drive dying ?

[rh71]

I left my PVR (hardware decoder) on all night which I normally don't do - I forgot to stop it from recording something before I went to bed. That's the only thing different today than other days. I usually leave the PC on anyway, but nothing running.

Anyway, all today, everything's been extremely slow to respond. [My computer] clicks through the directories are slow and so is doing things like bringing up a web browser. I tried running an AVG scan but that was going way too slow per file also. Still happening after a quick hard boot.

I thought it might have something to do with heat issues since I did leave my PVR on all night. I turn it off to let it cool down and upon turning it back on an hour later, I see it has trouble finding the drives to begin with. Another hard boot and it tells me primary hard disk fail. Another hard boot and it tells me boot.ini can't be read. I load in a boot disk and see that boot.ini is empty so I replace it with contents of a normal boot.ini.

Now all it's doing is loading slowly again but still won't get into Windows. The logo appears with the load bar but it reboots over and over. Trying safe mode now but it rebooted also.

Is this a sign of my hard drive failing ? Or software/files corrupted ?

 

[Spydermag68]

Were you recording? If so your drive might be full.

 

[rh71]

I was recording but it was to drive H: which is my 3rd hdd. I noticed it had 36MB left on it, but not C: ... that has 2.5GB left.

 

[imported_FishTaco]

Check the SMART status of the drive? It's hit or miss as to whether the SMART status will tell you of an impending failure but it can't hurt to check. Look on your drive manufacture's website for diagnostic software.

EDIT: Text in case you wanted more info about SMART.

 

[rh71]

Well I ran the Maxtor diagnostic against the drive after getting it to detect as the secondary master... It ran SMART and said the drive is indeed failing. I loaded into Windows and it was extremely slow and the drives never opened through My Computer.

Already ordered a replacement but I guess I'm sh!t outta luck at getting data from it... ?

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: rh71
Well I ran the Maxtor diagnostic against the drive after getting it to detect as the secondary master... It ran SMART and said the drive is indeed failing. I loaded into Windows and it was extremely slow and the drives never opened through My Computer.

Already ordered a replacement but I guess I'm sh!t outta luck at getting data from it... ?

The 80GB Maxtor that died a few weeks ago in my work system showed the exact same symptoms. Ran diagnostics that showed the drive was failing, but was able to backup the important data before it went belly up.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: rh71
Well I ran the Maxtor diagnostic against the drive after getting it to detect as the secondary master... It ran SMART and said the drive is indeed failing. I loaded into Windows and it was extremely slow and the drives never opened through My Computer.

Already ordered a replacement but I guess I'm sh!t outta luck at getting data from it... ?

I'd stop using it immediately. When you get the new drive set up with Windows and everything, hook up the failing drive as a slave and then try to extract your data. Everytime it spins up is 1 less chance you have of getting it to work. Some people have had luck freezing the drive then immediately hooking it up as a slave and extracting the data.

Good luck

 

[Injury]

Originally posted by: lxskllr
I'd stop using it immediately. When you get the new drive set up with Windows and everything, hook up the failing drive as a slave and then try to extract your data. Everytime it spins up is 1 less chance you have of getting it to work. Some people have had luck freezing the drive then immediately hooking it up as a slave and extracting the data.

Good luck

:thumbsup:

rh71, every post you have made has indicated a physical error in the drive. Using it anymore could make it "self destruct"... you really can't be certain what's wrong without running the risk of destroying it completely, but it's a safe bet that it's done for. If there is something pyhsically wrong with the drive, it could be broken in a manner where everytime it spins, a part inside is scraping against the platters...

So be certain to only use it when it's time to dump the data on to a new HD... even a disk recovery program cannot fix these errors or help destroyed data!

 

[rh71]

I'm using HDD Regenerator and it seems to be repairing bad sectors very well so far. Except it's extremely slow... (44mb checked across 120GB in 30 minutes). Within those 92000 sectors so far, 130 bad sectors have been found...

But say I wanted to just retrieve the last of 3 partitions from the drive... can I just repair the last 1/3rd of the drive (assuming equal sizes) ? Does it work that way ?