Hard Disk Monitoring

I have 2 1 terrabyte drives installed - Windows XP 3+ year old box - drive are less than 2 years old. I've been using Acronis Disk monitor for the last couple of years and it keeps showing one drive getting to a temp of 44 and the other at 39. Suddenly today it gave a degradation warning on the hotter drive reducing its status to 36% but with no real useful info about why.

I've spend the evening panicking, since I have some deadlines to meet and not really enough time to clone onto a new drive, but if I lose the drive I'm in worse shape. I've looked around and tested various drive monitors, but none of them shows any problems (unless you know hoe to read a S.M.A.R.T. list)

Hard Disk Sentinel was nice enough to explain that 32 sectors degraded and got moved to a safe place. It estimates I still have an estimated 656 days of use. How risky is it to keep using this drive? Hopefully within 2 months I will have moved all data off this XP machine to a new Window 7 machine with all new parts, so I hate to buy another new drive, especially since I just finished moving 2 other XP machines to new Win 7 boxes.

If I buy HDS and run it to monitor full time will that reduce my risk?

Yes: Hard Disk Sentinel would help lots to be notified about any, even minor new problem with the hard disks.
This would include any (even a single) new sector which will be found as bad - and you can constantly keep an eye on the health of the hard disk - or even configure alerts and/or automatic backup to be performed when the hard disk health goes lower.

Generally, the "bad sectors" reported in the text description are no longer used by the hard disk: they are already reallocated.

It means that the hard disk moved the contents of these sectors to the spare area and now (instead of the original sector) the spare area is used for all reads and writes targeting those bad sectors. So there is no need to manually "fix" or "isolate" them - as these both already done by the hard disk.

This is why the detected and reported bad sectors can never cause problems, regardless of their position because that problematic area is never used any more.

Now the question is: did the hard disk found all bad sectors and fixed them by re-allocating? Or are there any further problems with the drive (for example weak sectors, spin retry issues, slower/hardly accessible sectors etc.) which may cause problems?

According the experiences, new and new bad sectors may be detected quickly during normal usage as the hard disk head(s) read/write other areas of the drive.

So personally I'd perform a backup (at least the very important files) as new problems may be detected any time.
Hopefully the status will remain stable (no new bad sectors will be reported and the health % will also remain at this level) at least until you'll have the opportunity to perfom a complete backup, just to be sure.

And if your data is safe, I'd recommend to use the tests in Hard Disk Sentinel: to verify if the data area is error-free, there are no further errors reported (no weak, damaged sectors, no further problems).

If this is true and the tests will show no problems, then you can be sure that the hard disk drive is stable and can be used - even if the health shows less than 100% percent.

And in this case, you can manually acknowledge the reported problems in Hard Disk Sentinel, to clear the error(s) reported from the text description and restore the health to 100%.
That way the software will no longer display the current problems, just reports any possible new issues, errors (if there will be in the future).

For more information about bad sectors and further steps, please click on the "?" next to the text description and check
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#health and
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq_repair_ha ... _drive.php

My backups are pretty good - crucial files are backed up daily to 2 cloud locations, 2 remote [5 minutes walk away] computers, and 2 local NSA/raids, hopefully all data is also backed up to a different local NAS/raid at least weekly.

Yesterday I got more moved sectors increasing from 32 to 40, and then last night the other drive [that had been perfect till now] got its first problem, 8 moved sectors. Weird co-incidence I hope, and not an indication of serious problems. It was however nice to get an immediate audio alert.

The funny thing is that right after that last alert - I got a Windows XP problem that I get randomly at least once a week for the last year - the clock on the right of the desktop bottom tool bar stopped updating, and the bottom toolbar and start button would not respond. However I was able to switch to active windows with ALT+TAB. When I get this, it usually clears up in about 20 minutes. At one point, someone inn a support forum told me that this is a symptom of disk problems, but I never believed that.

If the clock and tray icons do not update, it is caused by the crash of explorer.exe of Windows.
If you press CTRL+ALT+DEL to open the Task Manager and kill explorer.exe, you may see the complete bar vanishing, but in the Task Manager if you select File menu, you can run explorer.exe - which will immediately show the Start menu, task bar, tray icons, clock, etc.. again.

Usually explorer.exe crashes are not really related to disk problems - except if explorer.exe itself (or a DLL/library it depends on) would be on a damaged hard disk sector. But then it would not work at all, so it will stop updating immediately after Windows boot - or even does not show up at all.
Explorer.exe crashes are more likely caused by some additional software installed, for example special shell extensions, themes - or even a virus/malware.

Yes - I have found in the past that terminating and restarting Explorer solves it about 50% of the time, generally it get the clovk and bottom bar running, but sometime the system is still unstable and I have to reboot.

Since this is a 4 year old WIndows XP machine, and Windows was never re-installed, and has more programs installed than you can imagine, I'm generally surprised it still works at all. I'm hoping that within a month or so I can get all the legacy programs that I still need running on the Windows 7 machine that is sitting next to it.