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#11
First of all, it's not my judgment call to make but I laud your conscientiousness in creating backups. How many times does one read plaintive entreaties from users whose data is corrupt or lost and they want to know how to get it back. A religiously followed backup plan is essential - if only for peace of mind.
Based on the information you already have and, using probability as the operating premise, I think it less probable that the HDD is mechanically unsound. It may be but less probably.
Secondly, bad clusters or sectors, if you will, are common but I, personally, do not regard them as normal. I cannot remember the last time I had a HDD that reported bad clusters; perhaps I upgrade my HDDs before that happens. Basically, bad sectors are those that, for a number of reasons have lost or are losing their magnetism. As a consequence, read-write errors ensue or are introduced. Practically speaking, it is reasonable to consider that data in such clusters is corrupt and may or may not, in part, be recoverable.
All that said, one possible reason for bad clusters is a bad drive. Bad how? Manufacturing defect, heads slammed into the magnetic medium, and sudden loss of power during write operations. If the issue is one of physical damage to the magnetic medium or, otherwise, corrupt files/structure, then a full format will eliminate the issue (1) by wiping the corrupt data or (2) by marking the sectors as "bad" in the FAT and they will, thus, be ignored for future use. There are many defrag apps that will give you a visual ID of bad sectors if they exist.
So how to proceed? If it were me, one who always pursues the exoteric before the esoteric (and complex), if you have a good backup, then I would reformat the HDD. As I said, that will eliminate any corrupt data or mark the sectors as bad. Regardless, the issue is solved. Then restore your backup. If the issue recurs, you know that mechanically bad sectors are not the cause (the format has, in a sense, disabled those) and the issue is either corrupt files/structure or a bad HDD (again, the lowest on my list of probabilities).
Regarding space: my suggestion would be to add a third or second larger HDD (1) because storage is very inexpensive these days and (2) you experience better performance if the disk is not so full; seek times are also reduced if heads on one HDD are not doing all of the seeking. I cannot tell from the error message but it suggests that there are so many bad sectors (much data) that there is not enough space remaining on the drive(s) to write the recovered files.
Me, if I have a reliable backup: reformat. (First copy data on the HDD that was created after your backup to your other HDD.) This attempts to ID the issue by a process of elimination because if the HDD is good and your files are corrupt, the restored files on the replacement HDD will recreate the issue.
If your reformattted HDD shows bad sectors, get a new HDD. Why? Magnetically bad sectors tend to, sooner than later, spread out to adjacent areas of the platter.
Monk
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