Hard Disk Monitoring

I have been running HDS for some time now (Pro version 3.20) and two days ago it alerted me that my HD in my notebook was on its way out: approx 400 sectors had been found defective, and the report said the drive health was 20%.

I immediately made a complete backup (using Acronis True Image), ordered a new drive, and installed it yesterday when it arrived. Then I did a complete restore, which brought my system back to its previous state. All went well.

However, when HDS loaded,, despite the main screen saying my drive was in perfect condition it gave me two errors (see attachment): 1. the relocation sector count was 140
2. the write error rate was 51

The problem is that despite the main summary showing the new drive being perfect, these two errors are IDENTICAL to the errors I had on the original drive that I replaced. So, I kind of think that maybe this data was not being refreshed when I installed the new drive and restored my system to it.

Secondly, I had an icon on my desktop for the C-Drive. In good times, it has a green circle with a check mark in it. During this failure, the circle was replaced with a red circle with an X in it. After replacing my HD and restoring my system, the same bad disk icon displayed on my desktop, despite the resport saying my drive was perfect. I delete this icon and created a new one, which now has the green circle with the check mark. I sort of think this should have been automatically corrected when I put in the new drive and did my system restore.

Please advise. Thanks

Excuse me, but the situation is different.

Jack_Sprat wrote: 1. the relocation sector count was 140
2. the write error rate was 51

I can confirm these are NOT errors. These are factory default values which may change during later use if the drive encounter any problems.
The "Data" column of these attributes would indicate any deviation from normal situation, but these are all 0000's.
So I can confirm that no, there are no problems with this drive.

For more information about how the S.M.A.R.T. attributes work, please visit http://www.hdsentinel.com/smart
This will explain how the different columns work and how they are used and should be read.

Jack_Sprat wrote: The problem is that despite the main summary showing the new drive being perfect, these two errors are IDENTICAL to the errors I had on the original drive that I replaced. So, I kind of think that maybe this data was not being refreshed when I installed the new drive and restored my system to it.

This is not true. If you'd save a report previously about the replaced drive, you could compare it with the current one.
(this is why it is nice if you use Report menu Send test report to developer as I can check, compare with the previous situation(s) and may advise).

I suspect that the previous drive had problems with these attributes, what you wrote (400+ bad sectors) confirm this. However, I can make sure that the "Value" column was never showed 300, 400 or more, the count of errors was reflected in the Data column. (Please note that some attributes do not reflect problems in this column as they may hold only statistical information, like power on time count, start/stop count and so).

Hard Disk Sentinel identifies the drive as it is different from the previous (otherwise you may see the lower health on the health statistics graph when you select the new drive). So it surely does not display the statistics of the previous one.

Jack_Sprat wrote: Secondly, I had an icon on my desktop for the C-Drive. In good times, it has a green circle with a check mark in it. During this failure, the circle was replaced with a red circle with an X in it. After replacing my HD and restoring my system, the same bad disk icon displayed on my desktop, despite the resport saying my drive was perfect. I delete this icon and created a new one, which now has the green circle with the check mark. I sort of think this should have been automatically corrected when I put in the new drive and did my system restore.

Because the icon is displayed by Windows Explorer itself, it is possible that if you make a full backup (from the faulty drive) Windows saves the setting (that the icon with red X was displayed). After restore to a new drive, that icon may be displayed temporarily before HD Sentinel update the icon and Windows uses the updated icon with green mark as should. I suspect you did not wait this time.