Been having a few issues with Steam lately and was somewhat perplexed as I couldn't get to the bottom of the issue, and after some fiddling last night I finally found out what was going on. Issues were -
Steam crashed while downloading something from the recent sales and wouldn't restart, was saying it was already in use in another account, restarted the comp and it took an absolute age to boot, despite windows 7 being on an SSD, and Steam and all games being on a seperate mechanical drive (Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache - OEM (WD5000AAKX)).
Ran memcheck and comp booted normally, but steam was still throwing up the occasional error and would not download properly, it would pause the download pretty much every ten seconds. I updated Mobo drivers, SSD drivers, got the WD HD check tool which all did absolutely nothing, no errors on the WD HD check. Didn't do checkdisk at this point as I thought the WD tool would be as good.
Last night I again tried to download from steam and same symptoms, however I managed to catch a bad write error of some sort before it crashed, and a quick google search led me to a check disk recommendation, which I started at about 9pm. 6 hours later the system rebooted after windows had "fixed" numerous bad segments, and while all seems back to normal and steam is no longer acting up, I'm obviously concerned that something is wrong with the HD.
Is it time to get a replacement?
Steam crashed while downloading something from the recent sales and wouldn't restart, was saying it was already in use in another account, restarted the comp and it took an absolute age to boot, despite windows 7 being on an SSD, and Steam and all games being on a seperate mechanical drive (Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache - OEM (WD5000AAKX)).
Ran memcheck and comp booted normally, but steam was still throwing up the occasional error and would not download properly, it would pause the download pretty much every ten seconds. I updated Mobo drivers, SSD drivers, got the WD HD check tool which all did absolutely nothing, no errors on the WD HD check. Didn't do checkdisk at this point as I thought the WD tool would be as good.
Last night I again tried to download from steam and same symptoms, however I managed to catch a bad write error of some sort before it crashed, and a quick google search led me to a check disk recommendation, which I started at about 9pm. 6 hours later the system rebooted after windows had "fixed" numerous bad segments, and while all seems back to normal and steam is no longer acting up, I'm obviously concerned that something is wrong with the HD.
Is it time to get a replacement?
