[HELP] WD Elements 1023 chkdsk issue

TVeblen said:

Well, first, it is an either/or situation. Checkdisk will either repair it so it can be used or it won't!

Regardless, a hard drive with any bad sectors is failing and on it's way out. It is only a matter of time. Weeks? Months? Who knows?

This is just your official notice to start shopping for a new drive, sorry to say. You are fortunate that you were able to backup your data easily. Many do not get that chance.

I see. Oh well WD sucks -_- its only been 10 months since I got this thing. Do you think WD will still cover this with their warranty? Tho I bought it from a shop. Hmm..

TVeblen said:

Yes! Most WD products have at least a 1 year warranty.
Take screenshots for your records. Find the telephone #. You've got a shiny new hard drive coming!

OH YES! I might just drop by the store later then :3 Tho I'm still gonna try and fix this. But I can really see it's failing, my laptop takes a few minutes before it can detect it. And before I started formatting it, it's starting to slow down my laptop.

Well, as long as they'll replace this one. I'm all good. Anyway, chkdsk finished like 30 mins ago, i think, here's what I got:

Seems like its working fine right now, but I unno how it'll act later on. Gotta keep an eye on this, or if there are any other recommendations you can give to make sure I can still use this or should I just contact WD for the warranty.

I'll prolly run the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic later today. I don't have much time to do it right now. I'll post my screenies from the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic later. Thanks again mates.

Make sure to get a screenshot of the popup window for SMART data (by clicking on Pass/Warn/Fail or whatever term it reports).

Do you only have one partition on that drive (I:)? If so, does it take up the whole disk?

You probably have bad sectors on that disk even though chkdsk reports zero. Even new, good drives can have a few bad sectors. But they design disks with spare space that the drive itself uses when it encounters bad spots, it'll mark them as bad (retires them) and swaps in spare space in their place. The OS (and chkdsk) never see this happening. That's what the drive diagnostics apps can do; report what's going on internally with the drive (the SMART data).

There is only so much spare space on any given drive to use for swapping sectors. One way you might see a drive start going out is when sectors start going "bad" at a higher than "normal" rate.

At the moment it does seem like you'll soon be making a call to WD. When you run the DLG extended test and get that "Too many bad sectors" error, does that abort the test or will it let it continue to run to completion? If it lets you continue you should allow it to do so (WD may want the final result as well).

Even if this test run fails, see what you can get out of the "View Test Results" button before you close the app. Screenshot it as WD may want it as well.

Also check the SMART screen again, making note of the following number (circled):

Will do. What numbers should I be looking for to say that its still a good drive? Or whatever comes up as a result, should I still give WD a call? 45 minutes left still.