Bad HDD or just needing reformat?

Tim Pollard

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Feb 26, 2015
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I have a possibly failing HDD which I’d appreciate some help on.

The disk in question is a non-boot disk containing mainly mpeg videos. It is in my main pc file server and gives access to my bluray player TV using Windows Media Player in streaming server mode. The HDD is a Seagate ST3000 3TB internal connected using SATA 3, OS is W7 Pro.

Recently I noticed some recently recorded and edited files were freezing when I tried to watch them over the network. Then I found that when I tried to copy those files onto a stick to watch them direct, they often wouldn’t copy.

A few days later I noticed that my pc was slow booting, and then I noticed that the drive was disappearing from explorer. After a reboot it worked for a while and then disappeared again. At this point I started to think it must be an HDD failure getting progressively worse.

I removed the HDD from the PC and instead mounted it in an external eSATA caddy after booting – this means boot works ok and I can remount the disk without rebooting. It takes W7 a couple of minutes to recognise and mount the HDD. I am now slowly and painfully removing all the data I can from it. Any file > 1 month old copies fine, anything newer fails, often crashing the system. Incidentally I always test the files immediately after editing them to remove trailers and commercials, and all the files which now won’t copy or load worked fine when they were first edited.

When copying the drive is up and stable for 5-10 mins before dismounting. I can then remove and remount it and continue. Every two or three cycles it crashes the whole system.

Seagate Tools for Windows reports no problem on its quick scan. However the demo version of HDD Regenerator reports a checksum error. I can’t run the long suite of tests in either because the system won’t stay stable long enough.

I had a similar problem a while back on my Mac, where an external HDD went flaky in the same way and Disk Utility reported checksum errors which it couldn’t fix. With that drive a data removal, formal and re-copy fixed the problem and it has been working fine for months.

All of which leads me to wonder whether my problem isn’t that something scrambled the disks file map a month ago leading to corrupted data, rather than it necessarily being bad sectors on the disk?

Any ideas gratefully appreciated, along with any ideas whether I can get my more recent files off in any way?

My plan at the moment is to continue to get all the data off then, when I only have apparently corrupted files left, format it and try the full tests.
 
Solution
Hey Tim. It is possible that the partition might be corrupted. You did pretty well with the troubleshooting yourself. You could try accessing the drive via Linux Live USB/CD to see if you'll be able to unload your data without interruptions. Then I'd usually recommend that you run chkdsk on the drive - open up CMD and type in chkdsk /f x: (where X is the letter of the drive you wish to check), but it sounds like the HDD might not stay connected long enough for the drive to be checked, but you could still try it and see what happens.
Other than that it doesn't sound like you have too much options if this doesn't work. I'd say that you are on the right way with the reformatting of the drive and doing full tests with the...
Hey Tim. It is possible that the partition might be corrupted. You did pretty well with the troubleshooting yourself. You could try accessing the drive via Linux Live USB/CD to see if you'll be able to unload your data without interruptions. Then I'd usually recommend that you run chkdsk on the drive - open up CMD and type in chkdsk /f x: (where X is the letter of the drive you wish to check), but it sounds like the HDD might not stay connected long enough for the drive to be checked, but you could still try it and see what happens.
Other than that it doesn't sound like you have too much options if this doesn't work. I'd say that you are on the right way with the reformatting of the drive and doing full tests with the manufacturer's diagnostic tool (after you've recovered the data).

Hope that helps. Let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD
 
Solution
Hi Boogieman_WD

Thanks for the reply.

Your idea of using a Linux boot CD looks interesting but I know zip about Linux. I know OS X so I thought I could cope, but maybe not.....

I downloaded Linux SystemRescue and made a CD, booted ok, but I can't find any mounted volumes in File Manager. I thought it might be like OS X where there's a volumes folder, but there doesn't seem to be. I know Linux can see them, because the Testdisk app can see all my volumes - I just can't find a way to copy files between volumes using Filemanager!

Any clues how this works, please?
 
Hi

Thanks for the reply. I tried using ubuntu - which is a lot friendlier than the more basic Linux I was trying - but unfortunately the drive would only mount for a few seconds then disappeared as soon as you try to use it. It won't work on eSata at all, only if you use it as a normal internal.

Never mind, it was worth a try.

Thanks for you help.

Regards