Dying HDD

[eggrock]

"Bad block" errors in the event viewer, chkdsk has died repeatedly (/R /X) and WD's check tool aborts with 'too many bad sectors'...

I can access the drive for the most part; some actions result in a blue screen, others are very slow.

I've got plenty of room to copy files to my primary HDD but I'm wondering if that's a bad idea. Would corrupted files mess up the other drive as well? Is there anything I can do after copying the files?

There's nothing terribly important on the drive, about 1,500 photos I'd like to keep, saved game info for all the games I installed and app/game installers and patches along with other misc. data. The bummer is that it's a 250Gb drive that only saw a couple months of use.

And now for a <rant> on Western Digital. 4 Caviars dead out of 7 or 8 total. Not a good track record for WD. 3 clicks o'death and this corrupted drive. Makes me like SCSI even more; I've got a 500Mb and 700Mb drive running just fine in a Mac and they've seen a LOT of use.

Regardless, no more WD drives for me. I know drives fail from time to time but this is just stupid how many I've seen fail, percentage-wise. </rant>

[Invader_sk00dge]

My track record with WD has been crappy as well. 3 drives in a row failed for me. But I've trusted WD enough to buy from them once again. 250 GB SATA. Couldn't turn down the deal. It was like $115 after taxes. Anywho, if I were you, copy as much data as possible, corrupted or not. Just get as much as you can off before that drive is sleeping with the fishes.

[darknite]

if the spot on the drive that has the files is corrupted you prolly wont get the files off of it...
but you can try and copy your pix and save games to the primary drive...shouldnt have any problems or cause problems with the primary at all
i deal with bad hdd alot and people dont like ti when i tell them their pix are gone.... :(

its weird though..i got almost a TB of wd drives at home and Never had a problem with them...that all i do is wd...some people just get screwed (no offence)
some people like seagate...i hate seagate..i see those and ibm die more than anything
so basically its a 50/50 chance of getting your data...and sorry to see another badd hdd
rma it when your done

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/8682.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&id=8682)

[eggrock]

I don't quite understand what a bad block really is... Something that can't be read at all by the hardware or something with a bad checksum or otherwise garbled data, or all of the above. I'm wondering if a sysread through Perl (assuming you can even do that on Windows) and then dumping out the data as it's read will do the job. I can always index filenames and restart and skip what's done if the PC locks up...

[eggrock]

E: drive is completely gone, taking out XP on C:. Thanks WD.

Went with a Maxtor. :D