My old laptop has become utterly slow and unresponsive to the extent that after loading it takes a good 30-40 mins before I can even use it. It's mostly in an unresponsive state and doesn't change even if I do a hard restart. I did a SMART test and it shows my hard disk is 58% healthy.
I read somewhere on a forum that the OS or the NTFS disk itself will mark bad sectors and wouldn't write to them. So my question is, my disk is 750 GB, 58% of which is 435GB. My total data on the disk is roughly 300 GB. But I think the hard disk may still be reading/writing to those bad sectors and thus my system is not responsive. So my question is, can I do something in order to block all those bad sectors and use the left over good sectors only ? Most importantly, will it be a good idea in first place or should I just replace the old hard drive?
Note: This is an old computer and I only use it occasionally to stream movies on my tv via hdmi.
Best Answer
That is not true that a drive won't write to the bad sectors. Actually there are several aspects here:
It's true that the drive won't write to the bad sectors but it will attempt to write to the slow sectors considering them operative.
The next thing is that
ckhdsk
will never remove bad sectors, it will tell OS to ignore/skip them. During "CHKDSK /F C:
" it will detect bad sectors (as it OS sees, they may not match to the hardware bad sectors sometimes) and will try to move data from them to another place and will mark the faulty sectors as non-operative.The problem is that if the bads started to appear, their number will constantly increase. So, your actions with ckhdsk will lose their effect in some time.
You may check the real amount of bad and slow-read sectors using tools like HDDScan to scan the disk surface.
These guides might me useful: