Emergency help needed! Failing HDD?

evtimovmartin12

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Aug 22, 2013
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Hi all,

I have just encountered what I deem some major problems with my PC. I got home today and started Steam. I can't recall the order of events, however games were acting strangely. CS:GO in particular was unable to start, so I tried to verify the integrity of the local files. Steam found errors, tried fixing them, but hung in the process. I tried restarting my PC, and noticed that the drive (E) that steam is on was not listed in My Computer. I checked Disk Manager and it was absent from there as well.

I had a little trouble with some malware a few days ago, but malwarebytes supposedly cleaned it. I'm not entirely sure whats causing these problems. From now on, the drive keeps disappearing after a while, and the only way to get to to reappear is by shutting down and powering up.

My C: drive was a little full, and I deemed that was the cause, so I moved some files to the E drive. This was painfully slow. The next step I tried was error-checking the drives. C drive came up clean, but chkdsk said it could not access the volume E. Error-checking did not work through My Computer, only resulted in a hang. Seatools for windows came up with a fail on the generic short test for unknown reasons.

This has all been happening between eventual dismounts and hard reboots.

The drives are OCZ 120gb SSD (C) and Seagate Barracuda 3TB (E). I haven't installed any software apart from a driver for my wifi adapter.

Any help would be appreciated. I just wish I had an external drive to back up to right about now...

EDIT: I just ran another short generic with Seatools and it has passed. Also, SMART has not been tripped on the drive.

EDIT 2: Just ran a Seatools Fix All Fast and it failed for unspecified reasons. Starting to get a little flustered.
 
Solution
@evtimovmartin12, ISTM that the drive has bad sectors. SeaTools does not alert you to SMART problems until a critical attribute value has fallen below its threshold.

Instead I would examine the SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

If there is a large number of bad sectors, I would clone the drive with a tool such as ddrescue.
Could be a lot of things, but hard drive failure is certainly on the list. If you can get a drive and backup everything before it fails do so (well if you have a fast unlimited internet connection you can just re-download everything from steam, your saved games if not on the cloud are quite likely on your c: drive). My experience is SMART often does not tell you when a hard drive is about to fail and I've had little luck with seatools myself. You might want to do a full virus scan maybe with a different virus checker than you usually use (I personally like the free one Microsoft provides). If you can get backed up and you are still having trouble and the drive is under warranty I'd send it to Seagate they have a pretty easy return system, you'll get probably get a refurbished drive as a replacement most likely but I've actually had pretty good luck with their refurbished replacements it's usually the new drives that seem to go bad after a few months.
 
Thanks for the insight. I figured it could be a failing drive, however things are gradually starting to improve. A few hours ago, Seatools would hang because the drive would demount while the test was running. Now, it hasn't demounted in a long time and I'm currently running a chkdsk /r on it. It found an error in index $I30 for file 284665. Very specific, I know, but it printed the same "correcting" line three times in a row now and just hangs. I don't know if that's normal or not.

 
If it was an external drive I'd say replace the cable, you might want to check the cable connections inside see if they are working loose, this can cause odd problems some times including intermittent working....check the power cable too.
 


Looks like all is not lost! chkdsk is running again, looks like it was just taking a long time to fix one error. Hoping for the best on the tail end of this chkdsk 😛 I really need to find a backup drive, though...

EDIT: The files it's repairing look to be from CS:GO, with rendering-sounding names like "lightmapped_4wayblend.vcs". I searched that and its some kind of valve extension.
 
Hey there, Martin!

Good job with the troubleshooting steps that you've taken. I hope chkdsk repair the bad sectors and retrieve the readable data on your drive. However, I strongly recommend coming up with a backup solution ASAP!
There's no way we can determine how long will the drive will work, so the data is definitely not safe there.
I'd also suggest to check the warranty of your drive on your HDD manufacturer's website, if it's still covered you can get in touch with their tech support and RMA it. You should be provided with a replacement, but you'd still need to backup beforehand.

Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD
 
@evtimovmartin12, ISTM that the drive has bad sectors. SeaTools does not alert you to SMART problems until a critical attribute value has fallen below its threshold.

Instead I would examine the SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

If there is a large number of bad sectors, I would clone the drive with a tool such as ddrescue.
 
Solution