Help me diagnose this [Part 2, the saga continues!]

[krnmastersgt]

Well recently after filling one of my storage drives up (1.5TB Seagate Barracuda) I started to have my computer ask me to run Check Disk on boot-up. I thought maybe one of the files I had transferred from another system was infected so I ran an AVG scan, Malwarebytes scan, and Trend Micro's Housecall. All 3 scans showed my system to be completely clean.

Then I started getting a weird bug (I've had this long before) during a game of LoL, so I decided to quickly restart to fix it (still not sure what causes it but a restart always fixes it). However what I expected to be a several second re-boot just hung on the Windows splash. After much checking I discovered the problem to be 1 of 2 mechanical drives in the system (still not sure which, will check tomorrow [assuming its the 1.5TB though]). Once those were both unplugged my system boots up just fine.

So my question is, if it's not a virus, what is it? I thought maybe a corrupted sector but I don't see why that would interfere with the boot process when the OS is completely installed on my SSD. Would rather not have to format the drive considering how long a back-up of it would take, the files can be replaced I'd just much rather not (lots of shows/movies/misc. files). Any other ideas on what this might be?

 

[bbhaag]

Have you tried running chkdsk on the Seagate drive? It might help pin point the problem.
Also, were their any logs in the event viewer to help narrow down why windows hung on shut down?

 

[T_Yamamoto]

My stupid 250gb HDD asks for a boot check on windows when it starts. (Os is on the 250gb HDD)

Its defragemented and no virus. Yet still wants to disk check every time I boot up

 

[krnmastersgt]

Have you tried running chkdsk on the Seagate drive? It might help pin point the problem.
Also, were their any logs in the event viewer to help narrow down why windows hung on shut down?

Sorry if that's what it sounded like, the shut-down proceeded without incident, it just hung on the Windows splash when it was booting up (usually only on it for 2-4 seconds). And I did not run chkdsk on the drive prior to this incident because I thought it would just be a waste of my time for a 1TB+ drive that's only ever been used for file storage.

However I would run it now if I could, but with the drive hooked up the system just hangs so I'll be looking for my enclosure again so I can run some sort of diagnostic on the drive hopefully. There is still a chance of a virus (I always think there's a chance, but one that can evade 3 scans would be rather annoying).

As for checking event viewer, there's quite a lot of meaningless "errors" that it's reporting but I can't find anything that fits the timeframe of this incident. It seems that Windows doesn't notice it as a serious problem, but won't boot until the drive does something (perhaps start-up). I'll try hooking up the drive again but have it not power up until I try accessing it to see if the drive is still accessible.

My stupid 250gb HDD asks for a boot check on windows when it starts. (Os is on the 250gb HDD)

Its defragemented and no virus. Yet still wants to disk check every time I boot up

Ever have any problems with the drive? And did you run chkdsk on it and see anything out of the ordinary?

 

[mfenn]

Chkdsk is run due to file system corruption, it doesn't really have anything to do with malware (though malware can certainly cause corruption).

If the wrong sector is bad on a disk (i.e. one containing critical file system metadata), it can definitely cause a hang during boot when the OS tries to access the drive. Even Windows is installed on the SSD, it still has to touch every disk in the system to mount your other file system volumes. This is because every time you mount or unmount an NTFS file system, a little bit of data is written indicating that the drive is currently mounted/unmounted, the time it was last mounted, etc.

So in short, I'm betting that one of your drives is developing bad sectors and you got unlucky (lucky?) that is was something that would present an immediate problem.

 

[krnmastersgt]

Chkdsk is run due to file system corruption, it doesn't really have anything to do with malware (though malware can certainly cause corruption).

If the wrong sector is bad on a disk (i.e. one containing critical file system metadata), it can definitely cause a hang during boot when the OS tries to access the drive. Even Windows is installed on the SSD, it still has to touch every disk in the system to mount your other file system volumes. This is because every time you mount or unmount an NTFS file system, a little bit of data is written indicating that the drive is currently mounted/unmounted, the time it was last mounted, etc.

So in short, I'm betting that one of your drives is developing bad sectors and you got unlucky (lucky?) that is was something that would present an immediate problem.

My 500GB in the system had this problem occur some time ago, was only causing strange Windows behavior so I was able to back it up and DBAN the drive which seemed to completely fix the issue. Your explanation of the issue makes sense, though I can't believe the luck of it corrupting just as I was topping off the drive

Still no luck finding my enclosure for today, so I'll just be popping into Fry's tomorrow and picking up a cheap one to see if I can't find someway of fixing the drive. If not I have a few externals I could just back-up the entire thing on and reformat, though I'd imagine copying 1.5TB to an external, then back onto the drive itself is going to take quite a few hours to complete :\

 

[bbhaag]

I know this rarely works but you could try running Chkdsk with the /f and /r parameters on the Seagate drive at start up and see if that helps.
It has been my experience though that this is very hit an miss as to actually fixing the problem. Most of the time it limps the drive along just enough to get any important data off it.

 

[mfenn]

My 500GB in the system had this problem occur some time ago, was only causing strange Windows behavior so I was able to back it up and DBAN the drive which seemed to completely fix the issue. Your explanation of the issue makes sense, though I can't believe the luck of it corrupting just as I was topping off the drive

Still no luck finding my enclosure for today, so I'll just be popping into Fry's tomorrow and picking up a cheap one to see if I can't find someway of fixing the drive. If not I have a few externals I could just back-up the entire thing on and reformat, though I'd imagine copying 1.5TB to an external, then back onto the drive itself is going to take quite a few hours to complete :\

Copying a whole drive over USB 2.0 is not exactly a fun experience. If you have some free SATA ports on your mobo, I would seriously consider popping open your externals and going SATA.

 

[krnmastersgt]

Copying a whole drive over USB 2.0 is not exactly a fun experience. If you have some free SATA ports on your mobo, I would seriously consider popping open your externals and going SATA.

Think it'll make much difference if both drives are connected via my USB 3.0 ports? I don't believe drives can reach the theoretical maximum bandwidth for 3.0 so it should be roughly the same speeds yes?

 

[GrumpyMan]

Your drive is about to fail, back up the data and replace the problem drive.

 

[krnmastersgt]

Welp ended up just grabbing an enclosure since I couldn't get anything to run on the drive when it was plugged into the motherboard directly. Once I plugged the drive into the USB port, Windows recognized that the drive was damaged. I had it run Check Disk (and some other scan that I'm not sure what to call it) and it repaired the damage with all my files intact, still unsure what caused the corruption in the file system but it seems to be resolved now.

 

[mfenn]

Think it'll make much difference if both drives are connected via my USB 3.0 ports? I don't believe drives can reach the theoretical maximum bandwidth for 3.0 so it should be roughly the same speeds yes?

USB 3.0 is fine, you will only be limited by the speed of the drive.

 

[mfenn]

Welp ended up just grabbing an enclosure since I couldn't get anything to run on the drive when it was plugged into the motherboard directly. Once I plugged the drive into the USB port, Windows recognized that the drive was damaged. I had it run Check Disk (and some other scan that I'm not sure what to call it) and it repaired the damage with all my files intact, still unsure what caused the corruption in the file system but it seems to be resolved now.

The next step is to buy a new drive and get everything moved off of that drive. Unless you had a virus or something, the drive is only going to fail again.

 

[krnmastersgt]

The next step is to buy a new drive and get everything moved off of that drive. Unless you had a virus or something, the drive is only going to fail again.

Well I've backed it up fully on an external, contemplating DBAN'ing the drive in case it was some sort of virus and then just hooking it up until it shows symptoms again. Drive is only about 2 years old so this is most unfortunate, seems relatively fine after the fixes made by Windows but I'm going to test it out by loading it up to full again to see if certain sectors are botched currently.

 

[krnmastersgt]

Welp the boot problem arose again after a few days, ran SeaTools and it did create an error code + verified for me that my drive is still under warranty so I'll likely ship the drive out in a week or two.

Decided to run a SMART scan and see just what the drive was failing on, results are as follows:

I can't really make out most of the info, but it would seem to me that certain sectors are corrupted. Not sure if DOS based tools can fix this, should I bother running things such as SeaTools or UBCD (if that's even still around), or just make sure I have all my data backed-up, and ship the drive off to Seagate for repair/replacement?

 

[mfenn]

Yep, I knew it! The drive is slowly going bad, back up the data ASAP and send the drive off to Seagate. There is no way to "fix" bad sectors (short of a clean room and millions of dollars worth of equipment).

Here's an explanation of what each error means:

Reallocation Sector Count: Hard drives come with some extra sectors on the disk that aren't directly accessible to the OS. When the drive detects that a sector in the main data area is going bad, it transparently remaps the bad sector's address to one of the spares. This error means that your drive is running out of spare sectors.

Current Pending Errors Count: This is the number of bad sectors that are awaiting remapping to a spare sector. Since your drive is running out of spare sectors, these probably cannot ever be remapped.

Uncorrectable Errors Count: This is the total number of uncorrectable read errors that your drive has experienced over its lifetime. The pauses you were noticing was the drive reading the same sector over and over trying to extract the data before finally giving up and marking it is uncorrectable.

 

[sm625]

I wouldnt be happy with a 48C max temperature reading.

Also, if you value your data, I wouldnt fill your drive past 90%.

 

[Dahak]

Yep, I knew it! The drive is slowly going bad, back up the data ASAP and send the drive off to Seagate. There is no way to "fix" bad sectors (short of a clean room and millions of dollars worth of equipment).

Pretty much this, I had a drive start to show the same things, I had run the drive diags and it said that it was failing. I tried to push it a little longer, but it ended up failing and I lost all that was on the drive.

Pretty much if I start to see it getting bad sectors, backup and replace the drive.