Computer Help and Support

I had this happen to me on one of my Linux machines. The drives keep a certain amount of "extra" space in case certain parts of the disk become unreadable. In many cases, it can reconstruct the data, but it will move the data to another section, then mark the old one as bad.

If you get near the end of the "spare" space, then you might get a warning like this.

If your drive is relatively new, you might want to pursue a warranty replacement. If it's relatively old, it might be better just to replace it. In any event, it's probably worth someone taking a serious look at it.

There are apparently some ways of forcing the drive to reset the spare sectors value, but I didn't feel it was worth the risk. I just bought a new drive.