HDD become extremely slow after a power failure while running chkdsk

[nayanasri]

Dear all,

This is my 1st post.

You may already know what's my problem (Post title says it all 😉 )

So, the power failure happened while I'm running chkdsk on the questioned hdd in my winxp (p4) pc.

It has 3 hdds (80gbx2 & 160gbx1). Both 80gbs are doing fine. Problem (extremely slow. some files read rate 300kbps) occurred on the 160gb drive.


Already done everything to fix it, without any luck. 🙁

1. Reset the partition table & create new ones with different sizes.

2. Change the sata port, changed sata cable/power cable.

3. Plug in to a different pc.

4. Tried fat32 & ntfs file formats.

5. Google search with relevant keywords.


See the attached screen shot. (hd tune read rate)

Read speed is fluctuating like crazy.

Is this happened to anyone before ? Any ideas ?? Any cure/fix ?


Thanks & best regards.

Nayana Sri.

 

[Hawkeye22]

If you check the health tab in hdtune, does the smart status show any problems?

 

[nayanasri]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

Actually that's the strange thing. Checked the hdd with lot of drive diagnosing tools. (Including samsung ES tool (hdd is samsung) ).
All of them said hdd is fine.

Regarding your question, hd tune only show "realcated sector count = 1" error. Health status OK. That bad sector was already their before this happened.

Also, I've got another samsung 250gb disk, which happened the same thing few months back. ( power failure when running chkdsk, and become extremely slow )

 

[Hawkeye22]

It sounds like you got most of the bases covered. I wonder if the power failure damaged the drive electronics somehow. I was going to suggest damage to the drive controller on the motherboard, but ruled that out when you said you tried it in another computer.

Another thing you can check for is to check the properties of the drive controllers in the device manager. If it shows the drive running in PIO mode, it needs reset to DMA mode. I'm not sure if you will see this setting on a sata controller or if it's for IDE drives only, but it can't hurt to check.

 

[nayanasri]

Yeah, posted this problem in couple of hardware forums as the last resort. 🙁
I am repairing pcs since 2001 & this is the first time I've faced such a strange issue. All diagnosing tools are saying the drive is fine, alas its not.

Already checked drive controllers. Since you've mentioned it, I've also checked them now. All 3 hdds are in ultra dma mode 5. (except optical drives which are in dma mode 4).


What the more stranger thing is, some dos hdd tools are showing no read speed slowness. When I was checking for bad sectors with a dos utility (via bootable cd) , it completed the test with normal speed. (like 50mib/s or so)

 

[Hawkeye22]

Very strange indeed. Wish I had some more/better advice for you. Good luck to you. Hopefully someone else will have an idea.

 

[Ray Charles]

Something similar happened to me last year with transfer rate drastically dropping and that HDD is almost unusable now so backup your data while you can, as I suspect it is physically damaged. Not shutting down a pc in the correct manner especially during high activity can damage the seeking head of a drive I believe! If you happen to figure out a solution or an alternative fix I would be very interested!

 

[nayanasri]

Hmm.. thanks guys,
Yeah maybe physically screwed some drive mechanism 🙁 . Good thing is there's no important data on it.

I am going to try low level format for a couple of times and/or hooking it up to my freenas server and try UFS in next week. Will let you know what happened. In the meantime, any news ideas would warmly welcome


What do you guys think about running pc 24/7 ? Is it ok with domestic hdds ?
(When I checked in samsung site, I saw that they measure hdd life time by disk spin up + spin down times. Not by the power on hours.)

 

[Hawkeye22]

I've run most of my computers 24/7 other than update reboots and hardware exchanges. I've had drives last 8+ years in some of these systems with no problems. Newer drives are faster, so you normally end up replacing a drive before it fails anyhow.

 

[nayanasri]

Hmm, yeah. That's what I thought. I've got a freenas server on my oldest pc. P3, 800mhz, 20GB quantum fireball hdd, bought in 2001. Still working perfectly.

 

[nayanasri]

Hi all,

Finally I've managed to restore their transfer speed.

I've done a disk wipe half a dozen times using DoD 5220.28-STD method.

Then, performed low level format, again half a dozen times.

& whoila .....

HDDs are good as new. (at least for now 😉 )

I am using them on one of my freenas server for downloading purposes. So no worries if it fail again. If anything happens I'll post here.

Cheers guys & gals

 

[nayanasri]

Best answer selected by nayanasri.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey