Run ChkDsk, get this error at the end: "The second NTFS boot sector is unwriteable."

[Dankk]

murphyc,

Thank you for the info. I think we're on the right path: I opened up Sea Tools (Seagate's own diagnostic software), and under the "Advanced Tests" tab, there is an option to do a "Full Erase (SATA)." This option "Fills the entire drive with zeros. It can be used to recover bad sectors and erases all data. This is not a Secure erase."

When they say "this is not a secure erase", I believe they're just saying "your data won't necessarily be un-recoverable". Am I correct? If so, I think this is the feature we want to use.

I'm definitely going to try this out. RMA will only be a last resort. I already had to RMA a dead video card, and it took well over a week for a replacement; I don't have the patience to wait that long again. If a full-zero write sorts things out then I'll be a happy man.

I also picked up an external USB 3.0 drive from the store today, and I'm quite pleased with it. It's not amazing; but it's a far cry faster than my older USB 2.0 drive. (Transferring hundreds of GB's of data over USB 2.0 is, as you know, quite painful.) Now that I have my fancy new backup, I feel much more comfortable experimenting with my hard drive.

Thanks again.

 

[murphyc]

When they say "this is not a secure erase", I believe they're just saying "your data won't necessarily be un-recoverable". Am I correct?

I believe the data will be unrecoverable. What they mean exactly by "not a secure erase" may mean it is not an "ATA Secure Erase" issued command which cause the disk to erase itself; but rather the application will send a stream of zeros to the drive via the OS. This erases all sectors that have LBAs. However all disks have physical sectors without LBAs and those are only erased with a Secure Erase.

If so, I think this is the feature we want to use.

Seems reasonable.

If a full-zero write sorts things out then I'll be a happy man.

It's a good idea to zero out consumer drives regularly to remove stubborn bad sectors from use.

 

[Dankk]

I'm resurrecting this thread. Decided to run a ChkDsk earlier today. It's doing it again:

Checking file system on D:
The type of the file system is NTFS.

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
697856 file records processed. File verification completed.
86 large file records processed. 0 bad file records processed. 0 EA records processed. 0 reparse records processed. CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
759266 index entries processed. Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned. 0 unindexed files recovered. CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
697856 file SDs/SIDs processed. Cleaning up 58 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 58 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 58 unused security descriptors.
Security descriptor verification completed.
30705 data files processed. CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
697840 files processed. File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
76076903 free clusters processed. Free space verification is complete.
Adding 1253687 bad clusters to the Bad Clusters File.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Write failure with status 0xc0000010 at offset 0x1d1c0effe00 for 0x200 bytes.
The second NTFS boot sector is unwriteable.

Internal Info:
00 a6 0a 00 7d a5 0a 00 fd ec 12 00 00 00 00 00 ....}...........
0c 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................

This is interesting, because I thought I "fixed" this problem just a little while ago. It seems to have come back on it's own.

The 1,253,687 bad clusters is a bit worrisome too. Time to RMA the drive? :hmm:

Could this also explain why my hard drive is REALLY loud? As in, it sounds like a chainsaw?

 

[murphyc]

Time to RMA the drive?

Yes.

Could this also explain why my hard drive is REALLY loud? As in, it sounds like a chainsaw?

Normal functioning hard drives don't sound like chainsaws.

 

[Dankk]

On the bright side: Seagate's RMA service is pretty quick. Requested an RMA on Tuesday, and got my replacement drive today. That's the fastest RMA I've ever had.

On the not-so-bright side: The drive they sent me is borked. Totally broken. Makes several loud "beeping" noises when my PC boots up, and then just stops spinning. Windows does not recognize it whatsoever.

I'm not the only one. The noise sounds exactly like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9i5yixsJbk Looks like the needle can't even stay on the platter?

This is a huge disappointment for me. I was silly to think that an RMA could ever go this smoothly. Was looking forward to transferring all my data onto it, and having a working hard drive, but that would be too easy of course. Looks like I need to get in touch with Seagate again.

How do they even let this slip past QA? Don't factory-recertified drives go through a ton of testing before actually being sent out? This baffles me.

Sorry. I'm just bitter.

 

[cubby1223]

This is interesting, because I thought I "fixed" this problem just a little while ago. It seems to have come back on it's own.

The problem did not "come back" on its own. The problem was always there, only difference now is it is screaming at you to replace the drive instead of politely suggesting you replace the drive

Sorry, hope you still have the chance to copy off any critical data files.

 

[Nothinman]

Another note: I opened up Acronis Disk Director today, and noticed that apparently my hard drive gained ~4GB of unallocated space for no apparent reason. A couple days ago, it was only a couple of megabytes. I never shrunk/resized the volume; this just happened all of the sudden. What's going on here?

That's most likely because you chose MBR for the partition table and not GPT. MBR can only address ~2TB, although I haven't created one myself just to see what the exact number ends up being.

 

[taltamir]

Technically MBR can address 4Gibi sectors which comes out to 2TiB using 512B sectors.
On a 4Kn drive that would come out to 16TiB...
does MBR even have the capability to address larger sectors?

 

[Elixer]

On the bright side: Seagate's RMA service is pretty quick. Requested an RMA on Tuesday, and got my replacement drive today. That's the fastest RMA I've ever had.

On the not-so-bright side: The drive they sent me is borked. Totally broken. Makes several loud "beeping" noises when my PC boots up, and then just stops spinning. Windows does not recognize it whatsoever.

I'm not the only one. The noise sounds exactly like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9i5yixsJbk Looks like the needle can't even stay on the platter?

This is a huge disappointment for me. I was silly to think that an RMA could ever go this smoothly. Was looking forward to transferring all my data onto it, and having a working hard drive, but that would be too easy of course. Looks like I need to get in touch with Seagate again.

How do they even let this slip past QA? Don't factory-recertified drives go through a ton of testing before actually being sent out? This baffles me.

Sorry. I'm just bitter.

In short, no, they don't, or at least, it is a very, very limited "test" run by someone who don't give a crap, and must be paid by how many drives they "tested".
I had 3 back-2-back RMAs from seagate. One that would beep (and mind you, these drives have no speakers), and the other one sounded like a banshee.

 

[murphyc]

This is a huge disappointment for me. I was silly to think that an RMA could ever go this smoothly.

Any company knows better than to think they can intentionally send a hosed replacement drive and not get called out on it. They're going to have to eat the shipping to return this drive, and send another one out, and the ensuing additional testing, and the phone support. So this problem will cost them also.

How do they even let this slip past QA? Don't factory-recertified drives go through a ton of testing before actually being sent out? This baffles me.

They do an ATA Secure Erase. I don't know if they do any testing other than what's built into the drive via SMART, but obviously a DOA disk would fail SMART testing. So this is likely just bad luck. Maybe these drives are particularly more sensitive to being knocked around during shipping. It's a good idea to do a conveyance test on any HDD before going to the trouble to restore data to it.

 

[tweakboy]

NO worries.. man its ok.

 

[Nothinman]

Technically MBR can address 4Gibi sectors which comes out to 2TiB using 512B sectors.
On a 4Kn drive that would come out to 16TiB...
does MBR even have the capability to address larger sectors?

Never thought about it like that, but given that everyone out there says 2TB is the limit for MBR I doubt there's any consideration of >512b sectors and any implementation of that would be proprietary.

 

[taltamir]

Never thought about it like that, but given that everyone out there says 2TB is the limit for MBR I doubt there's any consideration of >512b sectors and any implementation of that would be proprietary.

Good point.

 

[Mark R]

Never thought about it like that, but given that everyone out there says 2TB is the limit for MBR I doubt there's any consideration of >512b sectors and any implementation of that would be proprietary.

It's not officially supported anywhere. However, it does work reasonably well on most OSs.

USB enclosures for 3 TB drives and up have, for a couple of years now, included 512->4k sector emulation layers, precisely to provide compatibility with OSs that don't support GPT (e.g. windows XP). By presenting the OS with 4k logical sectors, this is often sufficient for the OS to be able to access the whole capacity of the drive. This does work fine on XP, Vista/7/8 and Mac OS X (XP can't boot from such a drive).

It's not perfect, and it does cause problems with some hypervisors and database software where the operation of the IO layers is predicated on a 512 logical sector size.