Disk Usage spikes and services terminating in event viewer

[Zeee530]

Hi, i own an acer e5-575g laptop and after only about 6 months of usage the acer care center was reporting that my 256gb ssd had errors and needed replacing, unfortunately the laptop did not come with warranty so i continued using it regardless.

Just today i put on the system and it was excruciatingly slow to startup when it finally got to the desktop i opened task manager and noticed the disk usage was stuck at 100%. After several minutes the disk spike stops but happens occasionally every few minutes. Next i decided to check event viewer and saw a plethora of error messages of "The device, \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, has a bad block.". After each of these messages you find a message saying certain services have terminated unexpectedly. The services that reported this so far are:

cryptographic
dns client
workstation
network location awareness
remote desktop services
geolocation
bits
telephony
windows management instrumentation
user manager service
user profile service

Next i decided to try initializing the services myself and whenever i start each service in services, i notice disk usage in task manager spikes again to 100% and then comes down after a few seconds. When i check event viewer after this it reports the same plethora of hard disk error and then followed by that service i started and its dependencies terminating unexpectedly.

Does this mean the hard drive is finally dead or is it something else, i unfortunately still do not have finances to get a new SSD. I would actually prefer to get an NVME drive instead of another SSD so i can expand storage instead of replacing. If there is any temporary help i can get for this till then i'll be really grateful. Thanks.

EDIT: I ran the normal CHKDSK and it reported no errors, I'm now running CHKDSK /f /r /x, and been stuck on 19% for a while though

 

[mikeymikec]

SSD is dying. What you get out of it from here is pure luck.

You wouldn't be able to put an NVMe M.2 drive in there unless the laptop supports that. It's still an SSD whether it connects to SATA/whatever, and there's no question of SSD capacity in any case (you can get large or low capacity SSDs available with whatever connection method your laptop requires).

 

[Zeee530]

OK, thanks for the response, the laptop is not even a year old, is it common for SSDs to die after less than a year, I thought they were supposed to be an upgrade on HDD.

Also is there a way to check if it does support m.2 nvme?

My former computer had a HDD and I was using that for 5 years with no drive issue, if HDD have a longer lifespan I won't mind going back to that

 

[mikeymikec]

It's not common for any computer hardware to die within a year. I've seen a couple of SSDs die in my line of work, and many, many more HDDs.

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/ZA/content/model/NX.GDZEA.002
Since it lists a 2TB HDD as the only storage drive, no doubt you've got a variation on that model which swapped the HDD out for an SSD, but considering it can handle a HDD, it has to be SATA, so you should be looking for a SATA SSD.

I certainly wouldn't be recommending SSDs for pretty much all my customers if I thought they had a lower life span / were less reliable. I think you just got unlucky (or, considering you mentioned that it didn't come with a warranty, I think you bought it cheap elsewhere and someone put a crap SSD in it).

 

[Zeee530]

Thanks again, I actually bought the pc from amazon but because amazon didn't deliver to my location I had to buy through a 3rd party company that could ship to my location and that company didn't give warranty, so maybe its just bad luck.

Anyways is there anything i can do to maintain temporary operation of the computer before I can get a new drive? I've run chkdsk and it reported errors, but since chkdsk identifies the bad sectors and marks them so as not to be reused, do you think a reset of the OS, back to factory settings will allow it to install in the now identified healthy sectors and ignore the bad sectors?

 

[UsandThem]

Anyways is there anything i can do to maintain temporary operation of the computer before I can get a new drive? I've run chkdsk and it reported errors, but since chkdsk identifies the bad sectors and marks them so as not to be reused, do you think a reset of the OS, back to factory settings will allow it to install in the now identified healthy sectors and ignore the bad sectors?

You could try, but since this has been going on for a while, it would only be a matter of time before your OS became corrupted due to the drive dying.

You'd be much better off buying a new drive.

 

[Zeee530]

I think I'll try to get a HDD first since it's easily available where I am, won't have to order, my only issue is the windows license, is there anyway to apply it to a new drive or will I have to buy a new Windows

 

[UsandThem]

I think I'll try to get a HDD first since it's easily available where I am, won't have to order, my only issue is the windows license, is there anyway to apply it to a new drive or will I have to buy a new Windows

The license shouldn't have any issues activating if you're only changing the drive. If worse comes to worse, you might have to call in and activate by their automated phone system.

 

[Zeee530]

OK, thanks for all the help, I'll try to update you as i go along

 

[Zeee530]

After CHKDSK it seems system operation is somewhat back to normal, the sluggish start up seems to have disappeared and checking event viewer there is no longer a plethora of disk read errors showing up, the only errors showing up are for the services located in those dead sectors which the system has now ignored and can no longer be loaded, still holding my fingers that an OS reinstall might fix those, a system reset was unable to complete, reported an error.

I'm really still trying to hold things off for the m.2 nvme, expanding storage makes a lot more sense than replacing, just hoping the SSD can hold on till then, have backed up important files..