HDD failing?

HCLPfan

Gawd
Joined
Sep 19, 2002
Messages
571
So unfortunately I'm thinking one of my HD's might be failing so I was looking to see if you guys had any ideas. Basically I was just coding up some script and when I hit save my comp locked up. (I wasn't save or writing to this particular HD at the time) and I hear this high pitched tone come out of my speakers (not my system speaker). I went ahead and restarted the machine and as it was booting up it seems to take a long time at a black screen in between the windows bootscreen loading bar and the windows login. Eventually it loads and I sign in and the drive no longer shows up like it used to. Essentially, here's what my HD list now looks like:

Server (_stuff_) (V:)
Server (_stuff_) (W:)
Server (_stuff_) (X:)
Local Disk (Y:)
Server (_stuff_) (Z:)

Ontop of it showing up like that I can't open the drive. If I even so much as right click on that drive explorer locks and i have to end-task and relaunch it.

Also, I went ahead and ran a S.M.A.R.T. checker on it and although the results mean nothing to me (im not sure what to look for) the status of everything seems to be fine:

5842-7nm6w7to.jpg


Lastly everything seems to look fine when i do a CHKDSK on the drive as well:

5843-xdj15itn.jpg


I dont really know what else to do except wipe it and try to use it but I'd like to avoid that option as i have 400GB of stuff on it. That being said...any ideas?
 
Google, download, burn to a CD and run Hitachi's Drive Fitness Tool to test your hard drive.

Though I just had something similar happen to me with an old 200GB backup drive. Long story short, the drive died but managed to get the files off of it using Knoppix.
 
You may want to head to the hard drive manufacturer's website and pick up some of its diagnostic tools to test it out even further.

As a precaution, you may want to also start saving up for a new hard drive.
 
Just a quick update:

I ran the program you told me to and it appeared that the drive was working fine or at least it didn't yell at me about anything after he scan.

Also I realized that I'm dumb and after reviewing the screenshot of my CHKDSK i noticed that everything was NOT ok. I went back and ran it with the /F flag and it said that it fixed files but in exchange it manages to lock up my computer if i open My Computer. Also, when I go restart my computer since it freezes and run CHKDSK again without the /F flag it just finds the errors again like nothing was fixed.

Also currently downloading Knoppix to see what I can do with recovery
 
The Knoppix solution is mostly useful when your boot drive with Windows fails to boot, but the files are still present. In your case, it seems like your HDD's filesystem is corrupted.

Since you are able to boot into Windows, but you cannot access any files on the drive, you might need to use some kind of Data Recovery software. This seems to have some good information about recovering data from a corrupted drive with a suggested freeware program.

In the meantime, don't write to the disk at all.
 
Another update:

So the annoying high pitched beeping was driving me crazy last night so I power my computer off. This morning when I woke up and turned it on...the drive showed up perfectly normal and works great. I have no idea what the hell happened but i guess I'm not going to complain.
 
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