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