Hello HDD Gurus,

I am suffering from a problem with my WD Scorpio Blue 6400BEVT-22A0RT0.
After I noticed it having reading problems, I used MHDD to locate all the problematic areas - they were located in the first 220GB space (around 120 bad and a few hundreds of slow sectors). Then, as I didn't want to lose the drive, I deleted the system partition from this area and made a new one, that was starting only from 220GB - so I left the preceding space unallocated, not creating any partition there. I lost one third of HDD space, that's true, but I was OK with it.

Now, when I try to install Win7 into this drive, it runs extremely slowly - despite the installation goes to the space that seems to be free of errors. When I scan with MHDD again, the transfer rates are around 55MB/s-80MB/s (excluding the error areas, of course). Do you have any explanation to it?

The HDD has two small partitions in the very beginning (100 MB and 12 GB) for system recovery (Acer laptop 3820TG) - however as they were affected by the bad blocks a little as well, I run the installation from an external drive now.

Should I just accept the unrecoverable HDD physical failure and get a new one?

Thanks in advance for any clue,
Marcin

120 bad and few hundreds of slow sectors means DEGRADATION and the only thing to do is professional repair. Unfortunately you cannot do it on your own at home so you have to refer to someone who has the necessary know how (and equipment) to do it.

I have said hundreds of time that the "partition hiding" of defects is only a cosmetic solution, it rarely works 100% and it is just like hiding rubbish under the carpet, sooner or later problems will come back again, possibly "back with a vengeance".