Lots and lots of "Bad block" Errors in Windows event viewer - Correlate with my NVKMD Crash?

[pistolonmyside]

Hi everyone ive been having a Windows Kernel mode driver stopped responding and recovered successfully, and replaced the PSU and GPU, Uninstalled windows and all my drivers and reinstalled, extended the TDR timeout, put the power mode on high power instead of balanced etc and cannot solve it for the life of me, so i was looking at other possibilities, and i went into the Windows event log to see if maybe anything there could give me a clue and wow. i see multiple "ERROR" events, all the same error "The device \Harddisk0\DR0, Has a bad block. Like, i can go back months ago in the event viewer and see this error event multiple times a day. Happening sometimes 3-4 times in one minute. The event log is riddled with these errors. Harddisk 0 is my main Seagate 500gb 5400 rpm harddrive, my only HDD. What does this mean? Also, I ran Seatools SMART test and it came back clear with no errors..odd. im defragmenting the disk now, Windows says it was 18% fragmented. But, Could this be causing my Display Driver to stop working? If i fix this will the nightmare ive been having for 2+ yrs with this Nvidia kernel mode driver crash FINALLY come to an end?! Thanks!

 

[pistolonmyside]

Update - Just ran a "long generic" test with SeaTools, and it Failed.. told me its time to back up my important info as i may need a new one... any ideas guys? do i really need a new hdd and will this solve my problem? 😱

 

[Solandri]

Multiple bad block errors means your HDD is dying, or the interface to it (SATA controller, SATA cable) is failing. Yes it can cause blue screens and driver crashes - if the driver or Windows system file was stored on a bad block and became corrupted.

Stop running tests to try to diagnose your drive. It could fail completely at any moment, and every minute you spend tweaking settings and running tests means that failure is one minute closer to happening. Backup your data ASAP. Or get a new drive and copy your data to it ASAP. Then you can try swapping SATA cables and testing the drive on a different computer to see if it's the SATA controller or cable which is faulty.

If the HDD turns out to be bad, you will likely have to reinstall Windows and your programs on the new drive. Cloning is a bad idea. There is no guarantee the files you copy off the old drive are still good - they could have become corrupted.

 

[pistolonmyside]

Multiple bad block errors means your HDD is dying, or the interface to it (SATA controller, SATA cable) is failing. Yes it can cause blue screens and driver crashes - if the driver or Windows system file was stored on a bad block and became corrupted.

Stop running tests to try to diagnose your drive. It could fail completely at any moment, and every minute you spend tweaking settings and running tests means that failure is one minute closer to happening. Backup your data ASAP. Or get a new drive and copy your data to it ASAP. Then you can try swapping SATA cables and testing the drive on a different computer to see if it's the SATA controller or cable which is faulty.

If the HDD turns out to be bad, you will likely have to reinstall Windows and your programs on the new drive. Cloning is a bad idea. There is no guarantee the files you copy off the old drive are still good - they could have become corrupted.

Thanks for the info..I dont really have anything important on here to be honest, just games like GTA, And some first person shooters. Infact, my Windows OS isnt even genuine. the guy i bought this computer from years ago mustve just sold the same copy of windows to many different people, (EDIT ; Or, when i had my MOBO replaced by tiger direct something went wrong there) so when MicroSoft found out they banned the product key and then all of the sudden its not genuine which kinda sucks. So I'm not really worried about loosing any of this data. Now, i just replaced the PSU my self, the SATA cable your talking about, is that the cable that goes from the PSU into the drive, or the drive to the MOBO? I'm pretty sure youre talking about the blue HDD cable that goes from there to the MOBO. just want to make sure. (BTW, the nvidia display driver crash im talking about, ive been having it for over 2 years..)