WD C.Blue SMART Bad - Reallocated Sector Count.

Hello peep of OCF how are you doing?

Ill just go on and tell you about this HDD, I bought this 500gb Western Digital Caviar Blue over two years ago by second hand from a friend without too much use apparently, and i had it as a master drive and it never gave me any type of problem until last year, when it started to give me a SMART Status Bad warning, telling me to backup and replace (which i did), so i took it and never touched it again, til today in my boredom...

So, as i said, its giving me a S.M.A.R.T Status Bad problem, i know its like an "about to fail" type of warning, so i proceeded to turn off the SMART from the BIOS and Boot from it.

Running Windows 7 (where im writing right now) properly without any problem, but i did noticed a slow reading response when i try to "load" the partitions for the first time when it booted up (you know, that loading bar in the direction's bar at the top of the screen, but no problems now).

So i installed the WD diagnostics tools, and i find that its pointing the problem to a "Reallocated Sector Count" thing, which i have no idea whats about, but it says that its two numbers below the threshold. So im running right now the extended test.

Im kinda experimenting this drive, i hold no hope in getting it back or using it, but it would be nice to actually get it working, since it would be a great addition to try Linux distros, you know.

Which takes us -finally- to my question:
Any chances of this drive to work properly again? Is there any way to fix this "reallocation sector count" problem so i can at least have this drive working? Would LLF fix it?

I hope i didnt bother you guys, and you can help me out. Thanks beforehand for your answers and sorry for anything that might seem incoherent, i know i have a really bad english.

Cheers! Big Hug!

lautaro13 said:

Which takes us -finally- to my question:
Any chances of this drive to work properly again? Is there any way to fix this "reallocation sector count" problem so i can at least have this drive working? Would LLF fix it?

I hope i didnt bother you guys, and you can help me out. Thanks beforehand for your answers and sorry for anything that might seem incoherent, i know i have a really bad english.

Cheers! Big Hug!

Click to expand...

No, the drive is dying and you should not use it for anything. "Reallocated sectors" are sectors that have failed and the drive is using backup sectors on a different portion of the platter. Failed sectors tend to spread on the hard drive, so if it is close to the threshold, it will become un-usable very quickly. There is no way to "fix" this.

Don't worry about asking questions, this is a very helpful forum and the members are willing to help out with any problem.

So there's no way to patch it up to at least make a workaround those bad sectors to at least have half the drive working? im not interested in using its complete size, i just want, if possible, to use it to try distros, nothing really heavy, not interested in data storaging or anything.

Technically speaking, if you knew where the bad sectors were, you could partition them off. The problem is failing sectors will spread and eventually kill the drive. It really isn't a good idea using it.