Dropped hard drive

[CTho9305]

my roomie dropped his laptop off his bed onto the hardwood floor... thast about a 4 foot fall. I had the machine mark the volume for checking with a bad sector scan and rebooted it. It replaced a bunch of bad clusters in various files. I just ran chkdsk again in windows, and here is the result (note the 41k in bad sectores). I'm obviously going to tell him to back up, but how would you determine if the drive is shitting itself further or if it will be stable? Run chkdsk again in a week and a month and lookfor changes?

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\my roommate>chkdsk
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is roommate.

WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is recovering lost files.
Recovering orphaned file BU988A~1.TXT (58835) into directory file 15034.
Recovering orphaned file my roommate@mediaplex[2].txt (58835) into director
y file 15034.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows found problems with the file system.
Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these.

29302528 KB total disk space.
20271352 KB in 39943 files.
13500 KB in 2864 indexes.
41 KB in bad sectors.
137422 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
8880212 KB available on disk.

512 bytes in each allocation unit.
58605056 total allocation units on disk.
17760424 allocation units available on disk.

C:\Documents and Settings\my roommate>

 

[Texun]

Once they start to go they usually keep on going. Check it again in a few days and see. The problem is most likely due to the surface area becoming damaged from a head slap when it was dropped. If there are microscopic bits of media whirling around in there, they will find their way between the head and surface area again which will result in more surface damage. I hope I am wrong.

I have a friend that had with a similar experience just a couple of weeks ago. His laptop was running really slow and he decided to wipe WinMe and reformat. The format found bad sectors. He called Dell and they had him run their diagnostic tool - all came back clean with no problems. A week later it went under for the last time. They are shipping him a new HD.

 

[CTho9305]

Yeah, thats basically what I was thinking. The head must have crashed to cause bad sectors, so the question is really if there is dust or the head is damaged. I'll have him run a complete scandisk again tonight and then every couple of days.

 

[ugh]

Have to agree with texun. My friend dropped his laptop and it killed the LCD screen. Somehow everything remained intact and I was able to salvage the HDD. Unfortunately, the HDD didn't survive another fall {g}

 

[everman]

Make sure you back up all your data because it can degenerate further if there's stuff flying around in there from the impact of the head on the disk.

 

[Texun]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
Yeah, thats basically what I was thinking. The head must have crashed to cause bad sectors, so the question is really if there is dust or the head is damaged. I'll have him run a complete scandisk again tonight and then every couple of days.

It isn't actually "dust," but particles of the media from the platter. Either way is bad news, bud.

everman is right about backing up your data. I helped a my friend burn his info to a CD but everything he added the following week was gone. He was almost mad about it but I didn't feel at all sorry for him. I told him, and even showed him how to do it. I also told him to hold Dell's trust at a distance since I have never seen bad sectors clear up on their own. His loss was his fault.