HDD SMART: What happen when i read or write from the Pending sector?

[postcd]

Hello,

what are scenarios on what can happen when you

A) read from sector that is suspected to be bad (is within SMART's "Current pending sector count")
B) write to the above mentioned sector

I just did non-quick format of the drive in MS Windows, took several hours and these pending sectors was marked bad (offline uncorrectable), but im curious if full format is needed, if i can just use drive and what will be errors in MS Windows when i try to read/write to such pending sectors.

Are there any tools (which exactly) that can be much quicker (than full format) to find pending sectors and try to read or write to them in order to get them reallocated?

Thx

 

[lhuser]

To be honest, I'd run the manufacturer's diagnostics for your hard drive. This could fix it, but may not as well. A full format probably won't do much, but there is a program that I use called HDAT2, which has an option to write all sectors and verify them as well. It's a read/write/read to each sector.

It'll take a lot more time, but I've "rebuilt" drives like these. Some machines are using these rebuilt drives with data in it (with a backup of course) and they never had issues since.

 

[postcd]

I think non-quick format in MS Windows does same job like HDAT - writing to the hdd so pending sectors gets reallocated? In my case when looking on the SMART, pending sectors (23) was zeroed as a result and offline uncorrectable and reallocated stayed at same values like before MS Win. full HDD format...
Is that bad that offline uncorrectable was not moved to reallocated? because i see i have 140 reallocated and only 23 offline so it should fit into 200 reallocated