Harddrive issues?

[renrut422]

Hello all, my first computer and it had been running great until this last week. My event log told me I had corrupt information on my hard drive, which prompted me to ask a friend for some advice. He had me take it down to a computer repair shop where they tested my hdd and came back to tell me that it had failed the test and had physical damage.

After putting the hdd back into my computer i booted up, then chkdsk ran and deleted my files. Seagate asks users to run their hardware test (Seatools) to ensure defectiveness, upon running the long test (which they claim is 100% accurate) I am finding no hardware issues. Upon running the chkdsk utility again windows is saying I have no problems. In spite of this, my computer has frozen multiple times and the display went out briefly the other night.

I've run tests on my RAM and memory card to ensure they aren't the issue, but they are all coming up as completely fine. Any ideas on what the issue is? I'm not sure how a harddrive can fail a physical damage test yet then pass it an hour later and if it isn't the issue I'm not sure what is causing my freezes.

Sorry that it was so long winded, thanks to all who take the time to read it and thanks doubly to those who can provide assistance =)

 

[renrut422]

I probably should add that the application crash and freeze were while playing a game that is in its beta stages, however the display crash was in League of Legends.

 

[willard]

Physical damage to a disk will usually kill it outright. It will start making this lovely clicking noise, and that's the last you'll be able to use it.

That said, CHKDSK doesn't diagnose disks. It just tells you if information is corrupted, and tries to fix it. You want to run a S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic, which is designed to give you early warning on hard drive failure.

Go download SpeedFan. It's a free tool that gives you the temperatures of your computer components, and as a bonus, can diagnose your hard drive. It will even explain to you what the various scores in the test mean.

If that comes back and says your drive is on the verge of failure, I'd talk to Seagate and explain the situation and see if they'll RMA the drive anyway.

As far as the display going out, that doesn't sound remotely related. Your monitor isn't capable of crashing, anyway. It just displays the signal that's coming over the wire.

Finally, you're giving some conflicting information. You say in your first post that your computer has frozen multiple times, but in the second describe what's happened as an "application crash." What exactly happened? Did the application (beta game) simply freeze? Or did the entire computer crash? A piece of beta software freezing isn't exactly unusual.

 

[ram1009]

If the HDD is over 3 years old it's time to retire it anyway. Clone your old HDD to a new one or possibly an SSD or install a fresh OS and migrate data from the old one as needed.

 

[renrut422]

I've run a S.M.A.R.T. test as a part of the Seatools software, the harddrive passed said test. I'm starting to think that maybe the Computer repair center screwed something up, would this be a logical conclusion after the drive passes the SMART test?

The display going out was information related, not monitor related, i got an error from windows, forums elsewhere suggested this could be related to information not being read from the harddrive properly so I felt listing it could help.

Further to clarify, the computer has frozen twice at the desktop in the last 2 weeks while idle. The application crash probably wasn't a huge issue, but I was unsure whether the graphics issue was potentially harddrive related.

The HDD is two months old, I just built the computer in December so I wasn't sure why I was having any issues period.

EDIT: Installed Speedfan, its SMART scores gave me a normal in Raw Read Error Rate and Hardware ECC Recovered, a good in Seek Error Rate, and a very good in all other scores. Does this mean I should stop worrying about it?

 

[willard]

Sounds like the drive is fine to me. It may have been corrupted, but it doesn't sound like it's damaged. Corrupted data could very well be caused by a beta game, or just plain bad luck.

If you can, I'd recommend backing up your data, then forgetting all about this.

 

[aqe040466]

Hello all, my first computer and it had been running great until this last week. My event log told me I had corrupt information on my hard drive, which prompted me to ask a friend for some advice. He had me take it down to a computer repair shop where they tested my hdd and came back to tell me that it had failed the test and had physical damage.

After putting the hdd back into my computer i booted up, then chkdsk ran and deleted my files. Seagate asks users to run their hardware test (Seatools) to ensure defectiveness, upon running the long test (which they claim is 100% accurate) I am finding no hardware issues. Upon running the chkdsk utility again windows is saying I have no problems. In spite of this, my computer has frozen multiple times and the display went out briefly the other night.

I've run tests on my RAM and memory card to ensure they aren't the issue, but they are all coming up as completely fine. Any ideas on what the issue is? I'm not sure how a harddrive can fail a physical damage test yet then pass it an hour later and if it isn't the issue I'm not sure what is causing my freezes.

Sorry that it was so long winded, thanks to all who take the time to read it and thanks doubly to those who can provide assistance =)

My suggestion is back up your data to an external Storage drive, Reformat that HDD and reinstall the Operating System and all the drivers that came with your motherboard.

 

[renrut422]

Thankfully the only data on the drive right now is a couple of papers I wrote as homework, I'll make sure to save all crucial files to the cloud. I'll try reformatting this summer/spring break, but on University throttled wireless the idea of reinstalling all my programs sounds like a frustrating task. Thanks everyone for your help, our computer center had me pretty scared when they said it had physical damage but it seems like it was just a bit of data corruption. I blame Riot for their terrible coding with League of Legends.

 

[renrut422]

Best answer selected by renrut422.