Basic Questions / Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows

WD Software & Mobile Apps WD Software
1

Hi, I’ve tried to post some questions, but for some reason WD’s spam filter blocked my post. :frowning: So I’ll try again…

According to the Western Digital Knowledge Base, if I run the “EXTENDED TEST” this will detect bad sectors and attempt to repair them or mark the damaged sector not to be written to.

1.) Is this a data-destructive process?
a.) If I understand correctly, any data that exists on a bad sector is inaccessible and useless? For example, if you had a document or a movie copied to part of a HDD that had a bad sector, that movie or document wouldn’t open and if it did, there might be issues with the data (Movie may not play or file text might be missing etc?) So basically, running an extended test would delete these inaccessible bad sector files? So while this test can be “data-destructive” It’s deleting junk data anyway.

2.) My test produced a “Test completed successfully” “Pass” notification. This doesn’t tell me if this process
a.) Repaired any bad sectors.
b.) Marked any damaged sector(s) not to be written to.
c.) If the extended test came across bad sectors/damaged sectors that can’t be written to, AND it was able to resolve these issues would this test even tell me that it fixed problems or would it report as it has: “Test completed successfully / Pass” ?

2

Hi FennecTheFox,

  1. Extended Test run by Windows Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool is not a data destructive process. It can perform drive identification, diagnostics, and repairs on a Western Digital FireWire, EIDE, Serial ATA, or USB drive.
  2. It will give you result with Pass or with the error code if drive failed in a test. You can refer below KBA to check more about error codes descriptions.
3

Hello, wdc support et al: Could you amplify on the Diagnostics operation?

If an extended test shows a few bad sectors, will they be marked as bad even if the message window is “closed” instead of a “repair” attempted? Are the bad sectors reallocated at this time?

If the extended test is run a second time, will the bad sectors identified in the first run be excluded from this second run, such that the second run might identify no bad sectors?

And finally, once bad sectors have been identified and/or reallocated, is any further work required beyond a partition creation and format?

Thanks.