I have a WD hard disk (1 TB additional drive to my PC). For the last 10 days, surprisingly its accessing speed plunged. I thought something wrong with my PC first. Later on, I realized that I may be victim of bad sectors.

I used "Advanced system manager" to scan the disk which confirmed bad sectors on my disk. But it stuck on J: after 58%. I tried 2 times. It fixed bad sectors of H:, and I: was free from bad sectors. [I left the PC for processing at least for 16 -18 hours]

Now my PC started to work properly. But since i was worrying about my data, I tried widows disk scan utility who stuck again. [I left the PC for processing at least for 10 -12 hours]

Next time I tried "HDD Regenerator" who found 22 bad sectors. But it failed to repair same in windows mode. And since its bootable USB was not working, so I failed reparing at the time of system startup.

This time I tried programs from "Hiren Boot CD". One of the tool stuck after 58% done. I tried "WD diagnostic tool" who found errors on my drive and returned **007** response code. It recovery tool failed with response code **225** (as I remembered). So this time I again tried "HDD regenerator". Till 58% It was running fine and found around 34 bad sectors. He regenerated them too. But now onwards it is regularly finding bad sectors and regenerating sectors which is making me afraid.

Now my questions are;

1. Whether scanning a HDD continuously for bad sectors can increase them?
2. If a software find bad sectors and repair them then whether another application again report same bad sectors?
3. Whether I must replace my hard disk.
4. If I cut/copy data from this disk to new one, whether the bad sectors can be copied to. (It might look a stupid question, but I am able to backup smoothly. So I am doubtful)
5. If a HDD gets bad sector (even if very less number of bad sectors) then the chance of HDD crash gets increased?