Is my hard drive dead? or dying?

E

EclipseRydr

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 7, 2009
Messages
146
I'm not sure if this is the correct section, if it is not I apologize.

Today my computer was working just fine, I restarted, and got this black screen with an unexpected error 0xc00000e9

I had no choice but to restart, so I did, and then I got a little message that read 'A disk read error' and 'Press control alt delete to restart' so I did...

Then I got the black screen with white text that reads BOOTMGR image is corrupt. The system cannot boot.

So I tried to boot in safe mode, won't even let me get to that screen. I go into the BIOS, and my primary drive is listed as "BzBzBzBzBzBz" rather than the name of the drive like me other hard drive in there.

So then I stick in my windows 7 disc hoping to do a repair, but the startup repair fails, it tried 3 things.... Root cause found: boot manager failed to find OS loader and the 3 attempted fixes are 1) repair action: file repair, result: failed 2) repair action: boot configuration data store repair, result: failed 3) repair action: system restore, result: failed

My guess is the drive is dead.

But I took it out of my desktop and put it in an external case of mine, and it worked just like any of my other externals.

Will my drive no longer be able to work as an internal? Please help

Little about my PC, intel e8400, ati 4890, 4gb ram, 1tb wd black (the one that is acting up) and a 2tb wd black as a slave
 
If the drive is recognized under that name in the BIOS, but another computer accesses it normally under an external, my first guess based on the info given is the SATA controller on the board. You mentioned a 2tb drive, is that correctly registered in the BIOS?

Although you may not have changed anything, you could try a different SATA port on the motherboard, or the cord that goes to your 2tb if that's registering correctly in the motherboard.

Are you sure that the drive being recognized as bzbzbzbzbz etc is new behavior? I'm not saying it's typical by any means, just curious if you know for sure that it's different than it used to be.

I'll be waiting!
 
Also, if the computer was in the middle of a memory dump when it shut down, that could've definitely messed up the boot sector / related. There are methods to repair/recreate the boot sector of a drive, but I think it'd be best to eliminate any other factors before trying that. If your controller is indeed messed up, attempting a repair through the use of it could screw things up further.
 
trugate said:
If the drive is recognized under that name in the BIOS, but another computer accesses it normally under an external, my first guess based on the info given is the SATA controller on the board. You mentioned a 2tb drive, is that correctly registered in the BIOS?

Although you may not have changed anything, you could try a different SATA port on the motherboard, or the cord that goes to your 2tb if that's registering correctly in the motherboard.

Are you sure that the drive being recognized as bzbzbzbzbz etc is new behavior? I'm not saying it's typical by any means, just curious if you know for sure that it's different than it used to be.

I'll be waiting!
Click to expand...

To be honest, no, I don't know for 100% that bzbzbzbzbz is new behavior, but after looking online my guess is yes, I just put in another 2tb and in the BIOS it gave me the model number just like the other 2tb inside it, both registering with model numbers.

I don't want to give up on that 1tb drive, after a quick search online, it does lead me to believe it could be a bad drive, bad sata cable or as you said a bad sata port.

But since the 2tb that I stuck in, same port and same cable worked just fine, does that rule out the bad sata cable and bad sata port?
 
Well, your bootmgr getting corrupted is just a symptom. The bzbzbz is what's wrong.
Only once I saw this happen and a bad ATA ribbon was the culprit. Are both of your disks SATA 3 (6gbps) drives? or is one of them a SATA2 (3gbps) one?
On WD drives you can force a slower SATA mode by jumping pins 5 and 6 IIRC. Either that way or via the vendor's utility.
What motherboard do you have?
 
michalrz said:
Well, your bootmgr getting corrupted is just a symptom. The bzbzbz is what's wrong.
Only once I saw this happen and a bad ATA ribbon was the culprit. Are both of your disks SATA 3 (6gbps) drives? or is one of them a SATA2 (3gbps) one?
On WD drives you can force a slower SATA mode by jumping pins 5 and 6 IIRC. Either that way or via the vendor's utility.
What motherboard do you have?
Click to expand...

my motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3LR
the 1tb (primary) black drive is sata 2 (i'll call this #1)
the 2tb black drive is sata 3 (i'll call this #2)
there is an external 2tb black drive same model (i'll call this #3, same model as #2)

i think i may have run into a slightly bigger problem. so initially, my setup was a primary #1 drive, and my #2 drive was a secondary internal for storage, and i also had my #3 drive as an external drive.

so what i did was swap my #3 drive with my #1 drive, now I have #1 as external and #3 as internal so I hard to format #3, all while leaving #2 alone.

but now under disk management, #2 is Dynamic and invalid, the only option i have is 'convert to basic disk' and it says i'll lose data if i do that

i pulled out #2 to use it as an external and same thing, #2 shows up as dynamic and invalid with only option to convert to basic disk. is there any way i can view all those files i have in my #2 drive anymore?
 
Thanks for the thorough explanation.
I have the same exact board, it's a pretty decent one.
At this point don't connect any more drives to it, unless you don't value the data on them. I don't know about 'dynamic volumes' (never felt inclied to use this on windows or linux) but I assume it's just another symptom. Your data is probably still there, but the partition table might have become corrupted.
The 'bzbzbz' suggests serious corruption somewhere between the board's southbridge and the drives and IMHO this is the root cause we should focus on, especially when an inaccessed #2 drive also became weird.
We know your #1 drive is probably ok, and we know your #2 was ok right before all this. So, let's look elsewhere.
Do you have AHCI activated? i.e. do you see your drives listed on the 'first' bios screen (along with CPU info) or on the following screen (intel ahci bios bla bla)?
Try to toggle this between IDE/AHCI (windows 7 shouldn't mind) and the option below that (SATA native mode).
Another trick you can try is to put a jumper (computer OFF!) on pins 5&6 in the back of your #1 ( looky: http://eshop.macsales.com/imgs/ndesc/harddrives/westerndigital/jumpersettings_sata6g.gif ) this will force a sata speed downshift to SATA I, which might minimize the possibly occuring corruption.
I also think you should get a copy of hiren's boot cd, or some other Boot cd which has a good HDD utility like MHDD and test your drives/drive from there, instead of using windows.
MHDD can issue ATA I/O even when the bios has trouble identifying the drives. The MHDD commands you will have to type in are 'smart att' (check the reallocated sectors, pending sectors, UNC errors rows) and 'scan'.
If the above is too much (MHDD has some dangerous features), try to boot from a utility bootcd anyway and run some of the WD vendor utilities.
Overall all this looks like a dying southbridge or sata port circuitry, but sadly it's not trivial to diagnose, so sorry for the lengthy post :<
Hell, this can also be a power issue, I assume you're running your drives from one PSU cable. Try to use a SATA plug that is on another cable.
 
michalrz said:
Thanks for the thorough explanation.
I have the same exact board, it's a pretty decent one.
At this point don't connect any more drives to it, unless you don't value the data on them. I don't know about 'dynamic volumes' (never felt inclied to use this on windows or linux) but I assume it's just another symptom. Your data is probably still there, but the partition table might have become corrupted.
The 'bzbzbz' suggests serious corruption somewhere between the board's southbridge and the drives and IMHO this is the root cause we should focus on, especially when an inaccessed #2 drive also became weird.
We know your #1 drive is probably ok, and we know your #2 was ok right before all this. So, let's look elsewhere.
Do you have AHCI activated? i.e. do you see your drives listed on the 'first' bios screen (along with CPU info) or on the following screen (intel ahci bios bla bla)?
Try to toggle this between IDE/AHCI (windows 7 shouldn't mind) and the option below that (SATA native mode).
Another trick you can try is to put a jumper (computer OFF!) on pins 5&6 in the back of your #1 ( looky: http://eshop.macsales.com/imgs/ndesc/harddrives/westerndigital/jumpersettings_sata6g.gif ) this will force a sata speed downshift to SATA I, which might minimize the possibly occuring corruption.
I also think you should get a copy of hiren's boot cd, or some other Boot cd which has a good HDD utility like MHDD and test your drives/drive from there, instead of using windows.
MHDD can issue ATA I/O even when the bios has trouble identifying the drives. The MHDD commands you will have to type in are 'smart att' (check the reallocated sectors, pending sectors, UNC errors rows) and 'scan'.
If the above is too much (MHDD has some dangerous features), try to boot from a utility bootcd anyway and run some of the WD vendor utilities.
Overall all this looks like a dying southbridge or sata port circuitry, but sadly it's not trivial to diagnose, so sorry for the lengthy post :<
Hell, this can also be a power issue, I assume you're running your drives from one PSU cable. Try to use a SATA plug that is on another cable.
Click to expand...

The bzbzbzbzbz from BIOS is now gone, it now gives the model number of the hard drive, ran diagnostics again and I got this...

Root cause found:
ACLs on file C:\Windows\system32\slui.exe are not proper. Old value = 0x1f01df
Repair action: access control repair
Result: completed successfully

But everytime I try to start it up it will always start over after the Windows is starting screen

In response to your question, it says SATA AHCI is disabled, this was under 'Advanced BIOS features'

When i go to MB Intelligent Tweaker in the BIOS it right away shows this red box that windows has not booted correctly due to overclocking or changing of system voltages but I don't even overclock my PC =/
 
I'm still betting it's the motherboard, specifically the sata controller or related. Back up your data, and then back it up again!

Any spare hardware on hand to test with, another computer for instance? After you back things up, I would check it out with the HDD manufacturer tool...
 
in case anyone comes across this problem, only thing i could do was format the 1tb primary drive and then it worked, so i think i was victim to a virus. i just remembered that few months back i did get that FBI moneypak virus, i thought kaspersky got rid of it, but maybe not all of it

anyways, in order to fix the dynamic/invalid storage drive that i wasn't able to access, i extracted the data using testdisk as a backup, and then used HxD to edit the sector to change it to basic disk without losing data and that took care of it

not sure if this is the fix for the longrun, but i'm back up and running, thanks everyone for the input
 
BzBzBzBz is not a hard drive issue. It's a SATA cable connection issue. Blow out any dust if you see any inside the port, or on the cable connectors. Reconnect the SATA cable to the motherboard port and also to the hard drive. If reconnecting does not work, then use a brand new SATA cable, or one you know works. Warning: Even if reconnecting the SATA cable works you should not trust that particular cable. The best thing to do if you identify a SATA cable that is causing the BzBzBz error, then cut it in half and throw it away.
 
Be careful trying to run any disk repair utilities when you have a questionable sata port or cable, it could cause it to write gibberish to the drive trying to 'fix' it.
 
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