Hard Drive Issues

[NotQuiteAPCGuru]

I have two identical SATA hard drives. About two months ago I woke up to an operating system not found message on what appeared to be a DOS Prompt (but was most likely a motherboard message.) When I hit reset, I heard the clicks of death. When I shut the computer off and restarted it, everything booted as normal.

Obviously this is a bad sign. These drives are brand new. I have continued to use the drives for the past two months so I could monitor for any issues, as the data on the drive that appears to be having the issue is backed up, and not overly critical. Everything seems to be OK now, and I haven't run into a problem since the first meltdown. Yesterday I opened a folder to pull up some files, but whatever program I use says they're not there, or that they're invalid. I am trying to find some empirical evidence that this drive is truly failing.

Thus far I have run a checkdisk on both drives and the partition, and I have run disk defragmenter. Could someone please advise me of any other utilities or programs I can use to check these drives. Everything comes back OK. SMART says the drives are great. Checkdisk says there are no bad sectors at all. Defrag doesn't show any bad clusters on either of the drives.

I have two HDD's. One of them is partitioned. Could this somehow be causing my problem? Worst case scenario, I'll contact WDC and get a replacement RA'ed out to me and I'll probably invest in a third HDD, because I'm anally retentive and redundant to a flaw.

Thanks all.

 

[cprince]

Western Digital has Lifeguard diagnostic tool. I recommend backing up all your data first, then contact WD for a replacement before your warranty expires.

 

[Roguestar]

Actually, we've had that a few times in work with laptop hard drives and I swear to god the way we fixed it was to sharply bash it, twice, on a desk. No more clicks, no more errors. Haven't heard of any troubles from it and that was a few months ago.

 

[Oyeve]

Originally posted by: Roguestar
Actually, we've had that a few times in work with laptop hard drives and I swear to god the way we fixed it was to sharply bash it, twice, on a desk. No more clicks, no more errors. Haven't heard of any troubles from it and that was a few months ago.

I have been doing this for nearly 20 years! It works a good portion of the time! I even have systems with deathstars still running after a few smacks! Works with old CDRs that refuse to turn on also!

 

[NotQuiteAPCGuru]

Hah, I fixed a cable tech's laptop CD drive that way. That and hammering a screwdriver to bend it back into shape. He offered me a job. LOL

Thanks for the tip.

 

[Roguestar]

Percussive Maintenance FTW