HGST 500g failure warning

Tezzanet

New member
hi guys and gals,
new to this forum but have been in computer repairs for over 40 years.
i have an HGST z5k500-500 HTS545050a7e680 hard drive that came from my laptop, due to windows saying its about to fail and wouldnt let me reinstall windows 10 to it.
Why i had to reinstall windows is another story. (THANKS MICROSOFT)
suffice to say i have tested the drive on my linux machine data is still there but the drive shows red in the smart data reader, it has 1 unrecoverable error and linux says drive is likely to fail soon.
smart data and self test reports all ok except for reallocated sector count 1 with failing after it, and seek error rate which is VERY high 38600723 also with failing after it. on time for the drive is 1 year 11 months and 7 days and says old age.
is there any way i can get the drive to be usable again?
 

pclab

Moderator
Why don't you replace it under warranty?
In my country we have 2 years (don't know yours), but if the SMART says to you to replace, you should do it.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Keep in mind that SMART values (not the RAW values) are a countdown to failure. So if it's showing 1, it probably counted down from 100 or some other number they started at. So, it's likely that it's exceeded the maximum amount they suspect should ever develop during normal operation and is definitely on its way out.

In my opinion, any amount of bad sectors developing is reason enough to toss the drive out. Or sell it on ebay as a parts drive for data recovery.
 

Tezzanet

New member
well it looks like i have to tell the whole story,
the drive was behaving absolutely perfectly before the march 9th windows update, no errors no nothing, it crashed during that update there was an error screen came up for 3 seconds before it rebooted, after which it went into "automatic repair mode" and stayed doing its automatic repair for over a month before i finally got it out of the loop, after i got access to the machine again the drive was in this state.
the windows update hade wiped my restore points during it "automatic repair, i tried every "remedy" i could find on the internet after exhausting everything i knew after over 40 years "in the game of repairs/troubleshooting", NOTHING worked, i then tried an "in place upgrade" but it wouldnt do that cos it has to boot into windows safemode at least, so i tried a complete re-install and thats when windows said the drive is about to fail and exited the installer.
this being the whole reference to (THANKS MICROSOFT) in the first message.
there was NOTHING wrong with the drive before that crash and windows "AUTOMATIC repair"
 

pclab

Moderator
Maybe the upgrade/update failed because the drive have problems.
Imagine that the the update files couldn't be written into the HDD. That would cause the system to crash.
 
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