Weird HDD Failure, Let's Decipher the Event Log, You Know You Wanna!

M

Mencius

n00b
Joined
Oct 25, 2005
Messages
13
Hi all,

Well, the dreaded happened, one of my drives has carked it. A 160GB Samsung which has been running just fine, SMART indicators all within normal operating ranges. One morning windows didn't boot up properly, it just hung on "Windows is starting up" I forced a reboot and when I logged in my 160GB drive which I use for game/music/movie storage is there but it is unformatted and marked as RAW. When I try to open it Windows informs me it is corrupt and unreadable.

One thing to note, this drive was formatted as a dynamic disk, no good reason why, I was just a noob when I set it up and didn't know what I was doing. I haven't ever got around to reformatting it into basic.

Anyway, my data is all gone, a quick scan with Easy Recovery leads me to believe I can probably get most of it back. What I really want to ask here is how on earth this happened?!? I believe the hardware is still more or less ok, if SMART is anything to go by, but a quick perusal of the event log is where things start to get ugly.

The event log shows me approximately 1000 dmio "information", "warning", and "error" messages. Should I have seen these sooner? Maybe, but they only go back 14 days and I don't obsessively check the log every week. As an aside it is very irritating that critical drive failure information like this is hidden from the user, I would have liked to be alerted by the OS personally.

Anyway, my question is what are dmio warnings/information/errors? I will copy a couple of the relevant messages in here and I would really like some help trying to understand what these mean. As far as I can tell they are "bad" but what are they about? Do they indicate file system, software, or hardware failure? Could it be a faulty cable or controller? Could it be the motherboard? Or is it most likely just the end of the road for this drive?

Note that although the message changes from harddisk1 to harddisk2 I'm 99% sure they are the same disk, I swapped it to another SATA controller at one point.

First Error (Two Weeks Ago):
Source: dmio
Category: none
Event ID: 30
Type: information

Description:
dmio: Harddisk2 write error at block 312581807: status 0xc0000010

These errors spam a considerable amount of the log over the next 8-9 days with the same block and status numbers until we get this one:

Source: dmio
Category: none
Event ID: 30
Type: Information

Description:
dmio: Harddisk1 write error at block 6160447: status 0xc0000185

Simultaneously with this error these other two occurred:
Source: dmio
Category: disk
Event ID: 57
Type: warning

Description:
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

Source: dmio
Category: none
Event ID: 37
Type: warning

Description:
dmio: Disk Harddisk1 block 6160447 (mountpoint H:): Uncorrectable write error

These errors continue for the the remaining days, dmio warnings mixed with dmio infomation messages, until the drive fails. They are a mixture of write errors and read errors and occur at several different blocks, new ones come up occasionally.

I really do wish Windows had told me this was happening instead of silently filling the event log, oh well. Anyway, could you wizards help me diagnose this situation?

System:
Windows XP SP2
CPU: AMD 3400+
GPU: Nvidia 6800GS
RAM: 1GB Generic
Motherboard: Albatron K8X800 Pro II V2.0
Chipset: VIA K8T800/8237
I am a gamer and so keep all my drivers constantly up to date.

EDIT: Could this problem be related to dynamic disks as this might imply? I also found this but I do not really understand it, also the message is a little different.
 
Joe Average said:
It's dead, Jim. :)

/thread
Click to expand...

"He's worse than dead Jim... HIS BRAIN IS GONE!!" *gasp*

Ahhhh well yeah you're probably right. I just really wondered if this could have been something to do with it being a dynamic disk. At least for the price I paid for it a couple years back I'll be able to replace with one 3-4x the size nowadays.

Here's hoping Easy Recovery gets it all back.
 
Hopefully you kept backups, it seems like it's a concept that is easy to picture conceptually yet so difficult for many of us, even experienced users, to undertake until we've been burned with data loss. :(
 
If you ever encounter write errors, it's a very safe bet to say that it's hardware related and a sign of potential if not already happening hardware failure.

Find the manufacturer's diagnostic utility for their drives and run the Quick and the Advanced tests on that drive. If it comes up clean on both, then write it off (no pun intended) as a glitch that happened and doesn't show any signs of re-occurring based on the actual drive mechanics - that's the purpose of the diagnostic. But don't just run the Quick, seriously - it's not thorough enough.

If you happen to own a drive that doesn't have a utility, which is very rare, get the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and let it roll over it and see what happens. *ANY* errors at all are a sign of issues.

Also, use something like the free version of HDTune to check out the S.M.A.R.T. status on the drive to make sure it's ok or "Green" across all the stats.
 
Hopefully you kept backups, it seems like it's a concept that is easy to picture conceptually yet so difficult for many of us, even experienced users, to undertake until we've been burned with data loss.
Click to expand...

You're absolutely right unfortunately. Getting a big backup drive has been on my "to do" list for too long, so sadly I may have lost some stuff in this failure. I think I'll be able to get a fair bit back though and it is a wake up call. I'm just really glad it wasn't my OS/Email/Critical Apps drive that died. One thing's for sure, when I go buy a replacement for this failed drive I'm going to be picking up a big all-purpose backup drive too!
 
Just a quick followup here, I used Easy Recovery and I guess I was really lucky or something because I seem to have got everthing back. Can't find anything missing.

Is this normal? Does it mean maybe that the drive was only moderately damaged or something?
 
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