📎 AI Summary:
The original poster describes experiencing data loss and testing their new 3TB external hard drive, which shows a single bad block. They ask whether reformatting and copying data back will make the drive reliable again, believing that modern drives exclude bad blocks from use. A responder questions the assumption that the bad block caused data loss and advises running disk error checking tools like chkdsk /r to mark the bad sector as unavailable, suggesting this as a proper way to handle potential disk issues.
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pstein

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Thread Author #1
Assume I have a rather new external (Toshiba) 3TB USB harddisk.

During the last days I experienced a data loss because one of the data blocks on the hard disk seems to get damaged.

I run a surface test with one of these hardidsk management tools like Minitool Partition Wizard.

It shows exactly ONE bad block on the hard disk (see attached snapshot).

So if I backup the current stuff to another hard disk, then re-format the hard disk and finally re-transfer the data files on the hard disk in focus: Can I continue to use this hard disk without problems?

I have heard that new hard disks are smart enough to exclude such error blocks from their internal table of free available blocks.
So if I later copy some files onto it then the files will NEVER be copied to the bad block.
It will be completely invisible in the future.

Is this correct?

Thank you
Peter
 

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Digerati
pstein said:
During the last days I experienced a data loss because one of the data blocks on the hard disk seems to get damaged.
Click to expand...
How do you know this is the reason you are losing data? Your system should not be saving data to that block in the first place. If it tries, you should be getting a write error.

I recommend you run Error Checking on the drive or chkdsk /r from a command prompt. When prompted to let it run at next boot, allow that, then reboot. If it finds bad sectors, they will be blocked as unavailable.
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Digerati

Digerati

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#2
pstein said:
During the last days I experienced a data loss because one of the data blocks on the hard disk seems to get damaged.
Click to expand...
How do you know this is the reason you are losing data? Your system should not be saving data to that block in the first place. If it tries, you should be getting a write error.

I recommend you run Error Checking on the drive or chkdsk /r from a command prompt. When prompted to let it run at next boot, allow that, then reboot. If it finds bad sectors, they will be blocked as unavailable.
 

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