One of my Segate SATA HDD had developed bad sectors, windows was having hard time reading the drive and system hanged randomly

I formatted drive today after many months and it seems to be working perfectly fine, I have installed a fresh copy of windows over it without any problems

I want to ask that is the drive safe for useage now? can I trust it with my data or can it again at anytime start having the same problems?

hello ide,

You could run checkdisk. Open command prompt and type chkdsk /r this should fix errors on disk. Bad sectors should then be ignored and not used.

No hard drive is perfect. That is why hard drive manufactures create sector lists and OS uses defrag to move your data around bad sectors. This is a constant tuning for these hard drive manufactures to get it right. It is same as for cars; we get a lot of recalls. As much as many people experiencing this very problem, many others never do. When buying, do research on the hard drives you are buying.

Hi
this is an update to the 1st post

The hard drive in question was again acting up, PC hanging , disk read problems, long boot times

So I had to again install winodws, I did a full format during the install

and for the time being it is working, I did a scan of disk with HD tune software and it found error with one LBA in the disk

Now my question is

Should I stop using the disk ? will it again hang and crash my PC?

I suggest you get a new hard disk.

It might start losing a sector a month, and before you know it, several sectors a week.
How long before that wipes out something important, rather than the couple of hours it takes to reinstall the OS?

Error rates for disks seldom improve over time.

I had also bought a new WD250 GB disk
That is also having problems :(

I ran a check on it and there are 10 bad LBAs in it (although I have not formatted it since long)

What do you think could have caused problems with 2 disks in a short interval of time ?

any help :(

Do you have a CRT monitor? Is it near your machine? Do you degauss it often (though a lot of them auto-degauss).

Do you have a decent power supply in your machine (name brand, well within spec), or some cheap and poorly regulated PoS operating near the limits of its capacity?

When you power down the machine, is the disk still active when windows exits?

Use a compass, and go though your machine to see if there is anything with a really strong magnetic field. Leave it in sight to see if there are any sudden fluctuations in the immediate vicinity.

What about your mains electric supply, is that nice and clean?
Do you have "everything" hanging off one extension? Are there things like sub-stations or industrial sites close by? What about other heavy power users which might switch on/off at irregular intervals.
Things like this can cause havoc with the mains supply, and if you've got a poor PSU, then these get inside your machine and do no good at all. A UPS could smooth out a lot of the crud.

Thanks
I guess, you are right, the powers from mains has been really unstable and fluctuating, so it might be the reason

The PSU is also just average, not very special

please check your disk by command line "chkdsk /f " and repair the bad sector. I hope it is useful to you.

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