Error's causing slowdowns

NvidiaDan · 5 Jan 2010 at 00:12

Hey all,

Reacently my system has become increasingly slow reading and writing files and often hangs. I suspect its due to this.

This is the second time this has happened, last time was temporarily fixed by re-installing windows7.

Any ideas what this error means and how to fix it, or could it be new hard drive time?.

Thanks

doggs · 5 Jan 2010 at 00:16

Sounds like new hard drive time. Try running chkdsk.

NvidiaDan · 5 Jan 2010 at 00:19

Yeah, chkdsk reports nothing.

I only bought the drive in september, but it was OEM. Would there be any kind of warranty still on it?.
Thanks

doggs · 5 Jan 2010 at 00:28

If it's the WD drive in your sig then yes, I think most WD drives come with a 5 year warranty. As it's less than a year old best to send it back where you bought it from.

Have a look on the WD site first, you sould be able to find some drive utilities to test it with.

NvidiaDan · 5 Jan 2010 at 00:46

Burnt and booted the WD diagnostics CD and it was unable to detect a drive. :confused:

NvidiaDan · 5 Jan 2010 at 07:33

Any ideas?.

droyden · 5 Jan 2010 at 08:05

Do you have SMART checks enabled in the bios?

Corasik · 5 Jan 2010 at 14:24

Most drives have a limited number of spare blocks which are used to replace failed blocks on the disk, but if the disk has many faults it can run out of spares and the the bad blocks have to be mapped out by the operating system, which in my experience is not very reliable.

Reformatting a disk which has failed can hide the problem for a time as for example if the bad blocks are located half way through the disks capacity, and windows always attempts to fill the disk from the start as much as possible, then as you fill the disk, you hit the bad blocks and it comes crashing down on you again.

OEM Drives generally have a 1y warrenty, but its still worth trying.

You can try to force checkdisk to scan the entire drive (rather than just the used space) with chkdsk /R, alternatively google for disk surface scan and find a 3rd party utility to check the disk.

doggs · 5 Jan 2010 at 21:06

There's plenty of drive utilities on the Ultimate Boot CD - http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

NvidiaDan · 6 Jan 2010 at 07:35

Thought i fixed it, ran a hard drive regenerator which detected and fixed 14 bad sectors which seemed to make it dissapear for about 30 mins but now its back. I think i will be ringing the company i bought it from today.

Corasik · 6 Jan 2010 at 07:50

To be fair it probably fixed them, but your drive is faulty so it keeps spitting out new bad sectors. It probably has a major defect in one of the platters.

I suspected your problem would come back, as the drive hardware should mask out the bad sectors automatically anyway. Hope you manage to get it sorted with the retailer or WD.