External USB Hard Drive

[Pavle]

How to fix this :Health 0%
Failure Predicted - Attribute: 5 Reallocated Sectors Count, Count of sectors moved to the spare area. Indicate problem with the disk surface or the read/write heads.
There are 15832 bad sectors on the disk surface. The contents of these sectors were moved to the spare area.
Based on the number of remapping operations, the bad sectors may form continuous areas.
There are 544 weak sectors found on the disk surface. They may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk.
Replace hard disk immediately.

It is recommended to backup immediately to prevent data loss.

[hdsentinel]

As no software can repair damaged hardware, I'm afraid that there is no way to "fix this".

Basically, as you may see in the text description area there are lots of errors reported for this hard disk.
I can recommend what the software suggests:

Replace hard disk immediately.
It is recommended to backup immediately to prevent data loss.

The problem is that the number of problems are too high. This cannot be repaired (as the drive may have physical damages) and the hard disk may fail completely any time.

You may try to use the Disk -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface test to improve the usability and status somehow, but because of the high number of problems and bad sectors already re-allocated, new and new problems will be reported from time to time, causing data corruption / data loss.

In this situation, you may ask for warranty replacement (if the hard disk still has warranty) because the hard disk is considered "bad". For a such hard disk, new operating system installations may not be possible at all and it is possible that the computer even displays a warning notification before starting the operating system, indicating that hard disk drive failure may occur soon.

[Pavle]

How to reinitialize disk surface without read and write test ???

[hdsentinel]

Please use Hard Disk Sentinel Pro: Disk menu -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface

This performs all steps required to force the hard disk to repair (reallocate) possible bad sectors, re-examine the status and repair weak sectors and clear all data from the hard disk.
No need to perform separate read / write tests of course, this test performs both, to (in addition to the above mentioned repair functions) verify the functionality of the drive, confirm if the data can be both written and read back - and it is not damaged.

[Pavle]

Can I speed up Reinitialize disk surface ???

[hdsentinel]

Yes of course: if you use USB 2.0 connection (not sure, you did not mention) then please connect the hard disk directly to the motherboard, instead of using the USB adapter/docking station. USB 2.0 decreases the performance to approx. 1/3 of the maximum possible (depending on the hard disk).

Also if you prefer a faster method, you may try Disk menu -> Surface test -> Write + Read test

This is faster as this performs a complete (single pass) overwrite only and then reads back the complete data area.
It is much faster than the Reinitialise disk surface test (which performs multiple passes) but may not as effective in fixing problems.
You may try this first - and if you have no luck, you may try the Reinitialise disk surface test.

However, for a such almost dead hard disk, I'd not expect too much, especially not performance at all.
A hard disk with 15000+ bad sectors and with 0% health can completely fail any time. In such cases, even if you perform these tests, more and more problems will be surely reported soon.
When the health is 0%, it is not possible to "repair" the hard disk, it will be never perfect again (as the internal hardware damage is high).

[Pavle]

How to continue quited test ???

[hdsentinel]

Click Disk menu -> Surface test
In the new window, where you can select the test type and the hard disk to be tested, click on the Configuration tab.
There you can use the "Limit testing to specific data blocks" option to specify the first and last block to be tested.
The surface area is divided to 10000 blocks, so (for example) if you tested the first 25%, then you can specify first block = 2500 to continue.

[Pavle]

I plugged usb hard drive in motherboard and started test but it's still slow.How to speed up test???

[hdsentinel]

When the hard disk finds a bad block, it needs longer time to process that: to repair and advance.

It is not possible to speed up that procedure.

You may use the Disk menu -> Surface test -> Write test, which only performs a single pass write, so it may finish sooner than the Reinitialise Disk Surface.

But when a hard disk has so much bad sectors, it will not be faster: new and new problems may be reported - and these slow down the hard disk.

[Pavle]

Is there any difference if running the test from the beginning or from a certain sector ???

[hdsentinel]

Yes: if you select to start from a certain sector, then only that specific area will be tested. Sectors outside the specified area are unaffected.
The test method is similar - the only difference is which sectors are tested.