Bad blocks on HDD

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menehunes

menehunes

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Today when I was trying to use any of my programs that I keep on my non-OS drive, I couldn't start any of them up. While this was happening I was hearing weird clicking/chirping noises every couple seconds coming from my computer around where my Hard Drives are. When I went to look at the event log I noticed it a bunch of bad block errors, when I ran check disk nothing came up though. Any help with this would be much appreciated.

I have two Hitachi drives, bought at the same time, that are a terabyte each, and I have them set up as a RAID 0, then I have it partitioned 700gb for games and important programs, the rest for random stuff.
 
Solution
photonboy
Yep, you are in danger of losing everything.

You need to reinstall Windows since your drive appears corrupted. I would take the opportunity to get an SSD perhaps.

Unfortunately to backup any data you need another drive.

I also suggest you avoid RAID0 as that's less reliable than a single drive. Your games will take slightly longer to load, but for most games it's not a huge deal.

In fact, if you get a 500GB SSD you could partition it to 150GB for C-drive (to be safe, will fill up over time) and use the 2nd partition for games like SKYRIM that have frequent load times (entering dungeon/building, jumping map points).

*You can actually MOVE games easily within Steam. Literally just create a folder on the partition you want to use then...
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gasaraki

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I would back up stuff you need right now in case the drive dies and you lose everything. Since you are running raid 0 one drive dying will cause you to lose everything on both drives.

It looks to be a hardware issue with the drive causing the bad blocks. Are you sure you ran chkdsk? Did it make you reboot? It should have. Chkdsk will scan for bad blocks and attempt to move the data off of them to good blocks. However if your drive is dying and bad blocks keeps happening then chkdsk can't help with that.
 
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menehunes

menehunes

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Chkdsk didn't have me reboot, which I found odd, and with what your saying sounds like I may have done it wrong, its been a while. I ran it once threw CMD and the other on the properties panel, under tools. And I am currently in the process of backing up my data. Also I forgot to mention, if it matters at all, I have had these drives for maybe around 5 years.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Jun 20, 2006
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Yep, you are in danger of losing everything.

You need to reinstall Windows since your drive appears corrupted. I would take the opportunity to get an SSD perhaps.

Unfortunately to backup any data you need another drive.

I also suggest you avoid RAID0 as that's less reliable than a single drive. Your games will take slightly longer to load, but for most games it's not a huge deal.

In fact, if you get a 500GB SSD you could partition it to 150GB for C-drive (to be safe, will fill up over time) and use the 2nd partition for games like SKYRIM that have frequent load times (entering dungeon/building, jumping map points).

*You can actually MOVE games easily within Steam. Literally just create a folder on the partition you want to use then open the game properties and tell it to MOVE the game folder.

**You can save your Steamapps folder (or folders if separate partitions) if you have a drive to copy it to. Possibly create the SSD partitions with the HDD's off, hook them up, install STEAM, create folder on SSD 2nd partition then move the STEAMAPPS folder right over. Just copy and paste.

Then, you can VERIFY THE CONTENT of each game as Steam can fix errors.

I know this sounds a bit confusing, but plan it out.
 
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menehunes

menehunes

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I currently run my OS on a separate SSD, I actually have a 4th drive already in there that I was using for backups, never actually had it setup for auto backups because I was lazy. I think I am going to just go with a WD 1TB since its cheaper. As for moving my steam library the way you mentioned, thanks! Totally forgot I could do something like that since I don't mess around with that stuff that often.

Also, this is for others who may read this, I used the RAID0 to check it out, since it did offer slightly better speeds, but in all honesty I don't think I noticed much of a difference with using it.
 
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gasaraki

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WTF. This gets the 'Best Solution' tag? To reinstall windows? Wow.
 
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somesh101

somesh101

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Jul 16, 2015
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First thing back up your important data.
2nd you hear that sound from both drives or only one drive?
there ae some good disk cheking softwares out there use them for diagonistics.

at moment there can be 4 points of failure
1st: power (belive me i have gone trhough this one)
2nd : Sata cables
3rd: Disk itself is dying
4th: Port on mobo
i have gone trhough 1st and 4th myself
so check the dust in ports and clean them. change sata cables. They ae fairly cheap. have 1-2 around in spare.
 
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menehunes

menehunes

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I marked it as Best Solution not because of the reinstall, as I said in my first post that I keep my OS on another drive, but because upon further researching what he was saying that the drive is more than likely failing seems to be true.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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About reinstalling Windows.
That was a MISTAKE. It's obvious reading now, but I have a tendency to skip information on a monitor though I'm fine with printed text. Even if I go back and read it again I can skip over information once I get biased to the content. I'm not sure why, but it does cause me problems occasionally.
 
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