vista just told me my hard disk is failing!

I left my computer on while I ran to the store. I get back and move the mouse only to find a error window telling me one of my hard drives is reporting failure.

I have 3 hard drives.

80 gig IDE (main with vista)

320 gig IDE (secondary for data)

400 gig SATA2 (for data)

I have been using that 320 for about 2 months and have been running it with Vista for about 2 weeks now with no problems.

Why is it telling me its failing now and it wants me to back up all my data. I have 300 gigs on that drive with nowhere to stash it. The drive still seems to work ok and I can move data to and fro although its VERY slow now.

I hunted down the WD tools and tested it.

when I try to start the test it ends right away saying that there is a cable error or something like that.

I have just tryed 2 other IDE cables and its not the problem. I can look at the drives smart status through the software and it says in red that there is a problem with Re-Allocated Sector Count or something?


Should I get what I can off it and RMA it or something, this is really fucked up, its like a month or so old.

 

Hard drives could fail for any number of reasons. Don't discount the possibility that you have a bad/failing IDE controller too.

 

The hard drive in question shares a common IDE cable with the master and the master works flawlessly. I tryed diffrent cables and switched the 2 HDDs around and the problem stayed with 320gig.

Also the board is brand new like 2 weeks old so I dont think thats the problem.

 

Enable SMART in the BIOS, and see if it has a feature to check the drives (in the BIOS itself)

Even if it doesn't, the system should give you an error on boot if the drive is failing, and I'd trust the BIOS over Windows any day of the week.

Also, listen for noises such as clicks, whirrs, whines, etc. All are signs of impending doom. Sometimes they only come when the drive is inactive, and vice versa.

 

I have been hearing clicks every once in a while from down there, even when im just sitting there eating or writing a paper or something.

I do have smart enabled in my BIOS but I cant test them from there.

From the WD Tools and tester thing I can check the drives SMART status and the only thing wrong in there is:

Re-Allocated Sector Count

Not sure what that is but its the only thing in RED so that cant be good. I probably should do a advance RMA huh?

 

If the drives new, yeah, better play it safe than play Russian Roulette with your data.

 

lol its been backing up since I first found out about it.

Its 300 gigs, almost 80% of my Xbox ISO collection!!!

I am putting them anywhere i can but transfer rates are so slow. I have some on my other 2 PC drives, some on my extra PC. Some on a USB HDD, and the rest on my 2 modded xboxs (custom HDDs)

I will be doing the RMA tommaorw morning, they have a advance plan where the send the new one before I have to send in the old ^^

 

Make sure jumpers on the hdds are set properly! Also make sure u downloaded the latest WD diag tool. I'd also run a memtest just to be safe.

 

Ok I will do that. Im still backing up though. I know the jumpers are fine because I set them myself when I built the computer a few weeks ago. Also they have been fine up until today so I dont think its a jumper issue but I will take your advice and set them again.

Not sure why a memtest would help but I will run it. The ram is 2 gigs of Buffalo brand new. 2, 1 gig chips in Dual Channel.

I unhooked the HDD in question and started windows and everything was fine,no errors and tools reported all HDDs fine (bad one unhooked)

 

Check to make sure that you have enough air flow going through the case, particularly going over the hard drives. Drives fail quite regularly due to heat fatigue.

 

Yeah I took that into consideration. the 400 gig is way away from the others in a special cd-rom thing.

The other 2 are seperated by 2 hard drive slots so they have pleanty of room to. I also have 10 fans making good airflow so I dont think its heat. Besides the one thats failing is a slave so its not in constant use anyway.

Here are the specs if it helps:

MSI K9N4 SLI-F Ultra nForce5 sktAM2

AMD Athlon 64bit X2 Dual Core 4200+

2 GIGS DDR800 in Dual Channel

eVGA Geforce 7900 GT KO (overclocked stock)

 

How's your power supply?

 

you have VISTA?! 0_o

 

My power supply is SL! Certified and is at 600watt. Its no where near taxed though as im not even using SLi.

lol, and yes I have Vista. Its kinda nice though, im not sure XP would have told me to brace for impact with the HDD. At least now I can save my data.

I checked to make sure its not just a Vista error and it seems to be a legit HDD problem. The smart utility says that something is wrong with sector reallocation or something so im RMA'ing after I get my stuff off and format it. Probably should refill it with normal crap then format again to make sure its clean. Not sure how WD would react to finding out that it was full of ISO's. even if they are legit :rambo:

 

This is what the computer tech forum is for ;-)

OK, yes, firstly back up. Well actually, don't worry about that, just go out and BUY THE GAMES!!!!!

Download the test tool from your hard drive manufacturer's site. Burn it to a disc, and boot with that disc, then do a full scan on the drives. Windows should have reported which drive it is. You could always check which UDMA mode the drives are in. UDMA133 should be mode 6, UDMA100 mode5. Anything lower, and the drive has reported an error.

 

if drive is falling i would not recomend you to use disk tools to fix it before backup it, you files prolly will get corrupted, as some1 told you before, backup it while you can and do any desired test afther.

 

No point to running memtest, it's obviously a drive error.

Back up, replace, unless you're prepared to lose everything on it.

 

Thanks for the help guys. I have backed up everything I didnt already have some place else. Now if the drive goes down I dont lose anything.

I am doing the advance RMA so they will send me the new drive before I send them the old.

I have unplugged the drive until the new one gets here, then I will try to shift everything from the bad one to the new one just to save time down the road. If it works then great, if not no biggie ^^

 

Something weird happened with me. I have 3 HD's on my PC. All IDE (My PC is old... )

80GB (Main Windows XP)
120GB (Data, Games, ... )
40GB (Ubuntu Linux)

The weird thing happened with the 40GB one. It simply says now that it's not formatted and asks if i want to format it! WTF happened?