disk errors

Donald · Mar 11, 2011

When I go to disk management under control panel (Win XP) I see
"online (errors)" and "HEALTHY (at risk)" for my external E drive.

The drive is a RAID 1 enclosure with two 2 TB Seagate SATA drives connected over an eSATA connection.

Running chkdsk does not correct anything but does say there are 16KB of bad sectors.

Running SeaTools short generic says it passes. I will run the long generic, but it will take the better part of a day.

So how & why is Disk Management determining I have errors?

tmorris1 · Mar 11, 2011

You have to run chkdsk with the repair option to actually fix the disk.

Colt45ws · Mar 11, 2011

Because. its seeing errors. 16 kb of bad sectors is not normal. Have you checked crystaldiskinfo or similar for SMART info?

Donald · Mar 11, 2011

I used the /f option.

Donald · Mar 12, 2011

Originally Posted By: Colt45ws
Because. its seeing errors. 16 kb of bad sectors is not normal. Have you checked crystaldiskinfo or similar for SMART info?

I am not sure Windows is informed when a disk drive has bad sectors and relocates them into spare sectors.

I installed crystaldiskinfo and it gave me no information on my E: drive, and when I clicked "DISK" the C: drive was the only one listed.

The eSATA connection to my laptop is via a cardbus card, that is about the best I can get for a lenovo T61P. That connection may be limiting crystaldiskinfo.

Towncivilian · Mar 12, 2011

If Windows is reporting bad sectors reallocated by the file system, you have more bad sectors than your hard drive has spares. Back up your data and replace your hard drive now.

Donald · Mar 13, 2011

How does one know if the hard drive has more bad sectors than the hard drive has spares?

greenaccord02 · Mar 14, 2011

My understanding is that if you start seeing the bad sectors then that means your spares are all used up.

Towncivilian · Mar 14, 2011

Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
My understanding is that if you start seeing the bad sectors then that means your spares are all used up.

Yes, if the file system starts seeing bad sectors your spares are used up.

Speedfan will tell you the SMART status of your hard drive(s), which includes information such as reallocated sector count, which is the number of sectors the hard drive's firmware itself has remapped.

PandaBear · Mar 14, 2011

Originally Posted By: Donald
How does one know if the hard drive has more bad sectors than the hard drive has spares?

use a SMART utility like passmark's diskcheckup (free) and see how many reallocation sectors are there, and if it is growing in size. Reallocation event should be near 0 or 0, and reallocation sectors should be very small as well. Drives ship with 0 on both.

Bottom_Feeder · Mar 14, 2011

Originally Posted By: Donald
I used the /f option.

/f will fix errors in the file system.

/r is the switch you want since it will scan the entire data area for problems. It'll take a whole lot longer, though.

Donald · Mar 18, 2011

I cannot use any utility since its a RAID enclosure. I ran the chkdsk /r option and it still came up with 16 KB of bad sectors. I removed the A drive and moved the B to A and left the origional A drive out to see if I could get it to run a chkdsk on the mirror drive. One of the drives showed up as 80GB and the other as almost 2TB. They are identical 2TB drives. After awhile I realized that moving the drives did not help explain anything and appeared to screw things up. I put the drives back in the original positions and pressed RESET on the RAID enclosure. Its now rebuilding the mirror drive which will take the better part of a day.

An email from Seagate says 16 KB is a VERY small amount and not to worry. They had "VERY" in caps.

I am not done yet. I will now contact StarTech who made the RAID enclosure and/or SteelVine who wrote the RAID management software.

disk errors

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