Hdsentinel freezing during read test.

[Thedarchives]

I have just replaced my hard drive in January 2013 after having bought my dell in 2011. Now this new hardrive is acting weird and Hdsentinel is reporting 2 weak sectors. As per the forums, I started to run a disk-surface test-read test and the test have frozen 41 seconds into the diagnostic. It has happened twice. Currently I am in safe mode. All my data is backed up, I would be willing to do the reinitialisation program as long as it doesn't destroy my OS. I do not have another windows cd to boot from. Thanks for the help.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message.

In general, not really HDSentinel freezing ... but the hard disk is freezing when any kind of disk operation wants to access the problematic area. As you can see, this happens during the testing performed by Hard Disk Sentinel - but this would happen any time when any other software (or a simply copy/move operation) would try to access that particular sector.
Hard Disk Sentinel tries to force the drive to re-examine the status of the problematic sector and re-allocate if required. During this procedure the software (or even the whole system) may seem freeze for some time.

Currently if the Read test does not help, I'm afraid the Disk -> Surface Test -> Reinitialise Disk Surface would be the best option to fix the problems. But yes, this may require a complete backup and perform the test by booting from a different OS, for example by
- putting the drive as secondary drive in an other system
- use Windows Live CD/pendrive with Hard Disk Sentinel Pro Portable to perform the test
but only after a complete backup.

We're constantly investigating the possibilities to make the repair "easier" and with less troubles.