HDD forgetting things?

[Squally Leonharty]

Is it really possible for a HDD to "forget" things? Because I'm think that's what's happening with my PC.

The primary boot HDD (a PATA Western Digital Caviar 120GB) is pretty old now and as of lately it's acting strange. It's being detected just fine and the PC boots fine, but once Windows is loading, sometimes (but fortunately rarely) it doesn't finish loading, it just hangs, sometimes also resulting in a BSOD. Once inside Windows, programs sometimes crash suddenly without any apparent reason, or Windows BSODs right away (with random errors, like PFN_LIST_CORRUPT, DRIVER_IRQ_LESS_OR_EQUAL (or something), etc.).

Now, thinking that it could Windows could somehow be corrupt, I reinstalled everything, but the problems still persist. I did notice that whenever Windows wouldn't boot (one of the times was because system files became corrupt), I performed a surface check with chkdsk on the boot partition and after fixing errors, Windows would boot again, but it doesn't do that always. I did a few more surface checks, but no more bad sectors were found and the amount of bad sectors is only minimal.

What do you think?

On a side note, I already ordered a new HDD (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB) and 2x1GB Kingston HyperX PC3200 DDR RAM (I've always wanted to expand the memory, so yeah, I might do that as well now). The new HDD will replace the boot HDD, the "broken" HDD will serve as a backup HDD as long as it can last, and I'll see if that fixes things.

 

[LouPoir]

Sounds like a failing hard drive or hard drive controller on the motherboard. I would download and run the diagnostics utility offered by the hard drive manufacturer.

Lou

 

[wgoldfarb]

Originally posted by: LouPoir
Sounds like a failing hard drive or hard drive controller on the motherboard. I would download and run the diagnostics utility offered by the hard drive manufacturer.

Lou

If you haven't backed up your data, this is probably a very good time to do so! I had a similar problem, and decided to wait until I had my new drive to transfer everything from one drive to the other. Well, my old drive died before the new one arrived, so I never got a chance to transfer the data. All the important stuff was backed up, but I did lose some files and learned a good lesson in the process

 

[Squally Leonharty]

I did as LouPoir said and used Western Digital's diagnostic utilities and performed a Quick Test and an Extended Test on the boot HDD. The weirdest thing is that nothing wrong is being reported (every test has positive results): no other bad sectors encountered, physical condition of the HDD is fine, etc. And yet, Windows and programs occassionally crash. How do I make sure it is not the hard drive controller on the motherboard? I surely hope it's not that! I suppose I could use my new HDD (when it arrives) to verify this, but the "broken" HDD is PATA, the new one is SATA, so that doesn't really verify things, but ah well.

 

[pcgeek11]

This is really easy:

A hard disk cannot forget anything as it doesn't have a brain.

Seriously though:

IF a modern hard disk has any BAD Sectors it is failing and should be replaced. A Bad Sector definition:

Bad Sector = A segment of disk storage that cannot be read or written because of a physical problem in the disk. Bad sectors on hard disks are marked by the operating system and bypassed. If data are recorded in a sector that becomes bad, file recovery software, and sometimes special hardware, must be used to restore it.

Bad Sector = A bad sector is a sector on a computer's disk drive that cannot be used due to permanent damage, such as physical damage to the disk particles. It is usually detected by a disk utility software such as CHKDSK or SCANDISK. When found, these programs mark the sectors unusable and the operating system skips them in the future.

A modern hard drive comes with many spare sectors. When a sector is found to be bad by the firmware of a disk controller, the disk controller remaps the logical sector to a different physical sector. In the normal operation of a hard drive, the detection and remaping of bad sectors should take place in a manner transparent to the rest of the system. When the operating system begins to detect bad sectors, in most cases, it means that the surface of the hard disk is failing and the drive has run out of spare sectors with which to remap the failed sector.

Back-up Data Now.
Replace it asap.

pcgeek11

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Backup that hd.