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#1
Is my hard drive dying?
I keep all my data on a Samsung hard disk drive. Recently when I tried to make my regular Macrium backup it failed with an error message indicating that there was a problem with the disk. I ran Crystaldisk which failed it and found 4 pending sectors. I then tried the Seagate disk tools (since Samsung hard drives have been taken over by Seagate since I bought mine) and got an error message saying disk fail, request replacement. However, it also suggested trying to zero-write the disk before returning in case that overwrote the bad sectors identified.
I've low level reformatted the disk a couple of times and wrritten zeros to the whole disk. Now neither Crystaldisk or Seagate tools can find anything wrong with the disk, and the low level formatting software I used found no bad sectors.
So is my disk fixed, or is it an expensive paperweight that's waiting to fail? For what it's worth, it's nearly three years old. WHen I bought it it came with a three year warrenty but Seagate doesn't seem to think it's covered by them any more. So despite being under warrenty I won't be able to replace it - especially if I've just gone and done something to it that has eliminated the bad sectors and made it look good again!
Incidentally as soon as I first got the Macrium message I swapped it for a good disk, so I haven't lost any data. But it would be nice to know if I should continue using it for non-intense things like non-critical data backups or not.