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What's wrong with my HDD?

K

KrypticMind

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 20, 2006
Messages
64
So this morning, my PC did not move on from the Loading Windows screen. I left it there for half an hour just to be sure. After some testing, I've isolated it down to the HDD, a Hitachi HDS721616PLA380.

I tried to do the system repair in order to fix whatever it was that was causing me boot problems. The screen remained black after the loading screen, though. Next I tried to use my Windows 7 CD to boot system repair. After clicking Next on the language choice screen, the next part didn't appear. What confirmed that it was the HDD at fault was that I connected it to another PC, and the PC couldn't load as it usually did. When I disconnected the HDD, the PC booted up fine. I checked that the good drive had first priority boot. Perhaps I did something wrong?

Anyway, is there anything I can do to save the drive and boot from it again? Or is it dead and I'll have to get a new one?
 
The failed disk prevents your other computer from booting when you have both good and bad disks connected? That's weird.
Can you see the failed drive in the BIOS of any of these 2 computers?

Running chkdsk from a bootable CD might fix your problem.
If you get up to the Loading Windows screen, all hope is not lost: At least some of the disk is working and you might be able to read it from USB if it's the SATA interface that prevented the other computer from booting too. You'll need one of these $15 USB/IDE/SATA connector, though, if you want to retrieve your data this way.

But, yeah, you probably should order a new one ASAP if all that fails.
 
Yeah, I can see the drive on both PCs.

I just tried doing a "chkdsk c: /f /r" using NTFS4DOS, and I still have the same symptoms. :(
 
I've seen a failed drive cause the motherboard to hang. Sometimes during the initial POST, other times when the OS boot tries to start. In either case it was bad news.

What might work would be to get the machine booted from another drive, or a boot CD (ubcd is handy for this). Then attach the broken drive to a USB-to-SATA external adapter. See if the booted session can access the data on the drive. If not then you're probably SOL.
 
I have a new HDD coming in. Once I bust out my backups and get settled in again, I'll have to get a USB/SATA adapter thing as it looks like my only choice if I want to save some of my saved files from games that annoyingly place their saved files in My Docs.
 
The failed disk prevents your other computer from booting when you have both good and bad disks connected? That's weird.
Click to expand...
Not weird at all and very common.

OP, wkearney99's advice is right on the button. ;)
 
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