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Disk Repair test cannot find the weak sector

Posted: 2019.01.26. 21:40
by morrek
My storage drive (not my system drive) says that it has 1 weak sector. "There is 1 weak sector found on the disk surface. It may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk."

I've confirmed on the SMART tab, as well as in CrystalDiskInfo, that the Current Pending Sector Count is 1.

I followed the instructions on your web site and ran the "Disk repair" test. After 5 hours it reached the end of the test, but it didn't find any problems. The result was 10000 good blocks, 0 damaged block, 0 bad blocks. Everything in the map was green, and the log file simply shows the test starting and then 5 hours later the test ending.

Why can't the "Disk repair" test find where the weak sector is?

Here is the log:
26/01/2019 14:33:13 Sequential test, Disk: [2] 1397 GB S: SAMSUNG HD154UI [S1Y6J1KS508868] [Repair]
26/01/2019 14:33:13 Test ID# 1 00030002 00250091 1 4 H: 1164
26/01/2019 19:27:16 Test completed

Re: Disk Repair test cannot find the weak sector

Posted: 2019.01.29. 12:40
by hdsentinel
Thanks for the details.
The most important is that the disk test detected no damaged/bad blocks, so confirmed that the disk drive is really stable.
The 1 weak sector likely repaired some time ago already - just the hard disk may not able to update the value properly. This is why the disk repair test did not find any problems.
This issue is very rare but may happen: the counter of the weak sector not updated by the disk drive, so it still shows the 1 weak/pending sector. This may happened if the drive disconnected (power lost or accidental reset / disconnection happened) before it could update the value.

In this case, the weak sector counter may change after normal use of the drive. Maybe a Disk menu -> Extended self test (as it's an internal hardware self test) can help too.

If you prefer, you can manually decrease the counter now, to clear that number and remove from the text description, as the weak sector is surely repaired now. For this, please
- select the S.M.A.R.T. page of the drive
- locate the attribute 197 Current Pending Sector Count
- in the Offset column, click on the - button (to specify -1 instead of 0). After the confirmation message, soon the weak sector will be no longer displayed on the Overview page and the health% of the drive may also improve (not sure about its current level). The bottom graph may not change (as it shows the daily lowest value recorded).

This way only possible future issue(s) will be reported, if there will be any.

Interesting situation, if you can use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, would be happy to check the status of the hard disk drive.

Re: Disk Repair test cannot find the weak sector

Posted: 2019.01.29. 17:51
by morrek
Actually, what I did afterwards is I backed up all of my data from that drive, and I then ran the "Reinitialize disk surface" test. That took many hours to complete, but at the end it had found the 1 weak sector. The report that it showed me at the end said "1 pending sectors fixed" (see screenshot). Now, when I view the SMART data for that drive, it says that the Current Pending Sector Count is 0 and the Reallocation Event Count is 0.

Unfortunately, backing up all my data, running "Reinitialize disk surface", and then restoring all of my data took a very long time. It would have been nice if the original "Disk repair" test that I ran had been able to have the same result because that would have saved me a lot of time. Anyway, it is fixed now so I'm happy about that.

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