# Dying hard drive?



## Flatline (Sep 23, 2010)

I have two hard drives currently, one of them is an 500 GB Western Digital Caviar Black which I bought less than a year ago. It's not my primary drive - It has Windows XP Home installed on it in case something happens with my main installation, but other than that, I only used it for storage. I also moved my Steam installation to that drive a few months ago, so almost all my games are installed there. 

It was working flawlessly, but three days ago it started acting up and that makes me worried.

I first noticed it when I started Grand Theft Auto IV. I didn't play it for a while, but I still remember that it was running quite smoothly - It's not the case anymore. It takes at lest two minutes to get to the main menu, and about 10(!) minutes to load a saved game.
This is not the only problem - The game starts lagging randomly and the sound sound distorts about every 5 minutes for a few seconds.
Same thing with other games - I only tried playing DiRT 2, TrackMania United and Half Life 2: Episode Two since then, and all of them acted like this.

Games are not the only things that are slowed down - It takes forever to open or move any files on/from/to that drive and Steam became pretty unresponsive too.

I checked the S.M.A.R.T. attributes with a disk monitoring utility, and the results show that the "Current Pending Sector Count" attribute exceeds the threshold level, which is apparently 0.

I don't know much about these attributes, but I can see the "Caution" word too, and I don't think it means anything good...

I guess I should take it back to the vendor - The warranty is still valid until Dec. 2014, I just wanted to ask if this problem can be fixed somehow without replacing the entire drive. I already backed up all my important data from all three partitions. Should I format it before taking it back or just leave everything on it?


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## CaptainCool (Sep 23, 2010)

after moving to my flat my HDD was acting up, too. a ton of data got corrupted...
checking the drive for errors a few times and defragmenting it fixed that for me and the drive is working well again!


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## Lapdog (Sep 23, 2010)

Yeah, mine had an F1 (Thats where during start up the BIOS requires you to press F1 to continue)and my games started acting like that. All I did to fix it was clear up all non-used files, defragmented it, and no more problems.


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## Flatline (Sep 23, 2010)

I can't really check for bad sectors with CHKDSK or the free version of HDTune - I can let it run for hours and it won't make any progress at all, while it worked fine a few weeks ago, and it also works fine with my other drive.

Also, when I'm listening to music, it sometimes just stops playing and the tray disappears for a few seconds too - And when it starts playing again, it just skips to the next song on the list.

And since the Current Pending Sector Count attribute is critical according to multiple sites listing these, and it falls under the category of "Potential indicators of imminent electromechanical failure" on Wikipedia too, I'm not sure if a simple defrag would help =/


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## Lapdog (Sep 23, 2010)

Miles Snowpaw said:


> And since the Current Pending Sector Count attribute is critical according to multiple sites listing these, and it falls under the category of "Potential indicators of imminent electromechanical failure" on Wikipedia too, I'm not sure if a simple defrag would help =/



That's alot more serious than I thought.... I'd say you'd better back all of that up somewhere, and prepare for a bit of a break-down. That's not really gonna last very long if THATS imminent.


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## Flatline (Sep 23, 2010)

Lapdog said:


> That's alot more serious than I thought.... I'd say you'd better back all of that up somewhere, and prepare for a bit of a break-down. That's not really gonna last very long if THATS imminent.


 
I already backed up all my important stuff from that drive - I just don't know if this problem is covered by the warranty...


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## Runefox (Sep 23, 2010)

Miles Snowpaw said:


> I can't really check for bad sectors with CHKDSK



chkdsk /F /R doesn't do anything for you? Sounds like the drive's definitely going bad. I'd back up whatever important files you have ASAP and look into a new drive.

EDIT: Already backed up? Well alright, your drive should be under warranty, as WD usually has a 3 year (5 year for Caviar Black).


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## Flatline (Sep 23, 2010)

Runefox said:


> chkdsk /F /R doesn't do anything for you? Sounds like the drive's definitely going bad. I'd back up whatever important files you have ASAP and look into a new drive.
> 
> EDIT: Already backed up? Well alright, your drive should be under warranty, as WD usually has a 3 year (5 year for Caviar Black).



Yeah. I know the free version of HDTune isn't updated anymore, but it's still functional. I can't check for damaged blocks on the WD. Same thing happens with CHKDSK, except I can't abort the process - I can only shut the computer down by pressing the Power button >.<

I can't even run the S.M.A.R.T offline tests, they all stop at 10%. Surprisingly I can still access all my files.

Thanks for the replies - I'll just format the drive and take it back to the vendor... Hopefully I can get a working one soon.


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## Klaue (Sep 23, 2010)

A normal format will not prevent anyone from grabbing your files, if you fear that.

Also, you might wanna try WD's own tool, http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&sid=3&lang=en, just for more infos - with the problems you describe, probably nothing will save this HD anymore (it can also overwrite with zeroes for a "better format")
I dunno if it actually does more than HDTune (I doubt it, but info is slim)


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## Flatline (Sep 24, 2010)

Klaue said:


> A normal format will not prevent anyone from grabbing your files, if you fear that.



I know, I also have East-Tec Eraser so I can wipe out the deleted stuff after formatting.



Klaue said:


> Also, you might wanna try WD's own tool, http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&sid=3&lang=en, just for more infos - with the problems you describe, probably nothing will save this HD anymore (it can also overwrite with zeroes for a "better format")
> I dunno if it actually does more than HDTune (I doubt it, but info is slim)



Strange - Both this tool and HDTune says the S.M.A.R.T. attributes are okay, while CrystalDiskInfo and HDDScan doesn't  - I can't run a single test on any of these, though.


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## yiffytimesnews (Sep 24, 2010)

Ever heard of Spinrite? http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm It is one amazing program, I have literally seen it bring hard drives back from the dead.


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## Flatline (Sep 24, 2010)

yiffytimesnews said:


> Ever heard of Spinrite? http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm It is one amazing program, I have literally seen it bring hard drives back from the dead.


 
Never heard of it - Looks promising, but I can't afford it currently... Thanks for the info anyway


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