Bad Block on my WD Raptor Hard Drive?

[Marse.robert]

Hi all,
I have 2, 111 Gb WD Raptors and a maxtor in my box. I have had the Raptors for about a year. Recently, Windows Event Viewer has informed me that one of the Raptors has a bad block.

My first thought was to return the disk under warranty. That particular HD, however, only had a couple of backups and was hardly used. So a bad block was totally unexpected.

Dskchk revealed no problems as did Norton Disk Doctor. I have used three 3rd Party disk monitors and all three tell me no problems.

Has anyone else had the same experience with Microsoft Event Viewer? Also, has anyone got futher ideas to check this disk?

 

[_kC_]

Re: WD Raptor

run western digital DLG (diagnostics) availiable from their site http://support.wdc.com/dlg/

id back up the data first though, as if it wants to fix the bad sector, dlg usually wipes the drive to fix it. (unlike powermax/seatools)

(it does give you the option if you want it to fix it or not, if you select no, your data isnt affected)
so maybe run the test just to see if there is an error, if there is, reboot, back up your data.. then do the test again

 

[LeeJend]

Re: WD Raptor

Make sure SMART is turned on in bios before running the WD DLG. Modern HD's have built in prognostics (predicitive diagnostics for imminent failures) and are very accurate. If it says it's getting sickly beleive it.

 

[madmatt]

Thread title modified.

Please be more specific with your thread titles.

WDC Raptor hard drives previously came in 74GB and now 150GB. Also, something you may or may not know, WDC (like most companies) will issue you a refurbished/recertified replacement as a replacement.

 

[Geffy]

Once you've enabled SMART you can take a peak at it using http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ (scroll down to find Windows NSIS installer)

 

[X-Istence]

WDC, Seagate, Maxtor all have warranties. 3, 5, and 5 years respectively if I remember correctly.

If you are seeing bad blocks in Windows, something is seriously wrong, since the hard drive's SMART chip will reallocate blocks to other sections of the hard drive if it sees some bad ones fly by. Check out smartmontools and take a peak at the data, and find out how many re-allocated blocks it has, how many failures, and report back.