SATA Port 0 Device Error! Help!

[BathroomCitizen]

Hi,

my problem began today, when I turned on my pc the boot screen showed "SATA port 0 device error". I still could boot that hard disk up, but the SMART system told me that my hard disk could break down at a moment's notice.

Now, i'm quite a computer ignorant, so the first thing I did was trying to run the scandisk on the malfunctioning disk, but it would run very slowly (after 1 hour of scan disk, it only scanned about 150 files!!!), so i just stopped it.

My hard disk is a Seagate Barracuda. What should i do?

Thanks in advance

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Sorry bud your hard drive is rather likely to be on it's last legs.

You should immediately try and backup all the data you need to another drive or external USB device. Given it seems to be having issues with just a scan disk you should prioritize what files you need to keep. If you have a previous backup of the data do not any cirumstances overwrite this data. It's possible that when doing the latest backup file transfer could fail and the file on the external disk may become corrupted.

If you manage to backup everything successfully you could have a go at cloning the hard drive before it dies. But this would only save you from having to reinstall your OS and programs.

Ultimately you should be looking to replace this drive with a new shiny SATA drive.

 

[BathroomCitizen]

Thanks for the advice RIP, I already backed up all the files with success. I checked right now the manufacturer's website to see if my HD is still under warranty, and YES, it is!

Quite sad tho, it didn't even had 1 year of life...

 

[Hawkeye22]

I'd install speedfan, HDTune, or some other utiltty that can read SMART values and see what's going on. At the very least go to the manufacturer's web site and download their diagnostic tools before trying to RMA the drive.

 

[BathroomCitizen]

I'd install speedfan, HDTune, or some other utiltty that can read SMART values and see what's going on. At the very least go to the manufacturer's web site and download their diagnostic tools before trying to RMA the drive.

Ok, i downloaded the SeaTools program from Seagate, my HD's manufacturer, and tested my "faulty" HD. It didn't give me any error, even though I still get the same "SATA Port 1 Device error" at the startup of my pc.

Also, today I've been able to run a complete scan disk before getting into Windows, and it seemed to be all ok. I really cannot guess why I still get the SATA Port 1 Device error.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Make sure the sata connection isn't loose. You can aslo try another sata cable. Also, grab one of the utilities I listed above that will show actual SMART values and see if you have reallocated sectors and/or current pending sectors. If all the values look sane, perhaps the sata port is going bad.

 

[BathroomCitizen]

I installed HD Tune, and these are the results:

It doesn't seem like a good situation
The weird thing is that with SeaTools, the manufacturer's own software, I scanned the HD without any error...

 

[Rusting In Peace]

I'd go ahead and contact Seagate about a replacement if the drive is under warranty. The SMART data clearly shows the drive has used all of it's reallocation sectors.

Why SeaTools hasn't determined the drive has issues I don't know. It's very peculiar given that SMART is industry standard.

 

[BathroomCitizen]

Ok RIP, i think i'm going for RMA, but what do you think about the second pic? I'm not a techguy and I don't know anything about cables... could all my trouble be caused by a defective cable?

 

[Rusting In Peace]

The reallocation count refers to how many bad sectors have been remapped to the reserved reallocation section of the drive. This section is finite and when full the drive can no longer handle newly developed bad sectors.

I think the CRC warning is happening simply because data from bad sectors is occasionally being used. I think your cable is likely to be fine!

 

[BathroomCitizen]

Ok, understood, mate! Thanks to everyone who answered!

 

[Hawkeye22]

Ok RIP, i think i'm going for RMA, but what do you think about the second pic? I'm not a techguy and I don't know anything about cables... could all my trouble be caused by a defective cable?

The CRC errors can certainly be caused by a bad cable, but with just 3 errors, it isn't an issue. The reallocated sector count is miserable. I'm surprised the "current pending sectors" hasn't started to accumulate yet. You have enough proof in those images to warrant an RMA from the manufacturer. They should give you no problems.

On the plus side, the drive is still running so you shouldbe able to pull all your data off of it.

 

[BathroomCitizen]

Ok thanks!

The situation is getting worse by the hour... today the pc was barely able to turn on and the hard disk was chugging like hell. Really time for RMA.

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Just for your own information and I guess anyone else who would stumble upon this thread. For fun I've included a basic analogy of what happens when your hard drive has bad sectors:

When a drive starts to have significant bad sectors and thus needs to reallocate into the reserved space it's performance will drop and the noise it makes will increase.

Imagine the hard drive is a house will multiple rooms. One of these rooms is the reserved space for remapped sectors. You are the read head and objects in the house are data.

Someone asks you for all the cups in your house. Normally cups are in the kitchen of households*. You go to the kitchen to find 9 of your 10 cups and a note. This note has the location of your 10th cup in the reserved room. You need to now leave the kitchen and go to the reserved room to finish collecting all the cups.

So you (the read head) has had to travel from your starting point to the kitchen then onto the reserved room. You've had to travel further and you've produced more noise because of it. The problem gets worse if the things you are retrieving are in different rooms, more objects have notes and you have to travel one way in a circular path (which is what the read head has to do).

*If the cups are scattered around your house this would be fragmentation. And de-fragmentation of the cups (the data) would be putting them in one place. This is exactly what defragmentation of a hard drive is - making related data be next to each other so that the read head does not have to travel as much to read all of the data.