I have an older WD2500KS drive. I have only had it for a few years (actual Powered on Time is 1.4 years.) It recently had an issue with slow access to the disk and when running windows utilities it found bad sectors. I ran WD Lifeguard Tools and it does find errors, but when I go to repair them it gives me an error. I assumed this meant it was failing. However, the SMART status in Windows shows that everything is fine (all checks are green.) In Linux though, there is 1 warning under “Current Pending Sector Count” and everything else is green. The warning shows that there is only 1 bad sector.
So what I want to know is, is this drive failing or does 1 bad sector mean a simple error?
If your drive has marginal sectors that come good after several retries, then they won’t be remapped by SMART. However, you may be able to force them to be remapped using MakeBad:
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=18337
Otherwise, you could identify the file that occupies a particular sector, replace it with a good copy, and then delete the original. The next time the OS tries to write to the bad sector, it should be transparently remapped by SMART.
Tip: How to determine which file occupies a particular sector:
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=15364
A “pending” sector is one that the drive has identified as unreadable. The next time the OS writes to this sector, the drive will retest it and return it to service if good, or remap it if it fails again.
Thank you for the information. Exactley what I was looking for and it is up and running smooth again. Now I just have to keep an eye on it.
