My Toshiba SATA HDD in my laptop is playing up. Every so often it will have trouble reading and I can hear it retrying if I press my ear against the base. Eventually it clears and the laptop resumes normal function. The system event log usually shows a couple of ID 7's (bad block) at the same time.

Now - I've scanned the disk with every conceivable utility I can think of, from Chkdsk -R to Seatools and half a dozen more in between, and not one of them finds anything wrong with the drive. Even the SMART data says there are no remapped blocks ! The only SMART counter that flags anything as being less than nominal is C7 - Interface CRC error count (63278569) and HDTune just flags that as worthy of an 'attention' mark.

I'm trying to get the drive to recognise it has a few bad blocks and to remap them, but nothing I've tried even finds anything wrong - except, of course, Windows !

What can I do ?

Many thanks !

Edit: Finally ! HD Tune is picking up a couple of damaged blocks.... but the drive isn't remapping them

I think it might work to do a scan on your hard disk, but in the options, select surface scan. Depending on how large your disk is, this check could take hours.

That will map out bad sectors and if you have enough of them, you will get that SMART warning you wanted.

A surface scan with which utility ?

Any. Microsoft Scandisk should do the trick.