I got pretty new Toshiba 500GB HDD as 2nd HDD(just for data) in my ThinkPad T400. Seller told me, that he just replaced this HDD with SSD in his new laptop.
After about month of using I tested this HDD with HDTune an I was unpleasantly surprised. It has 2 bad sectors.
After some time of using i faced problems with playing some films on this HDD, one game crashes sometimes, etc.
So I tried chkdsk /r. But it stucked. It said that there is not enough space to remap. But I have 360GB free and just 140GB used.
Than I get soft called HDD Regenerator. It wants to set compatibility IDE mode. So i done it in BIOS and started Regenerator from bootable USB. It was checking my disk and in about 30% it found bad sector and started to regenerate it. After some time, red color messages has been shown.
Drive is not ready!
and
Set-up **BIOS** to compatibility IDE mode.
It is quite strange that there was set up BIOS. And it is strange that it wants to set up when it already is set up. Can it be problem in my SATA driver? I looked in device manager and there was AHCI controller.
Please give me a hint what to do and please don't everybody write that I should backup data and buy new HDD. I know it's best solution but it's not very easy to buy new HDD when you know that you got this just for about 3 months..
Best Answer
There's only so many "spares" on a drive to remap bad sectors to, and you've run out (they have nothing to do with the capacity shown for the drive, they are spare sectors specifically for remapping bad ones to).
Once you run out of spares, any future blocks that go bad will just be "bad" forever.
He sold you a failing drive (intentionally or not).