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I recently noticed Windows was extremely slow and some programs failed to run.

The hard disk is checked during boot randomly. Sometimes checks go to Stage 5: 100s of thousands of sectors.

After a check, my secondary partition was inaccessible. Upon changing permissions, I was able to gain access, but all my data was gone to folders like found.000, found.001 inside chk*. I also had Ubuntu installed in another partition, which refused to boot now.

Reallocated sector count is 880. The temperature stays above 50°C. Is this a hard drive failure?

I formatted the disk and reinstalled Windows. BSOD with error code MEMORY_MANAGEMENT happens randomly.

Here are the details. Even though there is no critical SMART warning, I doubt this is a severe disk failure.

Disk Details (SMART & Others)

EDIT: The System is now not booting. Windows BSOD with Error Code: CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED, which is followed by Windows Automatic Repair (which fails).

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  • What's the question? Is this a total fail? Not yet. Should I swap it out now or wait for it to fail completely? That would really depend on how much spare time you've got & how old your last fully-tested backup is.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 11:56
  • @Tetsujin Is it confirmed that it is failed? Is the Reallocated Sector Count high? There's no SMART warning. The drive is less than 3 years old. The MEMORY_MANAGEMENT confuses me whether it's a problem with RAM, but Windows Memory Diagnostics detected no problems.
    – Devanarayanan
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 11:59
  • There's an outside chance it could be an intermittent SATA cable. What you decide to experiment with is still dependent on how old your last known-good backup is.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 12:03
  • @Tetsujin Communication Error. Is it related with the CRC Error Count as attached? And about the data, I have backup. The disk is formatted now with fresh Windows installation.
    – Devanarayanan
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 12:05
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    "seek error rate" - 0x3887EB6 seeks, no errors. Seek error attribute is not a problem in this case. "raw read error" - 0x397F692 reads, no errors again. See t1.daumcdn.net/brunch/service/user/axm/file/… for info.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 1:46

2 Answers 2

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Reallocated sector count is 880. The temperature stays above 50°C. Is this a hard drive failure?

880 reallocated sectors is a sufficient reason to replace the dying disk.

For a rotating hard drive 50°C is already dangerously near the maximum allowed temperature. That temperature is increasing wear.

What is your ambient temperature? You should provide cooling for your drive to make your disk approach a hopefully much lower ambient temperature instead of heading towards the maximum allowed temperature.

If a possible successor of your drive is being put in that thermal environment, he won't live long.

Try to format the disk using a slow (not quick) format, which will rewrite all the sectors. Check the

Any variation of a window format command will delete stuff on the drive. This is a irresponsible hint!

Is the Reallocated Sector Count high?

It is sufficiently high to justify replacement.

Read this SMART report to see how high those figures can get. https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=12261

There's no SMART warning. The drive is less than 3 years old.

Don't expect any. If it happens to you again, check the SMART parameters regularly and you can watch the process of increasing figures.

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  • Not logical : If the disk is cooking, why doesn't it have hard errors. Hundreds of reallocated sectors means a weak disk but not the end of the world. Only if the number keeps on climbing there is immediate danger. HD Tune correctly marks it as a warning and not as critical. Another: 50 degrees is too rounded a number - the temperature should keep on climbing and not stop on 50. Note that HD Tune marks it as OK.
    – harrymc
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 16:20
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    880 is not an acceptable value for reallocated attribute, don't keep "monitoring it" with data on the drive, replace it. Ignore harry's advice would be my advice.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 16:35
  • My PC always runs at such a high temperature. My phone's battery temperature is currently 39°C (although it's a Xiaomi). Ambient temperature in this season goes up only to max 35°C. Anyway, room ventilation is low.
    – Devanarayanan
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 18:02
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    @harrymc, Google's hard-drive study found that the critical number for "reallocated sector count" was 1: a hard drive with a non-zero count was far more likely to fail than one with a count of 0, but there was no correlation between the actual number of reallocated sectors and the failure rate.
    – Mark
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 23:19
  • @harrymc The fact that the drive reallocated a sector means the sector allocation did its job. The next step is to replace the drive, not keep using it until you lose data. The contingency systems are there to recover from total failure, not let you keep using it until it breaks completely.
    – Nelson
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 3:13
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I don't believe in your SMART data.

On the one hand, you describe a disk that cannot hold written data correctly and causes crashes. On the other hand, the SMART data shows a disk that is certainly weak, but with no hard errors. The only really bad attribute is the Raw Read Error Rate, raw value 397F692 (hex), where bits 4-6 count the read errors, which gives 1 error only and HD Tune marks it as Ok.

My conclusion is that the disk is failing, and the firmware is not correctly updating the SMART data.

My advice : Replace the disk, even though it's not very old as disks go. Buying disks is mainly a matter of luck - some last longer and some less so.

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