Is my HDD dead

Wazz-1 · 20 Feb 2012 at 08:57

Computer wouldn't boot in to windows, said there was an error which windows couldn't fix, tried various thing and to cut a long story short got it down to my WD 500Gb HDD, Unplugged it and boots up fine, tried in different sata slots no joy the computer just wont boot into windows. If i boot into windows first and plug the drive in the hot swap dock i can see it in device manager and it says it's working fine but i cant access it. i have HD tune and can benchmark it, i have scanned it and it has 1 bad sector, is there anyway i can back it up?

Admiral Huddy · 20 Feb 2012 at 09:03

Have you ran CHKDSK /r This would normally flag bad sectors as bad, recovers what it can read and skips it then on?

I normally keep a cd with PEBUILDER handy so i can boot from a live CD, then issue the command from there if i can't get windows to load.

Failing that, plug the HDD into another machine and issue the command / or backup from there.

edit - Always run the disk diagnostics tool from the HDD manufacturers website when diagnosing a possible HDD faults.

Wazz-1 · 20 Feb 2012 at 12:48

Will try tonight, I just dont understand why I can't access it in windows when device manager knows its there

Wazz-1 · 20 Feb 2012 at 20:27

Ran CHKDSK and it just hangs on the first line,all very strange, i can hear the drive working, windows won't show it on my account but if i login to my sons account it is listed but still cant access it, the drive is Local Disk (F

all i get is this

whats that all about?

Xire · 21 Feb 2012 at 14:28

Double check in Disk management if the drive is enabled and the partition is marked as active

bledd · 21 Feb 2012 at 14:59

Try in Disk Management

See what's going on there.

Testdisk might be able to help. Failing that. GetdatabackforNTFS

If formatting doesn't sort it out, get a new hard drive and restore your backup of the files to that drive. ..

Wazz-1 · 21 Feb 2012 at 23:04

Thanks for the advice guys but the drive is now Completely dead, started making some strange noise like a little grone of a dying animal (poor thing) and no longer spins up. Never had a drive die on me before, Quite sad

or maybe i am lol
Anyway gave me an excuse to get another Crucial M4 128GB Hee Hee

TAC4U · 22 Feb 2012 at 13:47

I'd suggest using CrystalDiskInfo to check on the health of your hard-drives. I had a similar issue to you - which turned out to be related to a faulty SATA cable - and when I ran CDI it flagged up issues with a couple of my drives. Interestingly, it didn't flag up my old 750GB which has been powered on for 25,475 hrs (1061 days).

I'm really looking forward to Windows 8's Storage Spaces feature, which will support RAID-like functionality. I hate manually backing up important data and don't like to mess around with external hard-drives; currently I use Dropbox to backup my critical files.