Assistance needed with Identifying Hard Drive health

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
D

domkost

Commendable
Nov 15, 2017
8
0
1,510
Hi,

I'm having some issues hoping tech savvy people can shed some insight.


Symptoms:

About a week or two ago my computer started running slowly. Long boot times, computer hangs or freezes when using programs, doesn't shutdown properly or takes a long time to shutdown, on rare occasions the PC will freeze completely and the hard drive light goes completely dark like it shut down while the computer is still running.

I also have high disk usage 95%+ constantly.


Attempted Solutions:

I assumed the problem was hard drive relate, software or hardware. These are the following things I tried to remedy the problem.

Disabling windows services: Superfetch, Windows Search, BITS.

I've done chkdsk /f repairs with seeming good results but no change.

I tried the AHCI MSISupported key disable on regedit. ( http://www.troublefixers.org/windows/how-to-fix-100-percent-disk-usage-on-windows-10/458/ )

I'm sure I've performed other attempted fixes which I'm forgetting to mention but this is a good starting point.

Worth mentioning as I am writing this post my computer is behaving quite well right now, no freezing and I can open and use programs without any major interruptions. This is AFTER boot up and it's been running for a good 60 minutes now. Usually I get hangs when performing tasks for the first time since I booted: like right clicking for the first time, opening control panel first time, etc. Afterwards doing those same tasks works fine. But I expect shutting down the computer will cause problems and I'm back to the same show next time I power up.


Finally here are the SMART hard drive check results done with CrystalDiskInfo:

nQAB7QX.png



From what I understand is my hard drive is being filled with broken/unusable sectors and it's only a matter of time before it dies? So what is my best course of action? Is the hard drive salvageable or should I replace asap.

Thanks,

Dom




relevant pc specs:

I've got an MSI motherboard, Intel i7 processor, 8 gigs RAM, Windows 10 and you can see hard drive details in the image above.
 
Solution
SkyNetRising

Sectors get damaged. You accidentally bump into your PC, while drive is running, reading head crashes into drive surface, surface gets damaged, data becomes unreadable. That is why you should never hit your PC.
All the status info about drive health is contained into SMART parameters (your screenshot from initial post).
There is diagnostic software, that can scan drive surface, display it visually on screen and make recovery actions as necessary (mentioned it earlier btw).
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
Sort by date Sort by votes
SkyNetRising

SkyNetRising

Titan
Jan 4, 2016
29,856
3,853
111,640
The drive is dying. 320 (140h) relocated sectors and 4784 (12b0h) pending sectors.

Backup your data and replace.
Do not defrag your drive! It will lead to data loss.
It's never a good idea to move data around damaged disk area.

After you have safely backed up your data, you can try resolving pending sectors with mhdd (scan with relocate option).
But I wouldn't put too much hope on that. There's just too many pending sectors.
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
jankerson

jankerson

Judicious
BANNED
Sep 10, 2006
7,885
140
35,640
Download and run Seatools for Windows.

https://www.seagate.com/support/by-topic/downloads/

Run the Self drive test and Short drive test.

But yes I am sure the drive has a problem.

It's a good idea to back up your important data now.

I actually just had one of my Seagate Constellation drives go on me after 59,000 uptime hours. That's almost 7 years of uptime so I figured I got my money out of it. It's still running now, will replace as soon as the new drive gets in and I transfer data over.
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
D

domkost

Commendable
Nov 15, 2017
8
0
1,510
Ok, so I downloaded and ran the seatools tests here are the results:

SMART test - pass
Short Generic- pass
Short DST - fail at 90% completion

Seatools info says this:

''Unfortunately, your Seagate product has failed an important diagnostic test, possibly caused by problem sectors which are difficult to read. Seagate recommends that you run SeaTools for DOS, which has the ability to repair most problem sectors. SeaTools for DOS may be able to save you from the inconvenience and down time of exchanging the drive. ''

What are the repercussions of the this sector repair process it claims to be able to fix? Surely data loss is one of them?

I'm thinking of of getting an external hard drive to back pretty much everything that I can't redownload, since I don't have anything to backup important stuff right now other than google drive. I've never had an external hard drive I was just wondering if it works basically like a large USB flash drive?

 
Upvote 0 Downvote
jankerson

jankerson

Judicious
BANNED
Sep 10, 2006
7,885
140
35,640


Yes, you could download the DOS vers, create the disk and run the long test and it will likely repair the drive.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
SkyNetRising

SkyNetRising

Titan
Jan 4, 2016
29,856
3,853
111,640

Ok, let me explain concept of "pending sectors".
Current Pending Sector Count S.M.A.R.T. parameter is a critical parameter and indicates the current count of unstable sectors (waiting for remapping). The raw value of this attribute indicates the total number of sectors waiting for remapping. Later, when some of these sectors are read successfully, the value is decreased. If errors still occur when reading some sector, the hard drive will try to restore the data, transfer it to the reserved disk area (spare area) and mark this sector as remapped.
Click to expand...
Basically - drive could not read the sector. Sector is marked "pending".
Sector has to be overwritten to resolve "pending" status.
If overwrite is success, pending status gets cleared. If overwrite fails, sector gets remapped to spare area, pending status is cleared and relocated sector count gets increased. Spare area is limited. At some point there is no more spare area left (it is indicated by relocated sectors count current value getting below threshold value). Drive is considered FAILED then.

External drives are meant, if you want to carry it around, connect to different devices. They can be easily dropped, bumped, which leads to certain damage for mechanical drives. You'd be better with another internal drive.
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
D

domkost

Commendable
Nov 15, 2017
8
0
1,510

Ok, so from my understanding overwriting sectors does not affect stored data. I guess my final question before I try the fix is why do sectors become unstable, so I can try preserve my disk drive's health in the future? Also where do I look to check all available sectors, pending sectors, etc?

I will update this post and mark as solved once I get around to performing the disk repair.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
SkyNetRising

SkyNetRising

Titan
Jan 4, 2016
29,856
3,853
111,640

Sectors get damaged. You accidentally bump into your PC, while drive is running, reading head crashes into drive surface, surface gets damaged, data becomes unreadable. That is why you should never hit your PC.
All the status info about drive health is contained into SMART parameters (your screenshot from initial post).
There is diagnostic software, that can scan drive surface, display it visually on screen and make recovery actions as necessary (mentioned it earlier btw).
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom