# "Reallocated Sector Count".. What to do?



## WJohn (Mar 15, 2009)

I was feeling a bit of down grade in the older hard drive speed.

HD Tune highlighted the "Reallocated Sector Count" SMART attribute of the older 300GB hard drive. It gave me following data:

Current: 175
Worst: 175
Threshold: 140
Data: 198

After searching a bit on net I came to know that this actually shows bad sectors on the hard disk. I also learned about Zeroing the drive that it may get the values back to normal (I dont know how it does or maybe its not true). So I backup-ed my data and zeroed the drive but now when I check it in HD Tune (or any other such utility like Everest and Active Smart), it still shows the same data.

Can anyone please suggest me what should I do? The hard disk after zeroing the drive, is showing "Un Initialized State" in disk management.

Will be grateful,
John Wright.


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## raptor_pa (Dec 5, 2008)

When you zero the drive, it wipes out everything, including disk signatures from teh OS and partition table. Not much you can redo to rese the smart values. Those are a running 'total' so to speak. You will need to reinit the disk, and partition and reformat in disk management. Right click on the gray ares of the drive and pick initialize. The run something MHDD to check for bad sectors. Every drive leaves the factory with bad sectors, those are recorded in the Service area of the disk in the P-List. The drive then builds a translation table when it maps those bad sectors to other spare sectors on the disk. During normal operation, other sectors will fail, and those are marked in the SA in the G-List and added to the translation table. There is not much you can do to repair these sectors, no matter what certain software tells you. Once a sector is marked bad, it is pretty much bad, besides you probably don't want to store data in an unstable sector anyway. You can use MHDD to scan for and remap bad sectors. i would stay away from Spinrite however, it puts a very heavy load on the drive. Resetting the SMART attributes requires hardware and software that can talk to the disk at firmware level... bottom line is you could buy a couple dozen drives for the price of the gear to fix one. Best advice, try MHDD to remap the sectors, if the value keeps increasing then time to replace the disk.


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## WJohn (Mar 15, 2009)

Ok bro.. Thanks for your reply.. I think I should keep using the drive for now unless the number of reallocated sectors keep on increasing. Thanks once again :smile:


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