Hello there,

Apologies if this is a repeated post, I just wanted some guidance.

I have a 13 year old HDD from Toshiba (MQ01ABD100) inside Transcend StoreJet enclosure that I have not used in a while
It was formatted to FAT32 and recently I had backed up some files on it but there was data corruption.

I ran Victoria HDD analysis and this is the result:


Based on what I read I understand that this is not a good sign and I know the drive is failing.

But I want to salvage whatever I can just for pure mass storage of unimportant files.

This is the S.M.A.R.T status



Right now after the write cycle from Victoria, I am full formatting it to NTFS to see if it can, as previously with CHKDSK and Diskpart it would not work, tried zeroing with format command as well.

So after this I will run the write cycles 2 more times to see if the same blocks and sectors are a problem and after the 2 writes, I will use the remap option.

Is there anything else I should do?

Should I partition off the first 80GB (after confirmation with additional tests) and separate it off to prevent further corruption?

I have barely used this drive so don't want to bin it, any guidance would be appreciated.

Apologies if this has already been discussed as I am not very sure what to do now.

Logs:


Many thanks

Please refrain from playing football with your disk, at least this is what your G-Sensor shock counter tells you. Maybe these shocks created the pending sectors.

Any efforts trying to continue using this disk is only suitable for people with a high risk-tolerance that are searching additional excitement in their life.

If you fit into this category, please go ahead with your repair efforts.
Otherwise don't waste your time with this disk.

I suggest making your drive health judgement based on a read scan instead a write one.

Write scan is useful to be sure there is no direct error at writing, but it is common that the write got some slowdown.
I suspect that the warning results you got will little differ if you retry a write scan.
Don't forget to retest near LBA 871245824 that was in timeout.

Does your SMART screen is done before the write scan or after?
Pending sectors should be canceled or reallocated if it was after.

Do a read scan and post the result + ending SMART.
And terminate all process you can during the scan.
It is also better if you can plug your drive directly to SATA port.

@rec, you are rude with him 7 shocks is not the end of world, this attribute seems very sensible, and on some case it even grow without true shocks.

Hi.
First thing is it appears you are using an external hdd caddy to test the drive which is not the way to go.
First you MUST connect the drive directly to a sata port.
Then if you want to scan the drive for defects you should set the time out to 250ms.
If you are not concerned for the data you can use the remap option. Or backup and then scan with remap.
See how that goes.

Hey dick Have you think to the number of false positive he is going to remap with your 250ms timeout.
And even more with this scam drive model, all those kind of models I have seen have those big defects near the start of surface.

Better is to bypass those first 40-80GB with partitioning, and keep your reallocations for the part you are really going to use.
Because this first defective part is probably going to eat all your spare with useless reallocations, on a read scan.

Remap cannot be canceled, so I suggest using it with caution, manually and surgically, only on sectors where it is really needed, sectors that are really slow with more than one attempt, and in a block size of one sector.

If xygn is always there... first do a full read and post the result.

And if too much bad sectors appear at start during your full read scan, STOP it to avoid too much pending/realloc, and restart the read scan near 40-80GB. (and keep default timeout)

@diybit
What I am suggesting is any scanning whilst the drive is connected via the usb caddy is probably going to produce unreliable results and that might be why the drive shows 8 pending bad sectors.
The drive is old so as long as any data is backed up then the user can't do any real harm. So I say connect the drive directly to a sata interface and do the scan properly. The 250ms setting is good for remapping bad sectors if the user wants to do that.
The user might have to set the pc bios to ata/ide mode to be able to remap.