I dropped my laptop. SMART says there are bad sectors. Can I fix this?

Solution 1:

Check the badblocks command from the Linux command line. Refer to the man page for detailed information: man badblocks.

As an example, I run /sbin/badblocks /dev/sda on a monthly basis to find problems. I never had to use this tool to actually fix bad sectors, thats why I have to point you to the man page.

BTW: You cannot fix the NTFS filesystem from Linux, you need Windows for that. Yuo can however check the disk for bad blocks as described and it can do some relocation of bad sectors (which doesn't affect the filesystem).

Solution 2:

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badblockhowto.html#sdisk

See the section on bad block reassignment. You can repair this at the filesystem level, or the block level, seeing that you have multiple filesystems, and one is non-native, I would recommend the later. You can run badblocks and pipe the output to sg_reassign.

Backup any critical data before continuing.