Storage Solutions Found an old HDD at home

nileshsrox

nileshsrox

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So I found this old 3.5" HDD lying around at the house, seems to me it was from our old home PC from 2012,
Connected it and it was empty, ran Crystal Disk to check it and it looked something like this:
1716635800018.png


Can anything be done to fix the sectors, or can I make it so the HDD never accesses those sectors so it won't crash? also, would it give any sell value or should I just throw it away?
 
Bad sectors is a physical defect on the surface of the disk thus cannot be fixed.
HDD will not access those sectors once the pending sector count goes back to 0.

Your HDD never shows full space in windows because it has hardware reserved space just for this purpose, to replace bad sectors with new ones from reserved space.
If pending sector count doesn't go to 0 or bad sectors keep increasing that means the disk has gone faulty or has exhausted the reserved space already thus is unreliable and should be discarded.
 
Sometimes though, this error does not indicate an actual bad sector. I have a Seagate Ironwolf which started showing this exact problem after a sudden power loss. Doing a full surface wipe (format without the quick option checked) reset everything and the health is showing as good now. Have been using this for more than a year since this problem happened. @nileshsrox, you can try doing the same and hopefully it might help. But to be on the safe side, do not store something critical on this drive without a backup.
 
I pulled out 2 500gb drives from tata sky pvr. They had the same problem. Cleaned them out in diskpart then initialize and format. No errors after that. Done this on multiple hd, sd cards, pendrives, etc. YMMV. Have been using both drives for the past 2 months in old shucked (maxtor basics usb 2.0 and seagate go flex usb 3.0) 3.5 inch cases.

I have also experienced some old drives fixing themselves after using for a while. If the bad sectors start climbing then the drive is failing/failed and best not to use it.
 
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