Hello everyone. I have run into a strange problem about 7 months ago, when my apparently fine Windows 7 installation refused to boot, after blue screening on me. It would not even start the bootloader, I would get greeted by a black screen and a solid green LED on the hard drive, that after a couple of minutes went blank. Since I had no relevant data, I formatted it and re-installed, only to have it happen again 2 months after, and then a couple more times.

After researching, I concluded that the HDD was to blame. It followed a clear pattern of, when the drive started to get full, the same thing happened to me. So, I searched for tools too confirm my suspicions, namely MHDD, Victoria, Vivard, HDAT2, basically everything I could get my hands on. I had bad sectors. I also deposited some hope on HDD Regenerator, which I now know does more harm than good.

After some more research, I learned about remapping, head damage, etc. I wondered why my drive wasn't remapping the bad blocks. So, I am wondering if I can do this manually, since running CHKDSK /r does nothing (I was hoping it saw the bad blocks and allocate them in a filesystem level, but no, it doesn't mark anything as bad, just takes a very long time to read certain files).

Things I tried already:
1) Remapping in MHDD
Produces an error, makebad crashes MHDD after inputting sectors

2) Remapping in Victoria
a) Classic Remap - error
b) Advanced Remap - says it's successful, but then drive goes crazy with insane scanning speeds and garbled data in the drive name. Checking same sector still shows bad block.
c) Fujitsu Remap - error

3) HDAT2
Drive times out

4) Vivard
Claims remap, and checking the remapped sectors shows up as being OK, but will timeout at certain blocks, unless I EraseWait them with some other tool beforehand

The only thing that gives me access to Windows again is to EraseWait the disk, which erases some 30 sectors or so. However, after some days, or a couple of weeks, depending on the usage, the problem appears again.

So, what can I do? I am aware the drive is unreliable, but I cannot replace it right now and have got to work with what I got. The drive is a 2.5" FUJITSU MJA2500BH G2 500GB.

PS: I was wondering if I could somehow create dummy files in the affected areas, and perhaps write protect them so that Windows doesn't try to access them, or hide them away in the disk somewhere. Sort of like what TOF does in MHDD, but backwards. Attached is HD Tune's SMART data.

Have you tried just running an erase in MHDD? (not with remap option turned on) Any unremapped bads should get remapped by the drive. If they don't or if you get more new bads after that, then you need to bite the bullet and replace it. A possible alternative could be having it professionally refurbished, but I'm not sure how you would go about locating a reputable provider of this service

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

HD Tune is not correctly displaying the reallocated sector count. The pending and uncorrectable counts look very bad.

You need tools such as HD Sentinel or HDDScan to see the full 48-bit raw values.

http://www.hdsentinel.com/
http://hddscan.com/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.