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These past few months I’ve been getting increasingly frequent KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR BSODs, after some Googling it seems that it could be attributed to a failing drive. So after opening CrystalDiskInfo I was greeted with a “Caution” state about having pending sectors, 100 pending sectors to be exact however no uncorrectable sectors.

No new drivers have been installed lately or even before the BSODs started, I ran chkdsk /f which found no errors.

BlueScreenView shows nothing because for some reason I don’t have minidumps; possibly removed or renamed in Windows 8?

I’ll be monitoring the pending sectors every day in case it starts to increase, I’ve backed up all of my important data just in case the drive fails any time soon.

So what is happening? How can I fix or mitigate it? And is my drive on the verge of going to drive heaven?

Prime
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  • A 100 pending sectors is a lot. Those are sectors that the HDD cannot read and are waiting to be reallocated. Basically this drive is starting to develop bad sectors. Bad sectors appear when the platter surface is damaged or worn out and are essentially a physical fault on the platter. Unfortunately there is no software that can fix hardware faults, so any tool you try to use will either have no effect or will improve the situation, but only temporary. Unfortunately the drive is already on the way to HDD heaven. – Techpumpkin_WD Apr 23 '15 at 12:36

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So what is happening? How can I fix or mitigate it? And is my drive on the verge of going to drive heaven?

Your drive is dying and will end up in “drive heaven.” Simple as that. The best and only thing you can do is to get a new drive as a replacement and clone or reinstall your system onto the new drive.

I mention cloning since that might seem like the simplest/quickest thing to do, but if your drive has an increasing level of pending sectors I would not trust a straight clone of data from the failing drive to a new drive. I would instead recommend backing up all important data off of the drive, install the new drive, clean install Windows 8 and then copy over your important data to the new system.

And as a postscript, when you get the new drive setup be sure to see if you are still able to wipe the old drive to protect your data. There’s a 50/50 chance you will still be able to mount and write to the drive in a way you can truly wipe the system. But if it’s so near death it chokes, might as well just physically destroy the drive when all is said and done.

Giacomo1968
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  • That would make sense, it's been under some intense heat in its time, to be honest I was more worried about my CPU exploding. To what degree must I physically destroy the drive to prevent any sensitive information from being read? I would imagine the best way would be to open the drive and drag a magnet across the platters. – Prime Apr 22 '15 at 04:32
  • @AlphaDelta The whole topic of data destruction is not really a part of the question and [covered extensively elsewhere](http://superuser.com/questions/343198/destroy-a-hard-drive-without-proper-equipment). My recommendation is to first see if you can logically wipe it clean after you get the new drive setup. Honestly, wiping the drive with zeros should be 100% fine. And if that is too time consuming—or the drive won’t mount or behave—open it up, and smash the platters with a hammer and toss it in the e-recycling pile. – Giacomo1968 Apr 22 '15 at 04:41