Corrupted files and sluggish harddrive behavior, but all test say good to go.

[joergeske]

I have a WD 1.5TB Sata drive installed on my system MB is a MSI GD-80A running a Z68 chipset. I am a photographer and store all of my raw images on the drive, but for some reason there are times when thumb nail files get corrupted, random images will get so corrupted they cant even be moved by windows, and at times when trying to access the drive the computer will just hang for 10 minutes trying to load explorer. My main system drive is a Intel SSD and I have 2 other HDDs attached to the machine as well. The SSD seems to run flawlessly as do the other HDDs. My natural assumption was that the drive is having some issues and needs replaced so I ran the WD diagnostic tool on it and backed everything up. The WD tool came up with no errors at all. This really surprised me, so now i am wondering if it could be my sata controller on the board, or some other issue. Ideas?

 

[Bubbaleone]

If WD diagnostics gave the drive a clean bill of health, and you have the same problem after moving your data back, it sounds like file system errors are the culprit.

Try running CHKDSK from the command prompt using the following switches:

chkdsk X: /x /v /f /r /b (replace X: with the actual drive letter).

With these switches a 1.5TB drive will take a while to complete, so be patient. You may want to run it overnight.


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[joergeske]

Interesting, this is probably a noob question, but when running check disk it decided to eat 18GB of memory and now windows pretty much came to a halt. Is that normal?

 

[Bubbaleone]

If you ran chkdsk with those switches, on a non-system drive, chkdsk unmounted the drive to have full access, and you're now sitting at your desktop looking at a command prompt, with Windows pretty much at a standstill. Yes...that would be typical. Don't worry, chkdsk is running and you'll just have to be patient until it finishes.

Edit:

Running chkdsk once a month, on all your drives, is a practice many Windows users don't adhere to. I guess that's either because it's a bit time consuming, or they're just not aware of the benefits. But IMHO the benefits of running chkdsk, on a regular once monthly schedule, outweighs any short-lived inconvenience. A little time spent on preventive maintenance of the NTFS file system is far preferable to the hair pulling that will eventually result when you don't.


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[jolancer]

I'm familiar with chkdsk but i have no knowledge on what the reasoning is why you think it should be ran if you have no issues? I always thought file system errors could only accure from a hardware defect, if not intentional such as a virus or something.

sound like he might have file system errors, but i don't think the file system is at fault, and the corrupted parts of the files may not be recoverable.. If there's no reason to suspect your system is infected with any type of virus, or your not on an old computer that maybe clogged with dust.... if your SSD is your OS harddrive and you say it sometimes Hang's, maybe ur issue is elseware like corrupt ram or overheating defective/improper installed cpu, or if its a custom build and a cheap PSU was used? if you still experience problems you may want to start other diagnostics then just HDD. You say you work with lots of raw image data, does that mean you also use a high end graphics card? those can overload proprietary PSU's

 

[pcgeek11]

It could be a memory issue. Run Memory test.

 

[Bubbaleone]

I'm familiar with chkdsk but i have no knowledge on what the reasoning is why you think it should be ran if you have no issues? I always thought file system errors could only accure from a hardware defect, if not intentional such as a virus or something.

File system errors do occur when the disk develops mechanical surface damage (hardware defect) to an area of the disk where data was already written. Chkdsk marks these areas as bad sectors; area that data can no longer be written to, and if the data can be recovered it's rewritten to a clean area of the disk. But that's only one type of error.

Other types of errors that chkdsk repairs, that have nothing to do with hardware defects, include unused index entries, invalid or corrupt security indexes, misreported journal entries, misreported file sizes and the worst three; incorrect volume bitmap, free space marked as allocated, and allocated space marked as free space.

These types of file system errors are cumulative; they start out as insignificant but over time will become significant errors. Running chkdsk on a regular monthly basis corrects these types of file system errors, before they ever become serious enough to cause problems.


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[skyrunner]

Can you explain the purpose of each of those switches? I am having a similar issue with one of my machines and I have run chkdsk without those switches and it doesn't detect problems. I also am running WinXP though so perhaps this won't apply to me?

 

[Bubbaleone]

Open an elevated command prompt and run; chkdsk /? , for a full description of each switch. I will point out that the /x switch will immediately dismount a volume (other than the system volume) and chkdsk will run on that volume from the desktop, rather than restarting the computer and having chkdsk run on that volume prior to booting to the login screen. Running chkdsk with these switches forces it to re-evaluate every sector and bad cluster, even if no sectors are flagged dirty.

The /v switch provides verbose reporting of any errors and the correction/s taken. If you'd like to create a log of what chkdsk repaired, the command line option to write chkdsk output to a text file looks like this:

chkdsk X: > Y:\<path>\<filename.txt>

Where X: is the drive being checked, and Y:\<path> is the path to the location you want the log file created in. For example:

chkdsk C: /x /v /f /r /b > C:\temp\chkdsklog.txt


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