WD10EARS: Integer underflow in the calculation of the pending sectors (s.m.a.r.t.)

Hi WD Community,

After encountering some read errors, I had a few pending sectors showing up in my SMART data.

I then successfully managed to force a sector remapping by zeroing the drive.

However, there went something wrong with the re-calculation of the pending sectors count, instead of becoming 0 after remapping these sectors, it seems that there was some integer underflow (i.e. the value becoming “negative”) and it is now showing 65534. (Note that -2 in an unsigned 16 bit representation becomes 65534).

Of coarse, this value now is interpreted by any SMART tool as a huge number.

After some googling, I noticed that quite a lot of people have this issue with WD drives (search for “65534 pending sectors”, “65535 pending sectors”, etc.)

Is there any way to “reset” this false pending sector count?

Unfortunately I can’t RMA the drive, the warranty expired last year.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Bert

Welcome to the Community.

Unfortunately, I am not aware of a dedicated process able to address this behavior other than a full erase (Write Zeros).

@BertF, I have also seen this strange SMART result, but I have no explanation for it.

You could examine the firmware modules for your drive, in particular modules 32, 34, and 20-24. That’s where the defect lists and SMART data are stored.

http://sediv2008.narod.ru/Easy3.9Password01234567890.rar
http://sediv2008.narod.ru/Settings.rar

SeDiv WD Read ROM & Modules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UgFfhkkAwY

@ fzabkar Thanks for the suggestion, I will try that when I have the drive on a Win32 machine the next time. For now I will live with the strange smart result, the drive seems to behave well besides of that.

BR Bert