Apparent hardware failure on HP s5-1114 desktop

Mechanical drives and flying heads.... when any diag finds and fixes bad sectors, the drive is failing. The coating on the discs might be scratched and that leads to more head crashes (bad sectors).

The perfomance of the drive degrades as the heads seek a place to read or write the data making multiple attempts to read.

I've had drives in service for a while after moving bad sectors. Did I trust them - nope. I knew it was only a matter of time before the performance or reliability made the drive more trouble than it was worth - chkdsk continually moved the bad sectors. I replaced the drive(s) when I could afford it.

But that was on my machine having a few years of experience with HD.

Since this isn't your machine and you have the replacement HD, I'd leave the original HD out of the equation. I wouldn't think about using the original HD as a secondary, because of possible future problems. You've been though enough stress on this project. :)

Glad you made it through all of this Greg. The next one will be easier

gregrocker said:

Isn't it a rule of thumb that even if drive diagnostics claims it repairs sectors that the drive is not to be trusted again?

Thanks Bill and Bob.

Read the Manual for HDFT and it doesn't even work for Intel controllers, must load a controller for any other. I spoke with Usasma who has it in his HD Diagnostic tutorial we link here and he doesn't use it any longer, uses Seatools or WD Diagnostics including their repair function if offered. But I had to run WD tool from Hirens since it hasn't been available for years now either.

WD Data Lifeguard bootable offered repair here and then was unable to complete, maybe because it isn't their drive.

Seatools doesn't see it. I'll try another bootable HD test from Hirens just to see what the prob is, then swap in the new drive.

Britton30 said:

This changed the Disk to Good after moving those sliders to the left. Not enough?

Running Disk Check now, trying to find another scan so I can get a definitive diagnosis. Would at least like to know for sure. HD Tune or Spinrite best?

gregrocker said:

This changed the Disk to Good after moving those sliders to the left. Not enough?

Running Disk Check now, trying to find another scan so I can get a definitive diagnosis. Would at least like to know for sure. HD Tune or Spinrite best?

It shows the HDD is not all garbage yet, but it could run just fine for 2 years or fail in the next two minutes.
I'm not real familiar with Spinrite, but those who have used say it works wonders. IT is time consuming as it has to find bad sectors, see if the data in them is readable, write it to a good sector and mark the bad ones as unusable so no more write attempts are made. It may be interesting to see how the HP Diag tool see the drive since Crystal Disk was run on it.

As I understand it all rotating HDDs have bad sectors, even when new. The controllers on the drives now can bypass them without one having to do it manually. More can become bad with use though, which I assume is beyond the controller's ability.

Good is good. The thresholds at 0 tell S.M.A.R.T. to ignore the thresholds.

Not much else you can do to change S.M.A.R.T.

WD Lifegaurd - failed not because of the drive mfgr, for some other reason unknown.

It's odd that Seatools doesn't see the drive at all. I've had some better luck with
SeaTools for DOS | Seagate

Spinrite video - Gibson explains it himself

https://www.grc.com/sr/whatitdoes.htm

I have tried Seatools and it won't see any drives, and one is a Seagate. I've tried both bootable and Windows version.