Does corrupted drive = dead drive?

[Sondra]

I have enormous problems with dying drives and I don't know why.

Today a pretty new drive and the even newer one I replaced it with both died--or ? Both suddenly became unusable and a message said the drive was corrupted and I had to run chkdsk. I didn't run it because in the past, after giving this message, chkdsk has destroyed all or nearly all the information on drives and then the drives die anyway. It looks like that's happening again.

I've tried replacing the motherboard and power supply. I gone to computer shops and they've never heard of this. Could it mean anything but a dead or nearly dead drive?

Currently I have XP Pro, 3GHz Pentium 4, 512MB DDR, Intel D865PERL motherboard, Codegen 450 watt power supply, several hard drives of different brands. This has happened with different configurations.

 

[montag451]

can you try the hdd in a friend's computer?

 

[jackschmittusa]

Do you install/copy anything from floppys regularly? Possible boot sector virus?

 

[meltdown75]

monty! you switched your avatar dude!!

chkdsk doesn't hurt the drive. it helps it. if you run chkdsk and lose data, i think you can assume that the data was corrupt - you wouldn't want it if chkdsk doesn't like it. what i would do is link it up to another computer as a slave drive, go into command prompt and run "chkdsk *: /f" (* being drive letter). if you don't have access to another system, throw a DOS boot disk in and run chkdsk from there. after it is completed put it back in the rig it is to be used in and see if it boots. when it does run scandisk from within windows. it may very well pick up more junk. then i'd run a full virus scan, before shutting down again - make sure the boot sector is scanned as well. I use AntiVir personally. good luck.

 

[Uncle Bob]

are you overclocking? an overclocked pci bus can often lead to corrupted data on hard disks.

 

[Sondra]

I have copied files from my old drives, on my internal removable drive tray, and from my old computer, which is connected to the Internet. The copies are via CD and a flash drive and I only download files from commercial sites. I just did an online Trend Micro scan of that computer and flash drive and it said zero infected files.

I don't have a UPS, but both computers are plugged into the same outlet strip, and the old computer (a Compaq FreePC) has been running the same hard drive since 1999. On a radio computer show, a woman said three hard drives had died on the same motherboard and a caller said it must be the fault of the power supply or the motherboard. I've had the same problem with two motherboards and two power supplies.

This time I had uninstalled SP2, with only the system drive connected, and then installed a chipset update file downloaded from Intel, with the first drive to die connected. It seemed fine at first but suddenly became corrupted a few hours later.

I can try the drives at a computer shop where I copied some files onto a new drive the last time, but last time, the corrupted drives didn't suddenly turn OK.

 

[Sondra]

I wouldn't know how to overclock and I doubt the guy who installed the motherboard would do it.

As for chkdsk being good, I used to feel glad it would know when it needed to be run--till it started destroying huge gobs of my data. I also became afraid of defragmenting when that started leading to disaster. What really worries me is how the drives got corrupted and how to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks for the chkdsk info. I'll probably take it to a shop rather than run the computer right now. Getting the latest power supply gave me a false sense of security. Now I'm back to living in terror of both the computer and the drives individually.

 

[montag451]

The system I am using at the moment has a sorta strange problem along these lines.

If i plug a drive into it, mebbe 3 / 10 times the drive will never work again........

Everything else is ok, I blame it on a dodgy earth in psu - but what the hell - i learnt my lesson -
this ole girl doesnt like to be tinkered with.

 

[SemperFi]

Have you tried a new ribbon cable?

I was doing some hacking on my tivo a while back and I put on a drive then another then another. was getting lots of errors. I used the maxtor utilities and they came back with error code on all of them. By chance I put on a new cable and the same drives tested ok and I continued to hack away.

 

[Sondra]

The shop owner who installed the new motherboard and power supply had two suggestions.

One was to change the cables. That's easy and seemed to make sense, but both failed drives are slaves. Is it likely the slave on a cable would fail and not the master? (Both cables are on the motherboard.)

The other thing he said was to first use only the system drive, and if that worked for a while add another drive and keep adding till I find one that doesn't work and that's supposed to show where the problem is. I don't really understand this. All the drives were working and then suddenly one didn't and then suddenly another didn't. And the drive that was in the removable tray at that time worked fine till I turned off the computer, and when I turned on the computer again, suddenly that one didn't work. When I tried plugging it in where the first failed drive had been, it still didn't work.

So, can I get useful knowledge by this method? If another drive fails, I don't know how to interpret that. If it fails in a week--a month--or more, what could I do with that knowledge? I'm also afraid to buy another computer and try to use the drives in it, even to transfer files.

 

[Uncle Bob]

Well, hard drive failures are fairly common due to the fact that there are a lot of precision mechnical components in a hard disc and they can be adversely affected by heat/dust and vibration.

Having said that, what you describe does not sound like a typical hard drive failure (and I do have quite a lot of experience in this area).

Whilst I realise that your data has become corrupted, are the drives really faulty? Have you tried running the manufacturers diagnostic software on any of them?

Is there a strong magnetic field anywhere close by, is the computer in a location where it can be knocked or is subject to vibration of any sort?

might the problem be related to the software you use? do you use database software or video editing software?

is the computer subject to power failures or is it sometimes switched off without using the windows shutdown procedure?

 

[Sondra]

Uncle Bob, your reply really piqued my interest. If these are not typical drive failures, what is different about them?

I haven't tried diagnostic software. Do I have to use each manufacturer's software on corresponding drives?

If the information really is corrupted, then the drive might as well be dead, since I want the information and the hardware is supposed to keep it. If I can reformat the drives and start over, that's only good if the same thing doesn't happen again.

I don't know what would cause a strong magnetic field. That computer is right next to the older one I'm using now, which doesn't suffer these problems. Both are on the floor, attached to the same outlet strip. I only turn off the computer without shutting down Windows if it locks up and that happens much more often on the one I'm using now. Shops I've taken it to shut it off with the off button, but it isn't in the shop all that long. I can't recall any power failures while it's been on and few and when it's been off. I've used it occasionally in the rain but have used the other one more often in rain and lightning, with no noticeable effects.

I do usually leave the sides off the case, since I'm in there changing drives so often. While it gets dusty, it's it's been cleaned with a can of air more often than the other computer. The older one is almost completely covered right now, but that one has spent a lot of time completely open, too, and was in the same room as the other--both under lots of plastic--when painters did some sanding. The only thing I can think of that causes vibration is a washing machine in a nearby room that might run an hour or so a week.

I don't use database software. I do use Adobe Premiere 6 video editing software--which I've had enormous problems with--very often. This is one similarity the other machine doesn't have. But the drives didn't start dying till I'd used Premiere steadily for one and a half to two years, and the worst began after almost three and a half years, after putting in the, I think, fourth power supply. It continued after putting in the second motherboard and the fifth power supply.

How would video editing software contribute to these problems, and, if it does, why doesn't this happen to more people who use it?

 

[Uncle Bob]

Sondra,

My day job is a hardware support engineer and I replace several hard discs a month. Hard drive failures usually fall into one of four categories

1. controller or power circuit failure, drive may spinup but won't be found by computer
2. head crash - drive will continually reinitialise resulting in a continuous seek-click-seek-click noise
3. motor or bearing failure - drive won't spin up properly or will be very noisy
4. bad sectors - certain spots on the drive will go bad, the data is lost and a reformat will not resolve the problem

None of these sound like what you're experiencing as I understand your post;

I think you do need to establish, as a first step, if your drives are *actually* faulty or failing. To do this download the diagnostic software from the manufacturer (they are specific) of the drive you want to test or ask your dealer to carry out this test for you. Modern disc drives have quite sophisticated self monitoring software built in and the diagnostic software will be able to tell how many hours use the drive has had, how many power cycles and how many soft/hard errors have been experienced. If you have more than one drive that has given problems, check those as well.

Assuming your drives do check out OK, you can be 99.9% sure that your problem lies elsewhere.

A good friend of mine runs Premier 6.5 on his system (actually he also runs Premier Pro on dual boot system but that's another story) and he quite often gets corrupted .avi files that either won't load or cause Premier to behave very strangely. He never gets any chkdsk warnings though..... having said that he has seperate capture/edit/export drives which not on the same physical drive as Windows.....


Let me know how you get on

 

[Sondra]

Uncle Bob, I was going to put off replying till I got the nerve up to turn on that computer again and do the test. But maybe it will give me courage to write first.

Running chkdsk would tell me about bad sectors, and Windows wanted to run chkdsk on these drives and I wouldn't let it. When this has happened on other drives, it has often wiped out most or all the content, sometimes listing many bad sectors (sometimes none), and soon afterward the drives die and are not recognized by the computer. Sometimes they just disappear without chkdsk asking to check them. So my dying drives don't seem so different to me from the cases you mentioned--except that the drives I described above seem to be in the early stage of the ultimate demise.

Interesting about your friend's problems with Premiere and video files. I've had many problems with Premiere, but they could only be caused by corrupt video files if the corruption is subtle enough to allow them to appear to work normally for a time. As with your friend, most of the files on all my drives except the system drive are AVI (and some still image) files. And the most recent drive became corrupted while I was transferring video files to it. If problems with the video files could be found and corrected, that might solve it. Could SpinRite or another program do that?

 

[stevty2889]

I am curious as to what your case temps are like, and if you are monitoring your voltages. A weak or dying PSU that does't supply enough power to the hard drives, can cause them to keep becoming corrupted. I have never heard of a Codegen PSU, so I am a bit suspicious of that. Also memory problems can lead to hard drive corruption as well. I suggest running memtest on your ram, and if you aren't already, get a program that can monitor your temps and your voltages. If MBM5 supports your motherboard, I highly recomend using it, as it will keep track of highs and lows, so it makes it easy to see dips in voltage, or high temps.

 

[ttown]

you've swapped mobo's and power-supplies and experienced multiple dying drives....

Are the drives controlled from the mobo's ide port? Or do you have a seperate drive controller that may be the culprit?
How about swapping the data cable -- possible cracked wire/connection?

Just tossing out ideas....

 

[Sondra]

All four installed drives are currently on the motherboard, but I think drives have also died on the IDE controller. The removable drive tray has been on both and I think drives in it have stopped working in both positions (and more than one tray).

I don't know much about temperatures and voltages. I guess I could monitor them and see if I notice any relationship to the crashes. The current power supply was suggested by the shop owner, who seemed to have faith in it. The Antec before it was highly touted by another shop owner. (Both installed the products.) There were a couple of drive deaths before I got it, but they became more frequent soon after I got it. But that is now continuing without it.

Is memtest part of Windows XP? I did have a problem once with random system crashes due to bad RDram. (Now I have DDR.) About five video files were corrupted at that time. No hard drives died. The recent series of deaths and/or corruptions is very different from that experience.

Does it sound unlikely that the files may be involved? I had problems from the beginning with Premiere 6 crashing all the time, although a short use of the Premiere Pro demo didn't show the same problems. Adobe tech support thought it could be a motherboard conflict, yet here I am with a different motherboard having the same and added problems with Premiere 6. I imported the files into Premiere via firewire from DVCam. I'm just thinking--if the files caused the Premiere problem (which I still don't know)...could they be doing something to the drives?