Is my hard drive dying?

Phil87 · 2 Feb 2017 at 19:47

I just noticed that some of the videos on my old 2TB hard drive won't open / won't play properly, one of which I watched a few months ago so I think something has corrupted these files recently. Could these be signs that the hard drive is failing and what can I do to confirm this?

I used CrystalDiskInfo to check that smart status and it was ok, same with the Windows disk check. Is there another program I should use to check if the hard drive has problems? I haven't had any error messages or other problems that would suggest hard drive issues, although this hard drive is only used for storage (Windows and all other software is installed on my SSD).

ED209 · 2 Feb 2017 at 19:54

try looking in event viewer and see if there Is any errors relating to the drive in there or try running check disk on the HDD

Phil87 · 2 Feb 2017 at 19:58

Do you know what specifically I should be looking for in event viewer? The problem is I don't know when these files were corrupted, it could have happened a long time ago and there might not have been any errors recently.

ED209 · 2 Feb 2017 at 20:12

click on windows logs and go to system.

have a look for anything that has any yellow triangles or red circles, click on the error and it displays the full error below

PiKe · 2 Feb 2017 at 20:13

Just download seatools and run a long test, easiest way.

Phil87 · 2 Feb 2017 at 20:56

ED209 said:
click on windows logs and go to system.

have a look for anything that has any yellow triangles or red circles, click on the error and it displays the full error below

I looked at the warnings and errors for today, couldn't see anything hard drive related. I know a lot of these warnings will occur even when everything is working ok so it's hard to tell if any of them are indicating a real problem.

PiKe said:
Just download seatools and run a long test, easiest way.

I'll give that a try.

Phil87 · 6 Feb 2017 at 11:03

So I ran all the Seatools tests including the "long generic" and everything was ok. Does that mean the hard drive is probably working fine, and are there any other hard drive tests I should do?

ED209 · 6 Feb 2017 at 13:05

Could always try a new sata cable and sata port to see if this resolves any issues or even try running check disk on the HDD

Phil87 · 6 Feb 2017 at 13:27

I already did a check disk from within the hard drive properties in Windows and that was fine. I haven't had any other issues yet but if I see any other files getting corrupted I might try another sata cable (everythig important is backed up anyway). Although if it was an issue with the sata connection I wouldn't think it would pass the tests I've already run.

PiKe · 6 Feb 2017 at 20:34

Had a customer machine in today, although the partitions were shown fine, the file system was showing as Raw. Turned out to be the data cable that had been pulled tought.

I should have ran seatools to see what it made of it.