Should I get a new hard drive at this point?

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Cooksfork

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Jul 10, 2014
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There's been some strange going ons with my hard drives, is it about time to take the old one out to pasture?

Last night, while my computer was asleep, it restarted then popped an error about not having valid disk to boot from. I noticed that the boot priority had changed so I set it to boot from my Kingston again. It worked, except once it got into Windows (windows 7 64 bit), it restarted immediately. I figured I'd try unplugging and replugging the power and SATA cables to my hard drive. It no longer restarted on entering windows, but now parts of windows have become completely unresponsive, other parts are heinously slow, taking minutes on end to load (I stopped waiting for it to finish after about 5 minutes)

Safe mode is actually sort of unresponsive too. If I try to access explorer or control panel, the OS stops responding. I can still move my mouse cursor around, but nothing else seems to happen.

I know it's still possible to fail early on, but my hard drives are only about a year old.


OS: windows 7 64-bit
hard drive (boot): Kingston hyperX 3K SH103S3
 
Solution
WyomingKnott
The first advice I will always give in this context is: boot to a backup utility and make a clone or image backup on an external drive. Save everything before it gets worse.

How many hard drives do you have in the machine? If more than one, there's always the issue to check that the boot process got spread out across drives. This will happen if you had a previous Windows installation on disk 1, added disk2, and installed the same or a later version of Windows on disk 2. The machine is actually booting from disk 1.

Some fairly simple tests after cloning the drive to a spare.
1) Boot the system with only the clone, and that attached to SATA port 1. Same issue, the problem is not your drive but something else.
2) Boot the system...
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WyomingKnott

WyomingKnott

Legenda in Aeternum
Aug 29, 2006
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The first advice I will always give in this context is: boot to a backup utility and make a clone or image backup on an external drive. Save everything before it gets worse.

How many hard drives do you have in the machine? If more than one, there's always the issue to check that the boot process got spread out across drives. This will happen if you had a previous Windows installation on disk 1, added disk2, and installed the same or a later version of Windows on disk 2. The machine is actually booting from disk 1.

Some fairly simple tests after cloning the drive to a spare.
1) Boot the system with only the clone, and that attached to SATA port 1. Same issue, the problem is not your drive but something else.
2) Boot the system with only the original drive, and that attached to SATA port 1.
3) Run manufacturer's diagnostics on the drive.

Some drives last decades, some fail in the first month. So it's a crapshoot.
 
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Solution
C

Cooksfork

Reputable
Jul 10, 2014
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4,510
Thanks for your reply, Wyoming! And sorry for the delay in mine.

So unfortunately things got worse. I've made a bootable USB drive of Acronis to try to clone the drive, but said the bootmgr was missing. Problem being that I can't back into windows anymore to try to remedy anything there. I'll continue to try to find a way on my end.

That being said, I do have another hard drive, yes. Before my initial post, I had removed it early on to make sure that wasn't a factor, even though it never had an old installation of windows on it. Nothing changed.

I'll let you know if I can get around to doing the other simple tests. Thanks for your advice, WyomingKnott.

UPDATE - backup utility mentioned it couldn't read from a number of sectors on the kingston drive, I'm assuming the thing's on its way out.
 
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