- Jan 6, 2005
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A few years ago, I did my first build with an SSD. At the time I couldn't afford a large capacity SSD, so I went with a 60GB SSD for my OS and two Samsung 1TB HDDs (one for documents, photos, games and non-essential programs, and the second as my back-up drive).
As time has gone by, with various WIN7 updates and me moving more and more programs to the SSD, I hit capacity. Last month I decided to swap out the 60GB SSD for a 240GB one.
I did a fresh WIN7 install, backed up all of my files to the secondary Samsung HDD and did a wipe of my primary Samsung HDD. I also installed every program with the exception of Steam and Quicken on the SSD.
Everything was working fine for about a month. Then the other night I went to launch Bioshock Infinite, and Steam would hang and I would have to force an End Task through Task Manager or perform a manual reboot. This also started to happen with Quicken.
I uninstalled Quicken and moved it to my SSD. The problem seemed to go away as now Bioshock Infinite boots just fine.
Tonight, I decided to play a different game, and Steam attempted to perform a routine update to the game. I got a disk write error through Steam. Given the previous sequence of events, I immediately began to suspect something else is going on with the HDD.
I went to run the Error-Checking utility from within the Tools menu of the disk, but receive a warning that I need to dismount the drive to perform the check. I chose to schedule the check instead upon reboot.
When I reboot the system, it launches CHKDSK. Every time I run CHKDSK it gets stuck on stage 4/5, and hangs at the same exact status every time (38200 of 45000 files processed). It never seems to finish the operation, just hangs at step 4/5. I've also tried launching that same game within Steam a few times. Every time it goes to auto-update and hangs with an eventual disk write error.
I've also run malwarebytes, CCleaner and Microsoft Security Essentials and none of those scans have picked up anything malicious or otherwise on the drive.
What could be causing this to happen? Is the drive dead or is there a way to identify and isolate what I assume is a bad sector.
A few other things I just thought of. The hard drive is not making any audible noises to indicate there is a problem with it. Also, after I installed the new SDD I did notice that one of the two drive bay fans was not working and required replacement. In all honesty, that fan was probably not working for some time, and I only noticed it because I had to take apart a few things to replace the SSD. The case has two drive bay fans to the front, and one on top of the case the size of a small pizza, so I can't imagine there being a heat issue. I also ran disk defragmenter on the HDD in question and WIN7 is telling me it has 0% fragmentation.
As time has gone by, with various WIN7 updates and me moving more and more programs to the SSD, I hit capacity. Last month I decided to swap out the 60GB SSD for a 240GB one.
I did a fresh WIN7 install, backed up all of my files to the secondary Samsung HDD and did a wipe of my primary Samsung HDD. I also installed every program with the exception of Steam and Quicken on the SSD.
Everything was working fine for about a month. Then the other night I went to launch Bioshock Infinite, and Steam would hang and I would have to force an End Task through Task Manager or perform a manual reboot. This also started to happen with Quicken.
I uninstalled Quicken and moved it to my SSD. The problem seemed to go away as now Bioshock Infinite boots just fine.
Tonight, I decided to play a different game, and Steam attempted to perform a routine update to the game. I got a disk write error through Steam. Given the previous sequence of events, I immediately began to suspect something else is going on with the HDD.
I went to run the Error-Checking utility from within the Tools menu of the disk, but receive a warning that I need to dismount the drive to perform the check. I chose to schedule the check instead upon reboot.
When I reboot the system, it launches CHKDSK. Every time I run CHKDSK it gets stuck on stage 4/5, and hangs at the same exact status every time (38200 of 45000 files processed). It never seems to finish the operation, just hangs at step 4/5. I've also tried launching that same game within Steam a few times. Every time it goes to auto-update and hangs with an eventual disk write error.
I've also run malwarebytes, CCleaner and Microsoft Security Essentials and none of those scans have picked up anything malicious or otherwise on the drive.
What could be causing this to happen? Is the drive dead or is there a way to identify and isolate what I assume is a bad sector.
A few other things I just thought of. The hard drive is not making any audible noises to indicate there is a problem with it. Also, after I installed the new SDD I did notice that one of the two drive bay fans was not working and required replacement. In all honesty, that fan was probably not working for some time, and I only noticed it because I had to take apart a few things to replace the SSD. The case has two drive bay fans to the front, and one on top of the case the size of a small pizza, so I can't imagine there being a heat issue. I also ran disk defragmenter on the HDD in question and WIN7 is telling me it has 0% fragmentation.
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