Samsung HDD messing with OS

[Baked]

I had a Samsung HD502HJ running as a restore/storage drive in my system for a little over a year, with a pair of Crucial 40GB SDD in RAID 0 running as boot. Well, the inevitable happened a couple months back and my system crapped out. At first I didn't know the problem was caused by the Samsung HDD. I finally got around to it today, playing with it using my HDD docking station. Disk manager in Windows couldn't recognize the drive at all, and it would lock up windows when I have it turned on.

Does anybody know what's the cause of this HDD issue? I have a feeling I'm gonna need to bust out my floppy drive and do a format in DOS.

 

[Elixer]

I am betting it didn't lock up windows, it was trying to poll the HD, and your event logs would be full of warnings/errors. And this takes a really, really long time, and it just seems like everything is locked.

As for what caused it, impossible to tell.
Usually, you should keep SMART enabled in BIOS, and if that kicked in, it might have warned you, but, usually HDs die without warning.

I would try a linux BOOT CD/DVD/flash and see if it can see the drive, and read SMART data from it.

 

[Baked]

The last time I had a HDD failed on me was back in the early 90s with a Conner brand HDD (later became Seagate). I took that bad boy apart.

I'm gonna see if I can do a flash boot and do a format from DOS or something. I don't remember if there's any activities on it while I have the docking station on.

 

[Dessert Tears]

I have a Samsung HD501LJ data drive that started having similar symptoms. The first sign was Firefox crashing (cache on that HDD), and Windows seemed to hang on shut down. The RAID controller took an extra 0.5–1 second to recognize the drive. Windows seemed to stall on the start up screen, and I turned it off after several minutes.

I put it in my USB 2.0 enclosure, and Windows slowly recognized each logical drive over several minutes. During activity, the disk access light pulsed in a very regular 1s on/1s off pattern. I copied off my most important files, ordered by importance divided by size. I saw speeds of 20 KB/s, peaking to 80 KB/s. I moved the drive to my USB 3.0 enclosure with fan and continued copying files. This enclosure supports SMART, and CrystalDiskInfo evaluated it as "Good". I did copying batches off and on for a week, and the drive suddenly came back at full performance! I immediately xxcopy'd the entire drive to my storage and backup drives.

I put on a daily SyncToy backup and started using the drive again while I waited for a WD Black deal. The symptoms recurred about two weeks later.

I am betting it didn't lock up windows, it was trying to poll the HD, and your event logs would be full of warnings/errors. And this takes a really, really long time, and it just seems like everything is locked.

I didn't check my event logs, but I will look there.