Harddrive Errors, do I panic?? "Bad Sectors" / "Corrupted".

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Soul Hacker

Soul Hacker

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OK, someone in the Windows7 section was fast to respond to my question there, let's try here too!

My old PC seems to be headed toward failure, but I'm not 100% sure on what's going on. The PC will occasionally grind to a halt, and hard-freeze. Upon rebooting, it wanted to do CHKDSK on the C: but it didn't seem to find anything. It completed and said everything was cool.

The freezes are happening under conditions that you would consider "stressful". i.e. I have been avoiding gaming mostly but was bored enough to dare to play WoW for a bit, was fine for hours .. then it hard-froze.

I was also just using it and it was doing some "intense rendering" and the GPU was heated up noticeably, crash. But when I quit trying to make it do that task, it was a-ok for the rest of the evening without incident.

But glancing back at the EventViewer: I see the following errors prior to one of the crashes:
The device, \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, has a bad block.
The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:.

These error messages are from the day before yesterday, the PC is still booting up fine and running without any apparent issue that I can tell from response time, or file access.

(Though my PC is networked to it and claiming it can't copy certain files but it's currently copying the F: not the C:, so uh, also if anyone has any insight into why it might be encountering trouble and is saying it cannot copy them, that'd be helpful to know too.)

But with the two of them sharing files currently, in the old/"current" PC, I hear a repetitive grind, grind .. grind, grind .. it doesn't sound like the death rattle click to me but then I know every HDD sounds different. (The HDD has been making louder grinding [not clicking], noises for weeks now, so it sounds more like that loading-grind than a death rattle but the pattern of the grinds is eeriely similar.)

I'm treating it as an emergancy anyway but would like clarification if anyone has any more insight into those errors, since most responses I goolge'd said "Get everything off that drive, NOW!" Which I am working on.

I still have to RMA "defective" fans on the new PC, I'd like to keep using my old one for a bit longer but if this is what it seems like, I have no choice.

The PC seems to be running smoothly with no hang-ups or any abnormal behavior but ..

Thanks in advance. Hope someone sees this tonight.
 
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ffg7

ffg7

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Apr 7, 2015
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yes but also doesn't do the same thing all the time without more commands added to the chkdsk command line. did it go thru 3 stages or 5 stages in the scan? who makes the hard drive as both Seagate & wd do have diagnostic software on their website to checkout their hard drives?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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If the drive appears to be dying, you should have a current backup in case it dies.
If the drive does not appear to be dying, you should have a current backup in case it dies.

That way...if it does die...it is a simple hardware swap.

If it is making weird or new noises.....it is dying.
 
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Soul Hacker

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ffg7:
It did 3 stages, I don't remember the messages.
Is Disk Defrag what I want? I could swear there was a "Scan Disk" option, specifically somewhere in Windows, so if that's what I wanna do, where is it?

It is a SeaGate HDD, apparently both of them are, fancy that. Second one was a gift.


USAFRet:
I am planning on backing up what I can tonight but I already feel my eyes getting sleepy, s'why I was asking how much I should worry, do I force myself to stay awake and copy what I can? I'm thinking I'm gonna do it anyway
but it's weird that the PC keeps booting and functioning, seemingly without issue, except for one hard-freeze if something pushes it .. but then, PC problems can often be weird like that and parts fail suddenly, without a ton of warning too, so I know it running now doesn't mean it will tomorrow.

-- I also know that drives just kinda begin grinding as they get old, so that isn't normally any indication of a problem.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Continuing to run it now may be good, may be bad.
Turning it off and coming back to it tomorrow may be good, may be bad.
Messing with it while you are falling asleep is probably not good. 'oops...I clicked the wrong thing'

How are you doing this 'backup'?
 
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Soul Hacker

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Haha, I'm not falling asleep that badly my friend. Just had a long day and my eyes wanna close a bit. So it's more like, I may go to bed earlier than usual but I'm not going to bed now or even for several hours yet. Love that "may be good, may be bad!" But it's true, stuff like this is hard to guess.

My new PC is networked to it and copying files from it as we speak. But it's copying a huge file from the other drive, and it's gonna be at that for about 4 hours, it says. I don't wanna interrupt that but as soon as it's done, I'm going to target the main drive.

I was gonna chill and install programs on my new PC before copying everything over but with those errors I saw, and all, I'm more determined to focus on copying now and installing programs later.

I think my GPU is going bad too, so I originally believed the freezes might be due to that, until I saw the HDD errors in the EventViewer.

Didn't expect it to catch anything during a freeze/crash but I guess it did.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Unfortunately, Microsoft dumbed down the disk scan tool for Windows 8. I believe you have to manually run chkdsk /r in an admin command prompt to scan for bad sectors now. The regular chkdsk just checks sectors occupied by files. A scan for bad sectors also checks the free space.

Regardless of whether or not your HDD is dying, you should always have a backup. That way something like bad sectors are never an emergency and will never cause a panic. I learned my lesson the hard way when a data drive died and I lost about 1000 hours of work I'd put into scanning my slides and negatives over the years. Fortunately I still have the slides and negatives so I'm better off than the people who've lost data forever. But I make regular backups religiously now, and advise others to backup their important data.

Repeated grinding noises while accessing a file is usually a sign the drive is having problems reading the data. When you write a file to a drive, a checksum (number calculated from the data in the file) is also stored along with it. When the file is read back, its checksum is recalculated. If the new checksum does not match the checksum originally stored with the file, then the drive knows the data it just read is corrupt. It then tries to re-read the file, over and over until the checksums match. This regular re-reading is what causes the repeated grinding noises. If it happens for a lot of files, it is a very strong indication that your drive is failing.

Edit: Just to be clear, backup your data first. Then play around with chkdsk /r and other disk tools. If your drive is only going to keep working for 2 more hours before it fails completely, you want to spend those 2 hours copying important files off of it. Not doing something like running a stupid chkdsk.
 
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Soul Hacker

Soul Hacker

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Ah, I found it. It will force a reboot and do it when the system starts up, looks like it did that before like I said and it did not seem to report any problems when it did. Also, it did the check disk -after- the errors in the log about bad sectors, and corruption. It showed no errors upon completing.

On the link you gave me, which download do I want there?
DiscWizard
Samsung Drive Manager
Drive Detect
.. or something else?
 
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Soul Hacker

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Ah, Solandri I missed your response. I have Windows7, not 8. Not sure if that is a typo or not.

Many of my older PCs had drives that began to grind when they aged but ultimately never failed. Grinding can also just a natural cause of age at points.

But I agree with you, the focus is copying information, but with potential RMAs for my new PC due to fans and crap, I was hoping my current PC would be OK a bit longer. I thought it'd be fine, now I'm not so sure.
 
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Soul Hacker

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Panic was the correct answer. It froze for a long time, several times and my Event Viewer is a literal wall of Critical Errors. I'm copying everything off this PC as I type this. So uh, nevermind this issue, this has gotten it's answer via HDD failure.

I'm amazed that to spite all the errors, I can still copy files and post here .. but yeah, consider this "issue" over the hard way.
 
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