Bad sectors magically dissapeared

[JW The Computer Guy]

As the title states, I'm having an issue with one of my drives and I'm not sure if it's good or bad. The other day I checked the SMART data on my HDD, and it said it had 3 bad sectors. Just now, I looked at the SMART data again, and it's not showing any bad sectors at all, and saying the drive is at 100% health. Usually it will still show the amount of bad sectors even if they get remapped. Also, the drive is not having any performance issues.

the drive is a 320GB Seagate ST3320820AS.

I find it strange that they randomly disappeared

[Mr.Mike]

What testing did you do and with what program? GSmartControl? Have you done the long extended tests? Try that and see what happens. It will take some time but it may end up being well worth it. Maybe you should also take a closer look each partition to make sure recovery data and even system data is intact. No boot problems, right?

[JW The Computer Guy]

Originally Posted by Mr.Mike

What testing did you do and with what program? GSmartControl? Have you done the long extended tests? Try that and see what happens. It will take some time but it may end up being well worth it. Maybe you should also take a closer look each partition to make sure recovery data and even system data is intact. No boot problems, right?

I used Hard Disk Sentinel and Crystal Disk Info. I have not run any tests on the drive yet due the drive being in my main machine which is frequently being used. I have not had any problems with the drive at all.

[Mr.Mike]

Originally Posted by JW The Computer Guy

I used Hard Disk Sentinel and Crystal Disk Info. I have not run any tests on the drive yet due the drive being in my main machine which is frequently being used. I have not had any problems with the drive at all.

I don't know about HDS, but Crystal Disk does no testing, it just monitors. I would download the manufacturer's test and run that. Seagate? WD" Hitachi?

[technibbling]

Phantom sectors?

"The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 20 characters."

[RedFoxComp]

The sectors might have just been marked as pending bad, meaning the disk firmware will try to write to them a few more times before they are permanently marked bad. If it succeeds in writing to the sectors they will be marked good again. This prevents the disk from marking sectors as bad unecessarily because of a power interruption or firmware anomaly.

If the drive has a lot of hours on it, you might want to check it with HDDScan and see the sector response times in the Map feature when scanning. If you have a lot of sectors responding very slowly you should just trash the drive because it's going to fail soon.

[JW The Computer Guy]

Originally Posted by Mr.Mike

I don't know about HDS, but Crystal Disk does no testing, it just monitors. I would download the manufacturer's test and run that. Seagate? WD" Hitachi?

Hard Disk Sentinal is under Hard Disk tools when you boot from the Hiren's Boot CD. I will run the seagate seatools when I get a chance. The drive doesn't have anything important on it.