??Failing HDD
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??Failing HDD
05-02-2011 10:37 AM
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Cheers
Re: ??Failing HDD
05-02-2011 12:42 PM
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Re: ??Failing HDD
05-02-2011 12:54 PM
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Re: ??Failing HDD
05-02-2011 5:18 PM
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Re: ??Failing HDD
05-02-2011 11:14 PM
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Re: ??Failing HDD
05-02-2011 11:20 PM
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I had a laptop that was taking ages to boot and kept failing to install widows updates. I ran a chkdsk and it took over 15 hours to run and reported loads of bad blocks.
It does sound like the disk is suspect.
Re: ??Failing HDD
06-02-2011 7:20 AM
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"When you choose to run a regular format on a volume, files are removed from the volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors. The scan for bad sectors is responsible for the majority of the time that it takes to format a volume."
I don't trust HDD diagnostics provided by the disk manufacturers because:
- I have sometimes run them on a disk I thought was self-evidently faulty and drawn a blank
- It's in the manufacturers' interest to take a lenient view so they don't get too many returns
Re: ??Failing HDD
06-02-2011 1:08 PM
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Disc drives have a certain amount of self repair capability (roughly since the introduction of EIDE standard drives).
What basically happens is that the manufacturers include a few spare tracks on the disc platters which are normally invisible to the operating system. When one or more sectors on a disc platter become unreliable or unusable, the drive electronics stop using a dud sector and silently redirect any read/write operations for a dud sector to a spare sector in the invisible tracks. This takes place entirely within the disc drive and to the operating system it appears that it is still reading and writing the original sector.
This approach will extend the life of a failing disc drive but it can't fix data corruption caused by it. So the drive appears to gradually become more corrupt as more failed sectors are repaired by the drive's electronics. The only way to get rid of the corrupt data is to recover with undamaged files from a backup or re-install.
Most drives include a diagnostic interface called SMART which records statistics on this and other stuff. There are loads of software tools around that can read and report the SMART diagnostic data.
I'm fairly sure this explains why the drive appears to be much better after formatting.
Re: ??Failing HDD
06-02-2011 1:45 PM
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Manufacturers hardware tests in general (where they exist) I've found to be quite good. Dell's for example.
And Windows own checks at the most thorough level (chkdsk/r or equivalent) are also fairly useful.
The final test I use is the Mk1 earhole. Listen for the telltale clicking of a disk that is retrying to read data or jumping to the reallocated spare tracks regularly.
I've known disks that have had a read error carry on for years after a reformat.
Re: ??Failing HDD
06-02-2011 3:43 PM
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http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/index.html
Re: ??Failing HDD
06-02-2011 8:44 PM
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According to the laptop SMART has not been tripped, but I will check using others
BTW, the first full format just didnt complete. i had to reboot, and then do a quick format. Obviously found lots of bad sectors.
Cheers
Re: ??Failing HDD
06-02-2011 11:00 PM
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Quote from: penfold BTW, the first full format just didnt complete. i had to reboot, and then do a quick format. Obviously found lots of bad sectors.
Bin it.
Re: ??Failing HDD
07-02-2011 7:57 AM
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Quote from: penfold ... Obviously found lots of bad sectors.
What happens if you actually run chkdsk? But I agree with Okrzynska; hard disk drives are inexpensive to replace so it isn't worth wasting a lot of time over a faulty one.
Re: ??Failing HDD
07-02-2011 10:56 AM
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Thanks for all the input.
Re: ??Failing HDD
07-02-2011 12:44 PM
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I've been there and done that with duff hard drives and its just not worth the agro. Unless you physically get out your tools, dismantle it, replace the platters (and anything else thats duff) and reassemble it, nothing is going to fix it. Unfortunately no amount of software you run will be able to do it either.
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