaged, you can then lose data.

I suppose you can take a risk, back up what data you can retrieve if you haven't already, and format the disk. This won't repair it, but you can then rebuild your file structure on it in the hope you don't experience further problems for a while.

Your hope is then that all available storage space is comprised of good sectors - which you can check- and then that there will be no more significant failures while using it.

Your having an appropriate backup strategy is clearly vital. It's a very large disk, but if you were to use disk imaging routinely, the act of imaging the data itself checks the integrity of the used part of the disk. E.g. Macrium Reflect (free).

You can of course cross-check with other disk utilities such as HD Tune or Crystal Diskinfo, but as you probably know, only HD Setinel tries to provide a useful text assessment.

wrecklesstechn0 · 28 Jun 2019

Okay, so I have all of my files from the drive backed up to 3 different locations - my internal C: drive, and 2 other 4TB Seagate External Drives.

FORMAT DISK - Could you guide me as to how to do this from HD Sentinel? Is this like the write/read tests?

I'd appreciate it if you could just explain a little more about this disk imaging as well. I'm new to using HD Sentinel and don't know very much. Thanks.

spunk · 28 Jun 2019

HD Sentinel is used to Diagnose Hard Drives and monitor the temperatures. It is not used to Format, or make a disk image of HDD's.
Being that there are several bad sectors, there is no point in Formatting this HDD. It is going to fail whether it is formatted or not, sooner or later, probably sooner. If you want to Format it, you would go into Disk Management and right click the drive and choose Format.
Disk Imaging is great for drives that are used to boot an OS, as you can capture all of the hidden files. A drive that is used solely for Data, does not need to be imaged,. as you can just drag and drop, or copy and paste the files to another drive.
If you want to Image a drive, there are several programs, Macrium Reflect is a great Free program to image your drives.

dalchina · 28 Jun 2019

Disk images, as commonly used, are compressed copies of the used parts of 1 or more drives/partitions.
They can be mounted, and files copied from them.
Imaged partitions and disks can be restored from images- even if the original disk has to be replaced.

Typically a base image is created, then changes imaged by a faster method producing a smaller file. (Incremental or differential imaging).

Imaging thus should be timed appropriately to the changes on the imaged drives or partitions.

A good imaging tool has single option to image all the partitions comprising a Windows OS.

Macrium Reflect has tutorials here, videos on Youtube, and a huge help file on line. There are other tools too.

Grom0X · 28 Jun 2019

Try fix bad sectors with Seatools for DOS.
Seatools for DOS

wrecklesstechn0 · 28 Jun 2019

Grom0X said:

Try fix bad sectors with Seatools for DOS.
Seatools for DOS

Why for DOS? It looks like for that, I would need to install the program onto a floppy disk or a CD. My laptop does not have a CD or floppy disk drive. Would downloading regular SeaTools work as well? I'm looking here at "SeaTools for Windows" SeaTools | Seagate Support US

I just downloaded that and here's where I'm at. It seems like I can just do basic scans like in Sentinel.

External Seagate Hard Drive Suddenly has Weak Sectors, Errors-seatools062819_00.jpg

LMiller7 · 29 Jun 2019

If an error occurs during a write operation the drive can copy the data to a spare sector and no data is lost, at least in the short term. But when an error occurs during a read operation things are more complicated. The sector could not be successfully read so there is no way of knowing what data it contained. The drive could "repair" the sector by replacing it with a spare, and then fill it with all zeros because it doesn't know what the data is. It is possible the error was temporary and a later read would succeed. But by replacing the sector the original is securely locked away with no possibility of recovering it's data. Only professional data recovery could access these sectors.

For this reason bad sectors found during a read operation are not repaired. All the drive can do is make a note of it's location and wait until the sector is later written with good data or until it can successfully be read. Then it can be replaced. You have no way of knowing when or if either situation will occur.

The problem with suddenly appearing errors is that they are often caused by some internal problem, the nature of which is usually unknowable. You might have 40 errors one day, 1000 the next, and 10,000 the day after that. Likely it will take longer but you have no way of knowing.

Personally I would replace a drive with far fewer than 40 bad sectors. Back in the 1980s when a 10 MB (yes 10 MB) drive could cost $1000 it was justifiable to try to keep a failing drive going for as long as possible. In 2019 drives are dirt cheap in comparison and such measures make no sense.

Grom0X · 29 Jun 2019

You can create USB with Seatools for DOS.
SeaTools for DOS and Windows - How to Use - Windows 7 Help Forums
https://www.seagate.com/support/seat...lsDOSguide.pdf

Helmut · 29 Jun 2019

Just use Seatools for Windows there are various scanning options the most comprehensive is what they call "..long..". Those will take many hours to complete as you know.
You can make a bootable USB key drive with the DOS version if you like, but not necessary.
How to use SeaTools for Windows | Seagate Support US#

45% Health does not mean much, just what the application writer thinks is a suitable display. The detail is in the text box.

The detail you get from using Seatools will be different.

Whatever, there are some bad sectors on the drive. Those can be marked off and the drive last sometime but it can be a sign of damage progressing. That you would only find out by scanning the drive months later.

I would just replace it.