i have the following problem. A few days ago I noticed that my external 1TB WD hard drive got extremely slow. Usually im at about 5-10MB/s, since yesterday its at 100 byte/s up to maximum 150kb/s. Googled for a bit, the answer in general was test your hard drive. Got a bad feeling about this, opened up the event manager, and the feeling got even worse. The drive has an entry about a bad sector every 10 seconds or so. Downloaded the WD utility, quick test wont run due to the error message at the end of the post, Extended Test cancels after about 6 hours with the message 08 - Too many bad sectors.
The strange thing about this, the hard drive works, I could access all files and folders, the drive is just extremely slow.
Is there any way to mask the bad sectors permanently so I can at least back up my data? The drives at ~650 GB and it would be terrible to lose all of it.
Thanks in advance and please dont give me the “Well, throw it away and buy a new one”.
EDIT: The drive passes SMART.
Test Option:
QUICK TEST
Model Number:
WD 10EADS External
Unit Serial Number:
WCAV53482201
Firmware Number:
1.75
Capacity:
1000.20 GB
SMART Status:
PASS
Test Result:
FAIL
Test Error Code:
06-Quick Test on drive 2 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 2!
the transfer speed will bottom out when it tries to read problematic data.
(see event viewer to confirm this)
ckdsk may do nothing but make things worse.
cloning the drive would probably work but you would most likely be cloning it errors and all…
so corrupt data would be carried over to a new drive… i went through this recently…
I archive all kinds of stuff and when i got my new drive i drag and dropped my data to the new drive
and i got random errors saying some files could not be read and even after i was done copying and reinstalling etc i have still found the odd corrupt picture or video etc…
I was in the same situation and did the same thing as you pretty much.
the good thing about copying the files is you get to see if any are gonna fail at being read…
chkdsk can be pretty sketchy, if i were you i would pay close attention to what it says it does.
the most info it will say is in the screen while your doing it because the the buffer it uses for logging is bigger than what can fit into a windows log / event.
so how are you backing up your data ?
I’d like to help make sure you keep as much as possible.
also since you failed the drive test i would RMA the drive if i were you… repairing the file system is not gonna fix anything perm unless you know for sure bad sectors are being mapped out. and i know on my drive they were NOT ! so that measn the problem is gonna go on and on for ever while an increasing amount of corrupt sectors probably…
