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How to repair a disk drive with bad/weak sectors by offsets?

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Alone setting any offset to clear the error counter and acknowledge the problems does not help, does not REPAIR problems, does not make the drive stable. First it is required to make the status stable, repair weak sectors and force reallocation of possible bad sectors.

In general, you do not need to worry about the reported bad sectors as these are already fixed by the hard disk drive: now the disk uses the spare area instead of these bad sectors, all read and write operations are using the spare area. So there is no need to fix the reported bad sectors, as these are already fixed by the hard disk. They will not cause problems in the future and some of them completely acceptable.

However, if the hard disk drive still has weak sectors (meaning the status is not stable) further problems may be detected any time which can cause problems and data loss.

The sections of the Frequently Asked Questions page help and give details:
I have bad sectors and my disk health is 90%. Do I need to worry or ask for replacement drive?
Hard disk health is low or recently changed or I just installed a new (used) hard disk. How can I perform a deep analysis?

These describe the recommended steps to analyse the hard disks, reveal and fix any possible issues because the most important is to verify if the drive is stable - or make it stable (there should be no more, currently hidden problems).

If the drive has relatively high health, then I'd try the Disk menu -> Surface test -> Disk Repair test to attempt to stabilize specifically them. But if the health is low (eg. 50% or lower) so the amount of problems are high, I'd try use Disk menu -> Surface test -> Reinitialise Disk Surface test (after a complete backup only as this test clears all data) to fix them and improve the disk usability in general.

Ideally, after the these tests, the disk usability should improve: further tests should show no new problems. The health of the disk drive may also improve too, but the amount of bad sectors will not decrease (as they are already replaced from the spare area, they will be never re-used).

If the tests show no errors (which means the hard disk is now stable, all possible bad sectors are already re-allocated and fixed this way), it is possible to acknowledge the remaining reported problems (including the bad sectors) and remove them from the text description, restore the health to 100% as then the software will  only report future issues (if there will be).
This is described at How to repair hard disk drive? How to eliminate displayed hard disk problems?

So using the offset is only part of the picture, the important part is to reveal and fix possible problems BEFORE using the offsets.

How to repair a disk drive with bad/weak sectors by offsets?

Alone setting any offset to clear the error counter and acknowledge the problems does not help, does not REPAIR problems, does not make the drive stable. First it is required to make the status stable, repair weak sectors and force reallocation of possible bad sectors.

In general, you do not need to worry about the reported bad sectors as these are already fixed by the hard disk drive: now the disk uses the spare area instead of these bad sectors, all read and write operations are using the spare area. So there is no need to fix the reported bad sectors, as these are already fixed by the hard disk. They will not cause problems in the future and some of them completely acceptable.

However, if the hard disk drive still has weak sectors (meaning the status is not stable) further problems may be detected any time which can cause problems and data loss.

The sections of the Frequently Asked Questions page help and give details:
I have bad sectors and my disk health is 90%. Do I need to worry or ask for replacement drive?
Hard disk health is low or recently changed or I just installed a new (used) hard disk. How can I perform a deep analysis?

These describe the recommended steps to analyse the hard disks, reveal and fix any possible issues because the most important is to verify if the drive is stable - or make it stable (there should be no more, currently hidden problems).

If the drive has relatively high health, then I'd try the Disk menu -> Surface test -> Disk Repair test to attempt to stabilize specifically them. But if the health is low (eg. 50% or lower) so the amount of problems are high, I'd try use Disk menu -> Surface test -> Reinitialise Disk Surface test (after a complete backup only as this test clears all data) to fix them and improve the disk usability in general.

Ideally, after the these tests, the disk usability should improve: further tests should show no new problems. The health of the disk drive may also improve too, but the amount of bad sectors will not decrease (as they are already replaced from the spare area, they will be never re-used).

If the tests show no errors (which means the hard disk is now stable, all possible bad sectors are already re-allocated and fixed this way), it is possible to acknowledge the remaining reported problems (including the bad sectors) and remove them from the text description, restore the health to 100% as then the software will  only report future issues (if there will be).
This is described at How to repair hard disk drive? How to eliminate displayed hard disk problems?

So using the offset is only part of the picture, the important part is to reveal and fix possible problems BEFORE using the offsets.

 

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