I have a Windows 10 drive with 4 pending sectors according to SMART. Assuming this thing isn’t on death’s door, is there anyway to force the drive to go ahead and reallocate the sectors without reformatting? I understand a ‘full format’ is the preferred way to fix this problem, but I don’t have an external drive with enough space to hold all the files on this internal one.
Hmm, have you tried reading the whole drive with something like dd?
No, but I’ll certainly give it a try. It’ll probably take several hours on a 2TB 5400RPM drive though.
Any other suggestions before I sacrifice a day of my life to dd?
Remove your stuff off that drive because it’s probably on it’s way out, even if it works after this, its likely things won’t be stable inside an OS.
I wouldn’t attempt anything outside a reformat (I mean, I wouldn’t format a drive like this cause it’s probably not worth using after this) in terms of getting the drive to work again.
Moving data around sectors (especially for an OS) is probably going to cause some issues. Personally I think it’s more hassle than it’s worth. I would just replace it, lots of 2-4TB drives are going on sale
I didn’t have a 2TB drive handy, so I cloned the drive to a 2TB (2x1TB) RAID 0 array. (I know I’m living dangerously, but that’ll have to do until I can move some stuff around or buy a 2+ TB drive.) I used a Windows utility (EaseUS) because I didn’t have faith in my ability to recreate the Windows boot environment with dd. And the RAID array was ever so slightly larger than the original 2TB disk…
Aren’t sectors only fixed on writes?
So I guess you can gamble and defrag the crap out of it.