I bought a HP 14-v052tx notebook last February. It came with a HGST 500GB hard drive. After Windows 10 came out I dual booted it with Windows 7. One day, after trying a system tweak tool for Win10 the screen started stuttering/flashing. No key combination worked to get rid of it, so I had to force shut down using power button and when I logged back in to Win7 I checked hdd SMART status and found 65544 reallocated sectors. Not to mention, it was giving 'warning'.

Couple of days later the reallocation sector count got exactly doubled (131088) and reallocation event count became 2.

Few days later it was tripled (196632) and reallocation event count was 3.

After around 10 more days now it has multiplied fourth time and current value is 262176. Meanwhile, reallocation event count is 4.

I found that some of my files got corrupted (previous hash value wouldn't match with current hash value) possibly due to the remapping of sectors.

I have warranty. However, HP recommends running hdd diagnostic tests from it's BIOS tools and my hdd passed all of them (SMART, Short DST, Long DST).

My questions are:

1. I find it weird that the reallocated sector count is increasing as a multiple of a certain value, that is 65544. Is there any explanation for it?

2. If I zero-fill the whole drive would it solve the issue? What tool can I use to do that? (I already tried it with Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test v4.16 from Ultimate Boot CD but it always gave me this error - "write protect error reading drive c".)

3. What else can I do?