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Is this HDD toast?

G

Gnu314

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 12, 2004
Messages
343
Ok so I've been having serious issues with my hard drive. I've been getting a ton of BSODs while running in windows doing simple things. Often I'm just clicking around surfing the internet and it'll get a BSOD but I've been playing games or just click on like the start menu.

At first I'ed get BSOD and I'ed just reset and it was fine. Then it would crash and I'ed restart and get a dos error and then I'ed reboot again and everything was cool. Some of the errors I got were like, missing boot.ini, unable to load operating system, and others that I can't remember now. Later on it crashed and it wouldn't reboot for anything. I tried to reset but I'ed get errors one or two times then I'ed just get a blank screen (after my bios/mobo slash screen). I downloaded the Hitachi drive fitness tester which also automatically fixes errors. I ran it and after running the app it restarted and ran fine for a couple of hours before it crashed again. I did that a couple of times (crashing and running the uitility) but then the utility wouldn't work, it kept freezing at the same spot.

At that point my only option was to reformat. That worked for literally a day then this morning I went to turn on my comp and I got a black screen again, failure to boot.

I reset twice and it booted but windows gave me an error that it had to recover some registry settings from a log or something. A couple minutes later I was web browsing and it crashed. A couple more resets and now its back up but I don't know for how long.

I'm faily confident that the problem lies in the harddrive. This is a 120 gig SATA Hitachi Deskstar with 8meg cache. I can get the model number if it really makes a difference. I've got 2.25 years left on the warranty so thats not an issue. Is there anything left that I can do, is there anything I can do to positively diagnose the problem, or should I just RMA this thing? For that matter should I just run to best buy and pick up a new HDD?
 
Are you overclocked? If your PCI bus is too far out of spec HDs can have problems.
The HD test utility should be able to run a media test and see if the drive is ok. If it finds bad sectors the drive is on its way out.
Of course it could be your PSU, or even your mainboard. A bad disk controller can cause all sorts of nasty things to happen. What kind of PSU do you have?
 
Not overclocked at all except for the videocard which is factory. My rails are stable and within about 3% of spec at all times. Temps are all good. The utility hasn't reported any bad sectors but I'm not totally sure that it reports them.

My system is

Asus K8N
Thermaltake 480W PSU
1gig Corsair Value Select
BFG 6800 OC
NEC DVD burner

I'm really just trying to diagonse this problem so I can figure out what I need to do.
 
Any chance you can swap the drive out temporarily into another rig? That would be the easiest way I can think of...or maybe run memtest just to rule out the possibility of a flaky stick of RAM, or something like Sandra to stress different areas of the system and see if you can consistantly replicate the problem.

cheers
 
Naw, no extra drive. This is the first system I've built myself and the first system I've had with a SATA drive. I've never heard of Sandra but I'll see if I can find it and check it out.
 
Do you have another drive you could try? If it still fails that would at least narrow it down to the drive and the mobo (unlikely), or just the drive if you use an SATA one. If it works fine, then it's either the drive or if you're not using an SATA drive, the mobo (again, unlikely). In theory the SATA controller on the mobo could be bad, which would cause any SATA drive to have problems. That seems to be pretty rare though. Usually a bad mobo is more messed up. Either way, if swapping the drive fixes it I'd replace the drive.
Have you checked the Windows event logs? There may be some useful error messages in there. Generally speaking a bad disk or disk controller will create a pile of error messages in the logs even if the system doesn't crash. If a HD is dying, for every failed read there are usually a bunch of successfull retries.
You could also try putting Linux on the system. Sometimes it gives more useful error messages than Windows. They're generally more cryptic though, so you'll likely have to post them to get any useful information if you're not an experienced Linux user.
Personally I'd just go out and get another drive immediately. If you paid extra to get it from a reatil shop and can just exchange it do that. Otherwise I'd just buy another one. With the exceptions of cheap PSUs and perhaps optical drives, HDs are the most failure prone part of a system. Plus ATA & SATA drives are cheap, and you can never have too much disk space. Worst case you end up with extra disk space.
If you can stand waiting a couple days for it to show up and have the ca$h, I'd get a Raptor. Then once you RMA the drive or the other bad part you can use the Raptor for boot & apps and the other drive for storage. Well, actually I'd get a SCSI drive, but these days those only really make sense if you have a dual CPU rig since the SCSI card will get bottlenecked by the bus unless you have 64-bit slots or feel like coughing up $600 for a PCI-e HBA. Of course I'm expecting in a matter of months there will be PCI-e SCSI cards all over the place, and single CPU desktops will be able to take proper advantage of SCSI again. The SCSI interface may not have any particular advantage over SATA on a workstation anymore, but the fastest drives still only come in SCSI and FC-AL form.
 
Ok I ran memtest for about an hour, I had run it when the system was new 8 months ago too. Both times I've gotten no errors. I'll open up the Windows event log but what should I look for? I'm seeing a ton of "information" entries but not much else.

I don't really want to buy a new drive but I'm more than happy to do so if thats the real problem.
 
I'm sorry I hate to bump this but I'm really stuck trying to figure this thing out.
 
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