Drives automatically stop using bad sectors. It can be a sign that the drive is about to fail, so be sure anything important is backed up immediately.

Yep, bad sectors are the start of what could end be catastrophic failure.  That said, I've got drives with bad sectors on them that are still going 7 years later.  Remove all important data and store it safely, put that drive on rubbish collection with easily collectable stuff like movies/internet pictures and store all your important media on a shiny new drive.  They're so cheap now, the eternal regret isn't worth it.

A cheap & easy remedy (not all bad sector reports are hardware damage) is to back-up data, then run disk repair and defragmentation ... quite often that clears the problem up.

Run a scan disk/check disk with the option "attempt recovery of bad sectors option.

Keep a backup of your data, or replace the drive if possible.

If you dont care about data or drive reliability, then try the 'fixes' above

If data, windows reliability & drive reliabilty does matter , then replace the drive. Allways .

DO NOT defrag that drive: worst advice ever !!!!!! you may move data to bad parts of the drive, seen it happen.

1101:

 

If you dont care about data or drive reliability, then try the 'fixes' above

 

If data, windows reliability & drive reliabilty does matter , then replace the drive. Allways .

 

DO NOT defrag that drive: worst advice ever !!!!!! you may move data to bad parts of the drive, seen it happen.

 

You really havent seen it happen. Or if you did it was in the late 80s or early 90s

A SINGLE reallocated sector isn't anything to be particularly worried about. For instances its not even enough to get a drive replace under warranty. Now if that count starts to increase then maybe you have an issue. but a single error? no

Check the Current Pending Sector Count and Reallocated Sector Count if either of them are incrementing  regularly then you have a problem. But with a single write error you dont have even close to enough information to decide a disk i dying.

As for the OP, if its marked as bad then its already been reallocated. The Current Pending Sector Count shows you how many sectors have had read errors but no write failures.

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You really havent seen it happen.

Yes I have, at least I saw the results . Defrag on a bad drive .
Why would you assume there was only a single bad sector ?

again, defrag could move data to part of the drive that possible cannot read afterwards

1101:

 

 

 

Yes I have, at least I saw the results . Defrag on a bad drive .
Why would you assume there was only a single bad sector ?

 

Well because bad/reallocated sectors are really common in hard drives... to the point where its not uncommon for drives to be shipped with a certain number of already reallocated sectors on it. Like i said in my post, the fact that there is a single write error on a sector isn't the end of the world. In context it could show an issue, but it by itself isn't.

For instance, its standard practice in the storage industry to check and re-initalise RMA returns and if they still fit within manufacturers specs for reallocated sectors then they are re-shipped as replacements.

1101:

 

again, defrag could move data to part of the drive that possible cannot read afterwards

 

It doesn't work that way. Drive firmware these days does a form of write verification, if that fails the write isn't committed and its re-tried. In the case where a block is known bad, (from not being able to be read from before) it gets reallocated (i.e. remapped to a good sector in the reserved section of the disk) If its not known bad it goes into the Pending Sector queue which then if it fails a write, it is reallocated.

That's not to say its write corruption is impossible to happen, but it would take a lot of effort with a drive that's showing way more problems than a reallocated sector to happen in the way you're describing