Unable to access partition - failing hard disk?

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sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I have an old Seagate 160 GB hard disk drive (8 years old may be) which was in my old desktop. I had it connected to the new desktop with the intention of copying data from it. I was waiting for some free time to do so.

But yesterday while I was working on something else on the desktop, Windows suddenly told me that there were errors with the Windows partition on that drive (I have 2 other partitions for data and also 2 other partitions containing Linux) and needed a reboot to scan. I did a reboot and the scan took more than 15 minutes and told me there was some error. I booted back into Windows and that particular partition was simply inaccessible. I could copy data off the other 2 partitions into a new hard disk.

I have tried TestDisk and it says there is a mismatch in the number of sectors with NTFS saying it is 144 and HDD saying 255. It is a 40 GB partition.

Ran Crystal Disk Info and it is showing these 3 lines with yellow warning. It looks like this hard disk is failing, right? What should I do next? Is it worth trying a full low level format to see if the bad sectors can be excluded and good parts of the disk used?
Crystal Disk Info report 160 GB HDD.png
 
OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I went to Seagate and downloaded their SeaTools program. It says the drive passes SMART check!
It also passed a Short Drive Test.
And it also passed Short Generic Test.

There is a Fix All option available but I do not want to proceed until I hear from you.
 
patkim

patkim

Cyborg Agent
Since the Normalized Value has not yet fallen the drive may as well pass the SMART test and third party apps shall show Caution status. If data is important & data recovery is your priority, try third party data & partition recovery apps on the damaged partition.

Seagate sets Threshold value of certain critical parameters Pending Sector to 0 which may not be ideal case.
SeaTools also offers Long Test. It might take a few hours though. Be careful it might be Destructive in nature so proceed with care.

Later after data recovery attempts, you can also explore MHDD free app for disk level checking and attempting bad sector recovery.

Personally I have used my Caution status HDD (That developed a few bad sectors just like yours) for another 2 years as a secondary disk. In my experience and opinion, come what may an HDD is always unreliable be it a brand new or one with a few bad sectors. If no more bad sectors develop over a period of time you may use the disk for optional things like holding non critical data.

Certain apps like HDD Regenerator (Demo version) can show the sector level location of the bad sectors on a rectangular progress bar scale. You can use that info and try to carefully re-partition the disk, preferably GPT Partition Scheme and experiment with it (apps like Minitool Partition) to isolate bad sectors in un-partitioned space eventually.
 
OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I had the Long Test running already. It showed error and asked that I try the SeaTools for DOS to attempt further recovery/scanning. But the DOS version is unable to locate any of my harddisks. (probably not used to GPT system or EFI firmware)

I deleted that partition, did a new one in the same place and ran CHKDSK (detailed) again. No problem is seen so far. But I am not going to store any important data on it anyway.

Thank you.
 
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