Hard Drive Problems

[Ice9]

Hi, something very strange has happened to my hard drive. I first noticed the problem when Norton AV was doing its weekly scan - about halfway through it just froze up, and I could hear a loud sound coming from the computer (almost surely from the hard drive) - it sounded like 4 loud clicks followed by a longer scraping noise, repeated.

The computer was frozen so I reset and let scandisk come on in windows. Strangely, the computer seemed to know something was wrong because rather than the normal 'fast' scandisk, it started doing the full sector by sector check.

Anyways, as soon as it reached cluster 2125 the computer froze and the same noises started coming from the drive. This happens every time I let the scandisk run that far.

Also strange is that the computer wants to run scandisk every time the computer is turned on now, even after a normal shutdown. But otherwise everything else runs normal and I can't even tell there is a problem.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas how to diagnose this problem considering the main tool to do so (scandisk) causes the problem itself.

My comp is an Athalon 1.2GHz with a 30GB IBM ATA-100 HD.

[lucavig]

Try and get hold of a diagnostic program from the drive manufacturer.

I have hust been through this with a Maxtor 120GB. I downloaded POWERDIAG from the Maxtor website and was able to tell the guy on the phone what the error codes were.

It is on it's way back right now for replacement within 3 days.

Also, I think that Scandisk will continue to try and scan a disk that it has previously marked as suspect until it runs cleanly through the disk.


LUCA

[ski]

ScanDisk is not causing the problem, the hard drive has a problem that ScanDisk is informing you about.
If you start to see additional bad clusters, then start backing up and replace the drive.

[shiva_42]

Your HD IS failing and LIKELY will bite the dust soon. The sound you describe is the sound of the HD head positioning system resetting and retrying the same "location" on the HD because of errors that are being encountered.

The only utility I know of that would be able to perhaps resolve this before failure is Steve Gibson's "SPINRITE" which is an amazing HD diagnostic and repair tool. But...

Backup everything of importance before it's too late, and either invest in the utility or plan for a new HD. Storage prices are simply too low per megabyte to trade reliability of data against replacement cost any longer. Good luck!


------------------
[email protected]

[chunfa]

Originally posted by shiva_42:
Your HD IS failing and LIKELY will bite the dust soon. The sound you describe is the sound of the HD head positioning system resetting and retrying the same "location" on the HD because of errors that are being encountered.

The only utility I know of that would be able to perhaps resolve this before failure is Steve Gibson's "SPINRITE" which is an amazing HD diagnostic and repair tool. But...

Backup everything of importance before it's too late, and either invest in the utility or plan for a new HD. Storage prices are simply too low per megabyte to trade reliability of data against replacement cost any longer. Good luck!

Hi I had a simular Problem just recently It sounded like Marbles in a can and like Shiva_42 said My drive shortly after died I was able to set it up as a slave drive to recover my important files,It just would not handle the load of scandisk or defrag