HDD SMART: What happen when i read or write from the Pending sector?

P

postcd

Member
Hello,

what are scenarios on what can happen when you

A) read from sector that is suspected to be bad (is within SMART's "Current pending sector count")
B) write to the above mentioned sector

I just did non-quick format of the drive, took several hours and these pending sectors was marked bad (offline uncorrectable), but im curious if full format is needed, if i can just use drive and what will be errors in MS Windows when i try to read/write to such pending sectors.

Are there any tools (which exactly) that can be much quicker (than full format) to find pending sectors and try to read or write to them in order to get them reallocated?

Thx
 
A pending sector is one that's suspected to be bad because it took too long to read. During idle times the HDD itself will try to read the sector and possibly mark it as good if it was just a one time fluke reading it. Or, if it's still slow reading it'll re-map it to another good sector along with moving the data (if it can be read). The computer OS is completely unrelated to this process and will continue to work just as if nothing happened. Formatting is completely unnecessary as it won't do anything to change what's happened with the drive. It is all handled within the drive's own firmware. If the OS requests the old LBA of the bad sector it'll now read a totally different physical sector on the drive platter.

That having been said, a drive which is developing bad sectors like yours belongs in the trash. You should backup/transfer your data and replace it right away. It'll only continue to get more and more until it fails completely.
 
When i try to overwrite file that is stored on pending sector, there is some error on Windows? or it went thru, but part of the file's data are stored in sector that is located somewhere else on the HDD platter, because pending sector usually gets marked "offline uncorrectable"?

And when i try to read file which part is stored on the pending sector, then i get some error in Windows but usually sector is kept to be marked "Pending" because it is said HDD will try multiple/unlimited times to read sector?
 
Can I ask what exactly you're trying to accomplish here? If your trying to recover data then you're going about it all wrong. If you don't need data, then the only thing you should be doing with a drive in that condition is to throw it away.
 
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