Hello, 4 months ago I installed a new HDD on my laptop and worked fine with Windows, last week I installed Linux Fedora on a different partition and inmediatly the Gnome Disk Utility pop up an alarm for Bad Sectors and that the device should be replaced.
I run the diagnostic of Seatools and said everything is fine, so does Windows chkdisk. Also the report of SMART by SpeedFan says everything is ok. But when I run the "in-depth online analysis" it says that I have 102 reallocated sectors, the "normal" number being 100, and again that the drive should be replaced.



Now my questions are:
1.- May the warranty be enforced? In Mexico the warranty is at least a year, so I am good, but I do not know if they accept this kind of error.
2.- Should I be really worried about 102 raw bad sectors? Since i just discovered this issue I do not know if this happened a long time ago and did not progressed any further, or if is a recent event that is going to steadily grow.
3.- Personally I am against dual booting, plus on my linux installations I do complex partitioning and always encrypt them, could this combination of ext4/ext3/ntfs and encryption may have provoked this errors?

Thank you in advice, you help is greatly appreciated.
Cheers,

Omar

You're slightly confused about which of the SMART data is "normal", but that's not so important...

Here are my answers to your questions:

Disk drive can develop unreadable sectors, which is why there are many spare sectors - this is stated in manufacturer technical documentation. Therefore typically manufacturers will not accept a drive with some unreadable sectors as "faulty" until there is a SMART failure (i.e. a pre-fail attribute drops below its threshold value).

Therefore I do not expect that you can claim on the warranty, but of course I do not know the details of Mexican law.


I would be a little concerned, and if that number of reallocated sectors (or the number of pending sectors) increases, then I would become more concerned.


No, that did not cause these reallocated sectors.

However poor power input to the drive could also cause them, among other rare possibilities.

P.S. Remember to always have backups. Also remember that drives can fail at any time - you are not guaranteed that you will get any warning of a future failure, by looking at the SMART data.