My hard drive might be dying. I need to verify

[carnageX]

I hope this isn't being rude, but if his drive has a few bad sectors, could he attempt to zero fill his whole hdd ?
Sure it may not do much at all, but it might give him a shortt amount of time to get his new hdd very soon.

I think one of the old western digital format tools may work or seagate tools.
If the utility makes a determination midwat through scanning or filling the drive and says it will fail, there is nothing more he can do.

If I were him, I would put that 89.99 towards a new 500gb, the prices for the hdds are bouncing up and down so he may find one on sale towards graduation month.

Zero filling a drive wouldn't do any good... It would still only zero-fill good sectors. Spinrite doesn't "fill" all the bits, it flips each individual bit to see if it is good and/or recoverable. Even then, truly bad sectors can never be good again. Bad sectors are a physical defect on a hard drive and are not recoverable. Spinrite marks these sectors as unusable forever, on the drive level. Windows chkdsk /f /r does something similar, but not on as deep of a level as Spinrite, IIRC.

IMO, Spinrite is only worth it if you're in IT and do work on a lot of computers, where you can actually cover the cost of the software. For an end-user, if there's bad sectors on a HDD, it's best to back it up, and just warranty the HDD.

 

[jtfunkymojo]

I've done the WD Test and no errors show up. SMART hasn't been tripped either.

 

[carnageX]

Try running a chkdsk /f /r on the drive then, as I stated earlier.

 

[jtfunkymojo]

Try running a chkdsk /f /r on the drive then, as I stated earlier.

I'm running it, but this is what I have already. It doesn't look normal...

View attachment 5253
View attachment 5252

 

[carnageX]

Those corrections are good; it's what chkdsk was designed to fix.

Any performance increase or change after you ran chkdsk?

 

[-RockMan-]

Those corrections are good; it's what chkdsk was designed to fix.

Any performance increase or change after you ran chkdsk?

I'm looking at his screenshot and it looks about normal.
He could give his computer a good defrag and cleanup and check his tempatures on the drives.
If its peeking near 60 and has a yellow mark by it, the utility maybe trying to him it will give out soon.
Time will tell tell when windows ask him to abort the ship and go elsewhere.

Its funny how ms will tell you in few short words to give up on somethings.

Also carnage thanks for your comment, but the reason why I wanted him to try to zero fill it, is to delay the process of the hdd giving way.
Also for whatever tools he may use, for it, to move around the bad sectors and let him use whatever good sector bytes he may have to run a normal os.

 

[carnageX]

Windows 7 runs defrag automatically in the background (or at certain scheduled times); not really an issue to run defrags like in the old days.

And Zero filling a drive won't really "prolong" a drive's life; zero-filling only writes over data/free space so that files cannot be recovered. It wouldn't mark anything in SMART to ignore certain sectors that are marked as bad. Running a chkdsk /f /r or Spinrite will do this, however.

 

[jtfunkymojo]

The performance did not improve and I'm still copying files at the rate of Kilobytes.
I do defrag once every week or so and my drive is at 31C. (Caviar Green are supposed to be low temp/power)

A few minutes after booting, however, I got the black screen of death and my drive indicator light went completely off.

Also, I should add that it does large transfers (>50MB) slowly (<1MB/s), while smaller transfers seem to run at regular speeds, which means that it can still burst.

 

[carnageX]

If you can get back into Windows, check the Event Viewer to see if there's anything mentioned about the HDD, bad sectors, or SMART tripping.

If you can't get into Windows... then I would try booting into a Linux LiveCD, and checking on the drive from there. Usually Ubuntu will say if the drive is failing, or if SMART is reporting something bad about the drive. I'd try to backup your files off of it as well, and probably just warranty the drive (if it's still under warranty).

 

[jtfunkymojo]

If you can get back into Windows, check the Event Viewer to see if there's anything mentioned about the HDD, bad sectors, or SMART tripping.

If you can't get into Windows... then I would try booting into a Linux LiveCD, and checking on the drive from there. Usually Ubuntu will say if the drive is failing, or if SMART is reporting something bad about the drive. I'd try to backup your files off of it as well, and probably just warranty the drive (if it's still under warranty).

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3\DR5."
"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\DR5 during a paging operation."



Also, this
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