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I have a portable 5TB HDD. I was downloading data on it and it was 3/4 (or so, almost full) full with documents.

I did chkdsk /f /v /r /x just to check it. It was shown to be perfect in HDD Sentinel before.

I while running the command above it suddenly stopped and thrown an error saying that it doesn't have enough free space to check files or sectors.

After that I checked it again with HDD sentinel and it shows that this (brand new HDD) it is now bad and need to be changed.

These are the error messages:

https://i.sstatic.net/ARrhk.png

https://i.sstatic.net/frC1f.png

https://i.sstatic.net/ZvfTN.png

https://i.sstatic.net/VmdUj.png

I run diskpart and delete/clean partition and then I did a full NTFS format which took almost 3.5 days or so to complete and now the errors above still the same.

How to delete or get rid of these fake bad sectors?

I think they are fake because of that chkdsk broken command I'm just talking above because it is brand new and checked periodically with HDD Sentinel and it was PERFECT until this happened.

Thank you a lot in advance!

P.S. I am running Windows 7 x64 bits.

L.E. I run also HDD Regenerator which took 5 days or so to complete and it didn't find anything.

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2 Answers 2

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These are not fake. The HDD has detected and remapped some bad sectors. That's it.

It's not unusual for new drives to be faulty. Actually they are more likely to fail.

Get the drive replaced with a good one.

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  • But it was shown to be perfect and healthy in HDD Sentinel just before I run chkdsk command. After the command failed to run because not enough empty space, just after that happened suddenly HDD Sentinel shows bad sectors and the images I posted above. How is that?
    – YoYoYo
    Commented May 12, 2022 at 7:37
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    HDD's don't just know if they are completely fine - they learn about a problem when they witness it. chkdsk /r scans whole drive, both its used and unused sectors. This either caused the drive to find already faulty sectors, or produced them (it's quite an intensive operation). This would have happened later anyway. You have just revealed the issue sooner.
    – gronostaj
    Commented May 12, 2022 at 8:02
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    Gronostaj is right. Its unlikely some weird incident and much more likely that your drive is broken. Did you run a full scan with Sentinel before as well ? There are usually different types of tests, some of which that might have missed the problem. The fact it took 3.5days to do a full format of a 5TB drive is a second alarm bell. The drive is almost certainly bad, replace it.
    – Silbee
    Commented May 12, 2022 at 8:42
  • @Silbee gronostaj I have read (I think on this forum too) that some other guys copied/cloned partitions/entire HDD from a faulty one to a brand new healthy one in order to back up it and after that the new healthy before HDD just started to show now the same bad sectors as the faulty one. So, I think there is some place/hidden partition where this information about bad sectors is stored else what would be the explanation for that? Also, how software like HDD Sentinel read information about bad sectors instantly while other software like HDD Regenerator or chkdsk needs days to figure it out?
    – YoYoYo
    Commented May 12, 2022 at 11:25
  • If so, couldn't it just be deleted/reset? I think this kind of information partition exists since there are fake HDDs/USB sticks that show huge capacity of some TB in size and while trying to write on them buyers find out that their just bought products have only a few GB in size.
    – YoYoYo
    Commented May 12, 2022 at 11:27
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3.5 days to write a partition table?? I'd say it's bust. Your best bet would be return to vendor as DOA.

NTFS is a fragile file system and I don't have faith in those tools.

If you're really quite serious about keeping the drive (I wouldn't), I would run a read-write check with *nix 'badblocks' program. This will probably take days, but you can be 99% confident in the result. I'm guessing it will likely start throwing errors pretty quickly though.

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  • OP said a full format, ie. writing zeros to the whole 5TB disk, took 3.5 days. It's not unrealistic assuming the drive is using SMR. NTFS has nothing to do with bad sectors. Badblocks may or may not throws errors, but we know for a fact (from the SMART params) that the drive found and remapped a lot of bad sectors. On a healthy new-ish drive these numbers should be zero. Badblocks may detect new issues, but the remapped sectors will appear to work fine - that's the point of remapping (see comments here)
    – gronostaj
    Commented May 12, 2022 at 7:26
  • He also said "fake bad sectors"...I have no idea what windows considers a full format, but if he'd said "writing zeros" that would have made more sense. Also at no time did I say NTFS had to do with bad sectors?
    – mitts
    Commented May 12, 2022 at 7:46

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