chkdsk problem or is my hard drive dying?

P

poopy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 11, 2004
Messages
154
I'm running xp home sp2 on a 4 year old Barracuda ATA IV model ST340016A. Everything is up to date.

After looking in the event viewer in admin tools I noticed that there were errors being generated under disk and ntfs at every startup....

The Disk error shows this:
The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block.
0000: 03 00 68 00 01 00 b6 00 ..h...¶.
0008: 00 00 00 00 07 00 04 c0 .......À
0010: 00 01 00 00 9c 00 00 c0 ....œ..À
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 9e 69 15 06 00 00 00 .ži.....
0028: ac 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 ¬.......
0030: ff ff ff ff 01 00 00 00 ÿÿÿÿ....
0038: 40 00 00 84 02 00 00 00 @..„....
0040: 00 20 0a 12 40 03 20 40 . ..@. @
0048: 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 ........
0050: 00 00 00 00 68 15 fa 81 ....h.ú?
0058: 00 00 00 00 08 10 fd 81 ......ý?
0060: 02 00 00 00 cf b4 0a 03 ....Ï´..
0068: 28 00 03 0a b4 cf 00 00 (...´Ï..
0070: 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0078: f0 00 03 00 00 00 00 0b ð.......
0080: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0088: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

The ntfs error shows this:
The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:.
0000: 0c 00 00 00 02 00 4e 00 ......N.
0008: 02 00 00 00 37 00 04 c0 ....7..À
0010: 00 00 00 00 32 00 00 c0 ....2..À
0018: 18 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

I scheduled chkdsk to run autochk with /f and /r on next startup and it ran fine, but the damn thing never gives you enough time to read if it fixed anything. The event viewer shows the errors are still occuring and now autochk runs at every startup. Fsutil and chkntfs both reported my drive as dirty. Since I can't make out what autochk says, I do chkdsk via recovery console with /r set and it says that there were errors which it repaired. The disk and ntfs events are still going on though and the volume's dirty bit is still set which is causing Autochk to run on every startup :mad: . A new warning event showed up saying an error was detected during a paging operation, so I clear the page file and which for some reason stopped the ntfs event, but the disk event didn't cease. As of now, I have set chkntfs /x c: to bypass autochk.

Any ideas? :confused:
 
another suggestion.... this worked for me: go to the manufacturer's site (seagate) and see if they have a diagnostic boot floppy you can download from them. make the floppy, boot from it, and have it scan the drive. if it is something that chkdsk won't fix, the diagnostic floppy might be able to fix it. then shoot a support e mail out to seagate and ask them what's up, they might tell you to RMA the drive if it's still under warrenty, whether you find a problem or not of if the diagnostic utility fixes it or not.
 
thedude42 said:
another suggestion.... this worked for me: go to the manufacturer's site (seagate) and see if they have a diagnostic boot floppy you can download from them. make the floppy, boot from it, and have it scan the drive. if it is something that chkdsk won't fix, the diagnostic floppy might be able to fix it. then shoot a support e mail out to seagate and ask them what's up, they might tell you to RMA the drive if it's still under warrenty, whether you find a problem or not of if the diagnostic utility fixes it or not.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I ran Seagates diag utility which overwrote the bad sectors and cleared the dirty bit :D . Turns out chkdsk located and labeled the sectors as bad, but it didn't repair them for some reason.
 
From what I've seen almost every disk thats got bad blocks, gets more bad blocks. Its like they spread like a rash. Its probably time to start looking for a new hard drive.
 
To see the output from chkdsk being run during startup, look in the application event viewer. The output from chkdsk is written into the event log by the winlogon process.
 
pixl97 said:
From what I've seen almost every disk thats got bad blocks, gets more bad blocks. Its like they spread like a rash. Its probably time to start looking for a new hard drive.
Click to expand...

Basically what he said. I wouldn't trust that drive to any data. Keep your stuff backed up and get a new one as soon as you can.
 
I had a disk error in the region occupied by my OS partition, that was invible to chkdsk. I only suspected it was there when I attempted to create an image of my OS partition, and byte-for-byte image verification failed.

The error was identified and fixed by downloading and running WD DLDIAG5 utility on my WD HD, with no loss of data.
 
that's pretty unusual these days (i think...)

glad you were able to fix it.
 
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