WD 1TB hard drive suddenly reads 0 bytes free of 931GB

Judas2021

Honorable
Jan 28, 2014
25
0
10,530
I was in the middle of a game download when I received a disk write error. I noticed that my hard drive I was writing to suddenly read 0 bytes free of 931 GB and said NTFS underneath. I can still open the HD and explore all folders. All files are still intact and I can play files from it. I deleted approx. 10GB of unnecessary files thinking maybe I had really used all the space. It still won't write and displays 0 bytes free. Any ideas on what's happening?
 
Solution
first thing i would do is check the SMART data for the drive. make sure everything within spec, no warnings or failure states. after that, i would make a backup of all your data on it. if anything has failed, replace the drive immediately.

for possible fixes...
once your data is backed up, run a chkdsk from windows, This PC > right click on the drive > properties > tools > error checking > check. if it wants to reboot to do the check, let it. run it in read write mode, sense you have your data backed up if it hoses a few files it wont be a problem. this will attempt to fix the file system, and mark any bad sectors for remapping.

if the above fails to fix it, you can attempt to reformat the drive.

if all of the above fails, a 1TB...

pasow

Distinguished
Nov 15, 2012
474
0
19,160
first thing i would do is check the SMART data for the drive. make sure everything within spec, no warnings or failure states. after that, i would make a backup of all your data on it. if anything has failed, replace the drive immediately.

for possible fixes...
once your data is backed up, run a chkdsk from windows, This PC > right click on the drive > properties > tools > error checking > check. if it wants to reboot to do the check, let it. run it in read write mode, sense you have your data backed up if it hoses a few files it wont be a problem. this will attempt to fix the file system, and mark any bad sectors for remapping.

if the above fails to fix it, you can attempt to reformat the drive.

if all of the above fails, a 1TB drive is 50 USD or less, it wont cost much to replace outright.
 
Solution

GearUp

Distinguished
Feb 19, 2010
326
0
18,860
Use the Western Digital Lifeguard utility to view drive info. Drives maintain some functionality as long as possible to allow recovery but once the SMART error appears the drive is nearly unusable. If the reallocated sector threshold matches the worst result there is no more room provided to the user. There is a one year warranty on 3 values only. My experience with AHCI has not been encouraging, at least with changes from IDE.