# What do reallocated sectors mean?



## Black Panther (Feb 28, 2008)

S.M.A.R.T. indepth online analysis of my old maxtor 40 gb (on the P4) says:

18% fitness
99% performance

and.......

NOTE : your hard disk has 399 reallocated sectors (*this value is very large and your hard disk should be replaced*). Hard disks do have spare sectors (usually from 256 up to 1024) used to replace bad ones. This remapping operation is transparent to the end user. Anyway, this can lead to degradated performances (because remapped sectors are in different places of the disk than the original ones and the head needs additional moving). If reallocated sectors grow over time, you might encounter some serious troubles. A backup of the most important data is suggested anyway.


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## Ahhzz (Feb 28, 2008)

Unfortunately, it means pretty much what it says: your hard drive is failing.   So, you've got a couple of options. One, you can try and get a copy of HDD Regen HDD Regen (Home page). Excellent piece of software, I've used it to recover 3 different laptop drives over the years, as well as 2 desktop computers. That will attempt to re-strengthen the sectors, and hopefully keep you from losing data.  Your second option, is just to go ahead, bite the bullet, and buy a new drive  . Drives are cheap, buy two  . Transfer data, reload computer, recommence life as you know it....virtually anyway 

of course, third option is always leave it alone and hope it goes away :shadedshu


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## Black Panther (Feb 28, 2008)

Data isn't important here, this pc is my daughter's toy... I've already done a clean install and wiped her games off. They were wiping themselves off by themselves after all.

Now after a clean install, programs are starting to vanish, others like the avast suddenly becomes corrupt...

I've got a couple of PII's lying here. I don't know the size of their disks. I'll try the regen program first, then I'll see if the other HDD's of the PII's are any good.
Then probably I'll either buy one of the cheapest HDD I can find lol...


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## Ahhzz (Feb 28, 2008)

My rec, is to look atNewEgg for a hard drive. Good prices, EXCELLENT shipping, and good cust svc. Bought most of my latest computer from them.


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## keakar (Feb 28, 2008)

well a report like that says its dying fast, save any data you dont want to lose.

those P2's are going to have only 4 gb drives and slow ones at that with tiny cache and 5400 speed. they will make that slow computer seem like it used to be fast compared to how slow it would work with them in it. buy one at newegg, 80gb drives go for around $45.

i recommend you give thought to just building yourself a brand new computer and giving yours to your kids.


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## Silverel (Feb 28, 2008)

?

I don't think any kids need, nor deserve, the mighty powers that lie in his computer. 13k in 3dmark06 is nothing to scoff at.

Sift through some of the FS threads here and see if you can't wrangle up a cheapo-old-yet-functional piece of history for her to play on. Or if you'd rather they come lookin for you, make WTB thread, where people can hock off their junk for pennies at a time.

Hell, finding some old HD for 10-20$ prolly wouldn't be that hard. But the one you've got there sounds beyond the realm of saveability.


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## Black Panther (Feb 29, 2008)

keakar said:


> i recommend you give thought to just building yourself a brand new computer and giving yours to your kids.



That'd be nice, if I could afford it... 

There isn't any data I could lose, I've just formatted the HDD and done a clean xp install.

It appeared to be working fine. And I thought, nice, I'll put it up for sale as a whole system, for cheap.

Then today  the new fresh xp won't load. The pc POSTs well, arrives to the black screen where the blue bars show windows loading, does a very brief BSOD, so brief I barely noticed there was a BSOD, and restarts. It keeps going on like that...

It had being doing this occasionally before, but I thought I had solved it with the clean xp install.

Does the HDD continue to write and use bad sectors? Hence corrupting the xp installation now? 

Can I be really sure it's the HDD which is causing the BSOD? OK I know the HDD is baddish, but I wouldn't want to buy an HDD so the computer is on sale in good condition, only realising that it's still not loading with the new HDD.


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## Silverel (Feb 29, 2008)

If you're thinkin about testing the hardware independent of the HD you could get a Live CD of some Linux distro. Basically it's an OS on a disk, you won't be able to save anything, but it'll be enough to make sure everything works.


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## Black Panther (Feb 29, 2008)

Funny thing I just realised: If I lower the NB voltage too much on my own pc, it gives me a BSOD at exactly the same time as the Pentium is doing, and it restarts too. Only it doesn't keep restarting.

However I've never oc'd the Pentium, let alone meddled with northbridge voltage...


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## Graogrim (Mar 11, 2008)

Understand that nothing external explicitly tells a hard drive when to remap a sector. It makes that decision on its own internally. Even in a completely healthy drive read/write errors are very common. That's why drives devote a signifcant amount of space to error correction data. So if the failure is a fluke "soft" error it's not a big deal, and can sometimes be recovered by software. (Don't be fooled by marketing hype. Such software does nothing to actually "strengthen" the hardware. It just fixes a software glitch.)

Hard failures are a different story altogether.  If a drive has many remapped sectors this points directly at the snowball scenario, where contaminants (usually infiltrated dust or liberated particulates from earlier internal damage) spread across the surface of the drive, creating more damage. This is the classic looming catastrophic failure scenario, where you hurriedly get all you can off the drive and then take it apart to play with the magnets  and shiny mirrored discs inside of it.

Unfortunately, 400 remapped sectors points to the latter scenario. Software recovery isn't realistic at this point. You have a better shot at winning the lottery.

So I'd say don't let anyone convince you to pay for some snake oil software. Just buy a replacement hard drive and be shut of the problem.


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## Solaris17 (Mar 11, 2008)

Silverel said:


> ?
> 
> I don't think any kids need, nor deserve, the mighty powers that lie in his computer. 13k in 3dmark06 is nothing to scoff at.
> .



he's a she


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## Solaris17 (Mar 11, 2008)

Black Panther said:


> That'd be nice, if I could afford it...
> 
> There isn't any data I could lose, I've just formatted the HDD and done a clean xp install.
> 
> ...



this happened to my GF's laptop drive run spin right6 on the drive and make it do everything it can it will take hours but it rewrights the sectores and performs HDD maintenance within reason and brethes a couple hours of life back into it..i did it on my GF's hdd and its been fine for months....she runs vista as her hdd was so damnaged xp wouldnt laod i figure its a difference in how they read the drives but as long as she doesnt install anything big her hard drive works fine.

here you go its in zip format but when you unpack it its an iso burn it to a disk and ur fine.


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