Sentinel reports low health but no problems found?

[rustyb]

I'm a little confused by this situation!

HD Sentinal reports one of my SATA disks to be on very low health (8%!) so I have ensured that everything from this drive has now been safely backed up.

However, I have ran a number of tests on the drive and no problems are found.

I have ran:
Short Self-Test - no problems.
Extended Self-Test - no problems.
Read Test - no problems.

Out of interest I have also tested the disk using the disk manager of Windows 7 and this found no bad sectors either.

However, HD Sentinal still reports very low health for the disk and states it currently has 963 bad sectors!

Does anyone know why it is reporting low health but I cannot find any problems when testing the disk??

[hdsentinel]

Please click on the "?" button next to the text description.

This will describe the situation properly: your hard disk has bad sectors but they are already fixed. This means that the drive no longer uses the bad sectors but uses the spare area instead: all further reads and writes are accessing the spare area.

Then the tests can be used to verify if the drive status is stable or not (if there are further problems which may affect the stored information).

If the tests do not report errors, it means that the drive status is stable. In this situation you can acknowledge the errors to prevent them to be displayed again (thus restoring the displayed health and clearing the reported errors from the text description). Then the software will notify only for any possible new problems.

[rustyb]

Thanks a lot for your very quick reply!

I have now offset both of the following lines by -963 to clear the errors:
5 Reallocated Sectors Count
196 Reallocation Event Count

I will continue to monitor this disk and if the bad sectors continue to increase I will reinitialize the disk surface to see if this fixes the problem permanently.

[hdsentinel]

I completely agree with one note: the "reinitialize the disk surface" test will not clear these problems as they cannot be removed by any means. However, it may increase the usage of the disk by verifying the complete surface and forcing the reallocation of sectors if required.