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How do I fix the errors on my HDD?

B

bigdavethehorn

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 25, 2005
Messages
412
PC has been weird lately, decided to check my hard drives.

My Maxtor 160GB ATA drive passes all tests from Maxtor & Seagate.
My Seagate 320GB SATA drive passes the quick test from Seagate only (The Maxtor tool I've got can't test SATA drives).

The Seagate drive fails all "File Structure Tests" reporting that;

1 or more errors were found
1 or more file names contained errors
1 or more errors were found in the index
1 or more errors were found in the metafile.

What next? Will a format fix this? What caused it?
 
A "chkdsk" may fix it, or it may reveal greater corruption. I suggest you back up now, and then run chkdsk.

As for what caused it: are you using ECC memory? If not, that's my guess.
 
I am a big fan of Steve Gibson's Spinrite...Great results, the reviews on his site are as good as mine:)
 
unhappy_mage said:
As for what caused it: are you using ECC memory? If not, that's my guess.
Click to expand...

No, I'm not using ECC RAM, just normal stuff!

I'm not sure I understood your post, are you saying that my RAM could be bad?

Or that I have problems because I'm not using ECC RAM?
 
gjvrieze said:
I am a big fan of Steve Gibson's Spinrite...Great results, the reviews on his site are as good as mine:)
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with that program, is it like a fancy checkdisk?

If I delete all partitions, then format my drive, will these errors disappear?

I have Ghost images of all partitions, so I can re-image easily.
 
As some of the other posters have stated, the issue was likely caused by corrupted data being written to the disk due to a memory error. If that is not the case and the disk has dead sectors and physical problems then there isn't much you can do about it other than rma the disk if it is still under warranty. Does the disk ever make a clunking noise when it's spinning or accessing/writing data?
 
If the drive passed the basic test, the chances are it was just a data corruption. Chkdsk /f can restore the file structure, but you might lose a lot of data in doing so. Since you said you have backups, you might as well just reformat and restore the ghost image.
As to the drive itself, I would monitor the drive more closely since SMART doesn't always detect hardware failures. It you continue to get corruption, you probably also want to check your memory with memtest. If there's no problems with the memory while continuing to get corruption, you probably want to replace the hdd.
 
drizzt81 said:
i believe that U_M wants to suggest that chkdsk may screw up your drive royally, so having a backup of the data is recommended.
Click to expand...

OK, but Seagate's tool told me that "one or more files may have errors" or something like that, so should I really be backing up files which contain errors?

Or will the files be ok once they're on a good drive?
 
Tigertank said:
If that is not the case and the disk has dead sectors and physical problems then there isn't much you can do about it other than rma the disk if it is still under warranty. Does the disk ever make a clunking noise when it's spinning or accessing/writing data?
Click to expand...

Nope, no noises out of the ordinary!

How can I tell whether the drive has dead sectors and physical problems?

The diagnostic tools I've used so far don't seem to give me that info.
 
bigdavethehorn said:
OK, but Seagate's tool told me that "one or more files may have errors" or something like that, so should I really be backing up files which contain errors?
Click to expand...
Would you rather have files with "some" errors or files with "lots" of errors? If you have a backup of your data without errors, then you can disregard this step anyway and just run the long test and then either RMA or full format knowing that it may be dodgy.
 
drizzt81 said:
Would you rather have files with "some" errors or files with "lots" of errors? If you have a backup of your data without errors, then you can disregard this step anyway and just run the long test and then either RMA or full format knowing that it may be dodgy.
Click to expand...

Thing is, my PC backs up every night, I only determined yesterday that one of my drives has "issues".

How will I know if my backup up files are damaged or not?

I mean, does a photo containing errors still look like a photo? Or does it have visual corruption?
 
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