suspicious behavior - hard drive failure?

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Rangoon

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I have been struggling with Steam lately. It won't connect, it freezes (bootstrapper does not respond), it slows my computer to a crawl. Scouring the web for solutions, for which there is much voodoo, the one I'm left with is a hard drive failing. Steam is installed on my WD Black 1TB HDD. I have also noticed other file operations taking too long sometimes, but not always.

I have run chkdsk on startup a few times, but never get a wininit log. Is that another sign of the drive failing? I get no report at all, so can't tell what's going on. And I can't view the scan because my ASROCK motherboard won't display the scan progress, only colored pixel garbage at the top of the screen during scans.

How can I verify the drive is failing other than waiting for things to get worse? Can anything be done? I have a 5-year warranty with WD, so will call on that of course, but want to see if it's the drive first. Windows 7 is on my C: drive which is an Intel SSD.
 
I would download WD Data Lifeguard, which is Western Digital's utility. If the drive is bad, you'll need the error code from there, anyway.
 
Ringo_McFadden said:
I would download WD Data Lifeguard, which is Western Digital's utility. If the drive is bad, you'll need the error code from there, anyway.
Click to expand...

IMO this tool is made for WD to deny warranty claims, on failing drives.

I have a WD Green that is clearly failing. It is showing the classic signs. It takes a long time to respond to reads/writes, often locking up whatever program is trying to access it. When I record TV on the drive and it is now messed up consistently(fully of skips errors, despite a full signal), and finally if I check it with 3rd party Smart reader, it has 1400+ pending sector count, and about 80 uncorrectable bad sector count.

Now I just ran the WD data lifeguard smart test and all it does is report passed on clearly failing drive.

Sure run WD software, which will probably tell you drive is fine. But also run decent third party software that actually reports problmes like HDtune or freebie Crystal Disk Info.
 
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IMO this tool is made for WD to deny warranty claims, on failing drives.
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I believe that and SeaTools main purpose is to reduce the # of RMAs not to protect your data.
 
Mine is out of warranty anyway, but it was still annoying to have Data Lifeguard report my drive as passed. I think I have had 3 WD fail in exactly the same way around 15000-20000 hours. This is seems to the real planned lifespan of a WD drive.

Now the question is what to replace with, but I should start a new thread for that.
 
After passing the SMART test, I started the long sector test, which seem to be choking regularly. after running a bit, it was estimating 5 hours, 8.5 hours later it is still estimating 2.5 hours and it regularly slows to a crawl which is probably reading bad sectors all over the place. I expect it will run another 8+ hours, since it is barely moving now.

It will be a huge laugh if this also passes the long sector test, since it seems to be struggling to complete it.

To the OP, I think you are in the same boat. You HD is failing. The delays are caused by it regularly going into deep error recovery mode. I would check SMART info with 3rd party tool like Crystal Disk Info I linked before. This will likely give you some idea what is going on.

Then contact WD to see what you have to do to get a replacement. You may have to use their useless software, and then fight if the software claims your failing drive is OK. There should be a lawsuit about this bogus software for warranty claims. Once a drive starts regularly doing long error recovery, it is nearly unusable, despite bogus claims from WD Lifeguard that your drive has passed.
 
Rangoon said:
I have been struggling with Steam lately. It won't connect, it freezes (bootstrapper does not respond), it slows my computer to a crawl. Scouring the web for solutions, for which there is much voodoo, the one I'm left with is a hard drive failing. Steam is installed on my WD Black 1TB HDD. I have also noticed other file operations taking too long sometimes, but not always.

I have run chkdsk on startup a few times, but never get a wininit log. Is that another sign of the drive failing? I get no report at all, so can't tell what's going on. And I can't view the scan because my ASROCK motherboard won't display the scan progress, only colored pixel garbage at the top of the screen during scans.

How can I verify the drive is failing other than waiting for things to get worse? Can anything be done? I have a 5-year warranty with WD, so will call on that of course, but want to see if it's the drive first. Windows 7 is on my C: drive which is an Intel SSD.
Click to expand...
I would concur that the drive is suss but as you have it running on a cheaper board and unknown software and drivers installed, nobody can be certain.


SnowDog: The answer is clear for your issues however, get your own thread if you want to discuss your own issues rather than hi-jacking others.
 
I had a wd 1tb black that was sounding strange and passed all the wd diagnostics and the tech said to just rma it. It was making a slight grinding sound when reading.
After they received my drive, they emailed me and told me they didn't have any 1tb blacks available and if I would take a 2tb black instead. I said hell yeah, I'll take a 2tb black instead.
 
Lost-Benji said:
I would concur that the drive is suss but as you have it running on a cheaper board and unknown software and drivers installed, nobody can be certain.
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This is helpfull how?

SnowDog: The answer is clear for your issues however, get your own thread if you want to discuss your own issues rather than hi-jacking others.
Click to expand...

Ah yes, the self proclaimed thread police. Call the waaambulance while you are at it. My post isn't off topic, it is relating a similar situation to the OP, and my experience running the previously suggested WD Lifeguard tools.

It is a heck of a lot more useful here than your belittling of his motherboard.
 
Snowdog said:
This is helpfull how?
Click to expand...
Well if you worked with systems enough, you would be well aware that shitty drivers (common as hell these days) and dodgy boards/chipsets add up to a serious possibility.

Stop telling you life story and get to the point.


Put suspect drive in another system and test it.
 
I have used SeaTools to Fix bad sectors on many of my drives. It works for that but nothing else. Keep in mind I have about 8 seagate drives in my multiple computers, with multiple drives in them. Only 2 of them have made me use SeaTools and when the bad sectors are fixed they have worked fine.
 
Odd, that. I've never had real trouble due to bad sectors in my life. When my disks grew old (40000+ hrs, mostly WD Green 1T+ stuff), they simply packed up and went away, all at once.

Which is rather annoying. I'd like to have some advance warning of imminent disk failure next time. To save me some worry during resilvering.

Trade? Your failing disks against my failed ones? ;)
 
Rangoon said:
I have been struggling with Steam lately. It won't connect, it freezes (bootstrapper does not respond), it slows my computer to a crawl. Scouring the web for solutions, for which there is much voodoo, the one I'm left with is a hard drive failing. Steam is installed on my WD Black 1TB HDD. I have also noticed other file operations taking too long sometimes, but not always.

I have run chkdsk on startup a few times, but never get a wininit log. Is that another sign of the drive failing? I get no report at all, so can't tell what's going on. And I can't view the scan because my ASROCK motherboard won't display the scan progress, only colored pixel garbage at the top of the screen during scans.

How can I verify the drive is failing other than waiting for things to get worse? Can anything be done? I have a 5-year warranty with WD, so will call on that of course, but want to see if it's the drive first. Windows 7 is on my C: drive which is an Intel SSD.
Click to expand...

My brothers HDD showed the exact same signs! WD Tools is worthless for diagnostics because his drive passed all the tests. Use HD Tune or something similar and do a R/W test and various SMART tests. My brothers WD Black 1TB reported R/W speeds of 5MB-130MB. The graph looked like an EKG machine with all the drops it had. It caused his games to hiccup constantly, tons of download issues, slow boot, etc.. He probably had less than 2K hours on that drive too.
 
NickJames said:
My brothers HDD showed the exact same signs! WD Tools is worthless for diagnostics because his drive passed all the tests. Use HD Tune or something similar and do a R/W test and various SMART tests. My brothers WD Black 1TB reported R/W speeds of 5MB-130MB. The graph looked like an EKG machine with all the drops it had. It caused his games to hiccup constantly, tons of download issues, slow boot, etc.. He probably had less than 2K hours on that drive too.
Click to expand...

This does seem to be the way WD drives fail. They do extreme error recovery taking up to a minute on each sector, but if they can eventually pull out the data, they still show the drive as good, despite the fact that a drive that drive is pretty much unusable.
 
Thanks for all of the replies here. I wound up finally getting through a Check Disk routine on startup, and it did report bad sectors. My drive was still under warranty, and WD made the RMA process very easy on me. They immediately sent out a new drive, and I got busy trying to recover as much data as possible. It wasn't beautiful, but things worked out without too much important data lost. I had to reinstall/verify a bunch of games, but thankfully not much else.

The drive was never grinding. Just the slow response and failures some have described here due to, presumably, the deep recovery routines.

The other irritating issue was just that I could never see details of progress or current tasks in the check disk routine because of this anomaly with the motherboard not displaying anything but colored strips of random pixels where there should have been information. I finally realized that I could skip the routine by using a PS/2 keyboard. My USB keyboard works just fine for BIOS commands, starting safe mode, selecting options etc., but for some reason WOULD NOT work for skipping chkdsk. But the PS/2 did. Still, at least it eventually got through a scan and came up with proof (which I did not need) for WD to honor the warranty.
 
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