Windows 7 64bit HDD imminent failure warning....

AllanWalton · 21 Sep 2010 at 10:25

Howdy,

I hope you're all well (because I need your help lol ;-)

)

So I got "Windows 7 64bit HDD imminent failure warning" last night and it naturally scared the hell out of me so would like some advice.

here's whats happened from the top:

- Firstly, my drive is a samsung HD203WI ATA 2TB.

- I recently replaced the PSU in my PC because it shorted out and broke completely. I have no idea what caused this and am trying to fix this as a seperate problem (i currently have my entire PC running on top of a cardboard box with 1 mem stick and a cheapo (but proven to work gfx card).

I believe that whatever caused this may have also screwed the drive at the same time but cannot be sure - looking at the components there was no physical damage or burn marks to give any clues.

- After replacing the PSU, The first time I turned it on, everything was fine - it ran and all seemed well.

- The second time onwards the power LED on the case stopped coming on when turning the PC on - apart from that, it all still worked and seemed happy.

- Forth or fifth time, windows stopped loading - it would stall on the "Starting windows" screen. Resetting and loading in safe mode would get me into windows, then restarting again in non-safe mode would load successfully.

I then got the HDD failure warning screen.

- I ran "chkdsk /r" last night and it appeared to complete successfully. windows would load successfully this morning but the power LED on the case is still out despite being connected to the mobo.

- I ran HDTune (lite) and performed a quickscan and got 100% green with drive health "Ok". Temperature of the drive never gets above 36 degrees.

- I *think* the drive is making a more aggressive noise now but I can't be sure - it may be just me listening for it because of what's happened.

- Unfortunately Samsung don't offer their diagnostic tools for windows 7 64bit - I'm emailing them later to see if they can do anything about it.

And that's about it - I'm going to run a full HDTune scan tonight (I've worked out it'll take about 7 hours to scan a 2TB drive to completion) and I'll post the results tomorrow but if anyone has any advice or suggestions I'd be very grateful.

Thanks,

Allan

AllanWalton · 21 Sep 2010 at 13:33

hmmm, that's a bit worrying about the SMART data - do you have any suggestions about scanners that can provide the information needed?

I've already backed up the totally essential stuff (high storage USB sticks ***! lol) - if anything else got wiped It wouldn't be a total nightmare - it would be a hassle having to reinstall everything on a new drive but nothing too strenuous.

Cheers for the replies.

AllanWalton · 21 Sep 2010 at 15:25

you know what - thats made me remember something - after turning my PC on for the first time in a month after replacing the PSU windows installed 6 new updates so it's probably one of those that has triggered this and ****ed my machine.

I'm happier now I've remembered this (as it hopefully points to it being windows rather than my drive) - thanks for that post - I'll disable hibernation and try the other things out - you'd think they'd have caught this kind of thing by now.

<head off table>

Cheers again everyone.

AllanWalton · 21 Sep 2010 at 22:48

I tried running a bootable CD with ESTool on it but got a dodgy looking error message:

//--

Cannot open CD Driver MYDVD SHCDX33E cannot load
Disc C has label TURBODSC
Your Ram drive is loaded at C:
File not found L:\*.*
Out of memory error
Bad command or filename 'run.bat'

//--

I've no idea where MYDVD comes from (guess it's the CD burner using a default name), where TURBODSC comes from or why it's looking for L\*.*

The only thing that makes sense is run.bat and it seems to fire it off correctly as the program does run (I get the title screen), it just can't continue for the reasons above.

I'll give a bootable USB stick a go tomorrow night.

AllanWalton · 22 Sep 2010 at 19:57

So I ran HDTune with a full scan and it passed with flying colours. However, I ran the diagnostic tool off a USB stick and unfortunately it failed

Read DMA Pass
Check SMART Pass
Spin up / down Pass
Surface scan Fail
Bad sector

its recommended formatting the drive so I'm going to do that this weekend.

I've not done this before so excuse the noob questions but if I use the diagnostic app to format the drive, then just restart the PC with my windows disc it should all be ok yeah?

What about reinstalling windows - is it going to complain about already being installed before? what do I need to do it?

Is this the best course of action - is the diagnostic tool being over zealous?

If anyone's got a noob guide to this (even if it's just "don't forget to back this up!" style) I'm all ears.

Thanks,

Allan