Primary drive repeated corruption; Please help!

[sanitystealer]

HI all, I'm in a tough situation and I think only my bret[H]ren can help..

I'll start at the top. I've taken a job supporting the troops in Afghanistan as a contractor, which is where I currently reside; this provides some unique roadblocks to resolution, namely my internet connection is extremely limited, and it take's a really long time to get replacement parts.

In preparation for deployment, I bought the [H]ardest laptop I could, the Alienware m18x (I know, dell sucks. ). I then put in my own hard drives, 1 512gb M4 as my primary and a 1tb internal for overflow (games, programs, music, etc). I also put in 8 gigs of kingston hyperx ram. I got the laptop a couple months before actual deployment, and after about a month the SSD encountered some major corruption issues. It began to bluescreen, and would almost immediately freeze after a new boot. I did some diagnostics myself, and the hard drive failed a scandisk miserably. I also did a manufacturer test of the rest of the components and they seemed to check out, but keep in mind this was a dell diagnostic utility so i'm not sure how reliable it is.

So anyway, cool I thought, I'll RMA the drive - reinstall everything and all will be good. And it was, for about another month. Right as I was preparing to deploy I had another BSOD on boot. F-----. I ran a scandisk, which seemed to uncover a ton of issues but also seemed to fix them. It was at this point that I freaked out and bought Acronis Trueimage and backed everything up, and then cloned the primary drive - in the event I encountered an issue overseas. It seems that scandisk didn't fix everything, as I'm now discovering many of my steam games are corrupted and unplayable. I've copied install folders from my backups, and either the backups are also corrupted or the copy doesn't quite fix things. Either way, I'm in hot water. I know that the hard drive is continually getting worse because occasionally copying the games from backup does fix corruption issues.

I'm going to RMA this drive again, but my main issue is - after having such similar issues right after one another, isn't it likely that something else in my laptop is causing the problem? What can I do to try to further diagnose this problem? Thanks in advance for the help, this laptop is my bastion of sanity. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

 

[drescherjm]

I would start by looking at the SMART and seeing if the drive is really bad. Corruption may not always be caused by a bad drive. To look at the smart install CrystalDiskInfo.

 

[hotcrandel]

Have you looked into the Crucial M4 firmware update?

It doesn't necessarily correlate with your issues, but its something you can try at least.

Otherwise, at least get your life running on the 1TB drive, see if the laptop functions with that without causing errors.

Then if/when you RMA/get back the SSD, either dual boot or swap drives or whatever.

 

[sanitystealer]

I would start by looking at the SMART and seeing if the drive is really bad. Corruption may not always be caused by a bad drive. To look at the smart install CrystalDiskInfo.

Alright, so I download the crystaldisk deal, and it says the drive is healthy, as far as I can tell. Here is a screenshot of what it's saying.

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[sanitystealer]

Have you looked into the Crucial M4 firmware update?

It doesn't necessarily correlate with your issues, but its something you can try at least.

Otherwise, at least get your life running on the 1TB drive, see if the laptop functions with that without causing errors.

Then if/when you RMA/get back the SSD, either dual boot or swap drives or whatever.

I'm in the process of updating to the latest firmware now. I am backing up in case it craps up mid-update, and acronis is giving me multiple errors that it can't read from multiple sectors. The SSD is mostly workable now, and I have a clone for it from a good while back - so I can use it as a stopgap until a replacement comes. I just want to make sure it's the drive at the root of the issue - not something else.

 

[crzykid71]

If you had windows installed originally on the regular harddrive & then later on the ssd you can have problems even if you formatted the harddrive, you'd be surprised how much is still on there. I would try to download/buy killdisc to run at boot, Don't run killdisc on the ssd it's way too write intensive, just wipe the 1tb, it will take a very long time. when that's done, reinstall-windows on the ssd with windows' gentle reformat & see if that helps

 

[sanitystealer]

If you had windows installed originally on the regular harddrive & then later on the ssd you can have problems even if you formatted the harddrive, you'd be surprised how much is still on there. I would try to download/buy killdisc to run at boot, Don't run killdisc on the ssd it's way too write intensive, just wipe the 1tb, it will take a very long time. when that's done, reinstall-windows on the ssd with windows' gentle reformat & see if that helps

Never had windows installed on my 1tb. I've always had the SSD as my primary, with other auxilary programs installed on the 1tb. But thanks for the suggestion

 

[dandragonrage]

If you had windows installed originally on the regular harddrive & then later on the ssd you can have problems even if you formatted the harddrive, you'd be surprised how much is still on there. I would try to download/buy killdisc to run at boot, Don't run killdisc on the ssd it's way too write intensive, just wipe the 1tb, it will take a very long time. when that's done, reinstall-windows on the ssd with windows' gentle reformat & see if that helps

Uhhh, Windows will run perfectly from a hard drive even if another copy of Windows is or was installed on a different hard drive, remnants or not. And it DEFINITELY wouldn't cause programs like Acronis to error. Wiping the 1TB is completely unnecessary and terrible advice.