Unsure what to do following hard drive diagnostics

[ssilverm]

For the last few weeks my PC has been intermittently freezing for anything up to half a minute when loading applications. I was initially convinced that my motherboard was the problem as Vista's event viewer is reporting regular controller errors on an IDE Port that has no disk attached to it.

However, I have now run daignostics on my system drive (a 500Gb Samsung Spinpoint), and this has revealed dozens of ECC errors. I am uncertain of the implications of this and would be grateful if somebody could answer a few questions for me:

1. 
   1, Are these errors likely to be responsible for the intermittent freezing?
   
   2. Can they be fixed with a low-level format or is it time to bin the drive?
   
   3. Is it possible that these are simply known bad sectors that Vista is aware of and avoids when reading and writing?

Steve S.

 

[RebateMonger]

That can definitely cause freezing.

You need to replace the hard drive. A hard drive will try to replace known bad sectors will spares, but at some point it runs out of replacements. You can "fix" the problem temporarily by running "Chkdsk /r" at the (administrator) command prompt. This will add the sectors to the "bad sector" list. But it's likely to be a short term solution, as whatever is causing the bad sectors will probably get worse.

 

[Modelworks]

A lot of ECC errors can mean the drive heads or head amp are failing. Replace the drive .

 

[ssilverm]

I cloned the disk onto a spare drive and swapped them around. The freezing now seems to have stoppe, but the reports of controller errors on IDE3 continue. They don't seem to be having any impact on performance though.

Steve S.

 

[RebateMonger]

I've seen a couple of cases of a failing IDE controller where the only real fix was using a PCI hard drive controller. If you end up doing that, be aware that many add-on IDE controllers can't be used to control a CD-ROM drive.