Fucking hard drive...

Icehawk · Post by **Icehawk** » 2005-04-29 01:58am

It all started a few weeks back when while I was playing Unreal Tournament 2k4 with some music playing in the back ground. Everything was going fine and then all of a sudden the music just cut out. The game continued playing for about 10 more seconds and then everything just froze completely and I was forced to reboot. No real biggie I thought at first, though it was a bit surprising considering its a new computer.

Then a week later, it happened again, and I started getting worried that it might be due to my CPU being overclocked. So I dropped my CPU speed back down to its main speed and even put a nice new copper heat pipe cooler on it. But still when I tried playing again, it froze up after about 2 minutes of play. I then thought it might just be Unreal Tournament being corrupted or something so I reinstalled it but even after reinstalling it still would freeze up after a few minutes of play. I thought at that point it might be my video card that is bad, but I doubted it because EVERY TIME the game would freeze up the Hard Drive light on my comp would be lit up solid as if it was doing some serious work.

Also, after about the 5th time it had locked up and I was forced to reboot, the computer froze while detecting the hard drives, at this point I was freaking out, so I rebooted again and then it came up with a "Disk read error has occured" message and so I rebooted again and then everything was fine and windows loaded up. I still thought it had to be something other than my hard drive because its a new computer and Seagate hard drives are supposed to be one of the most reliable. Plus for the most part windows and all other apps would work fine and run great. It was ONLY when I played games that the computer would freeze up like that. However, the hard drive light always went solid an instant before freezing up so I was really conflicted over what it could be.

Well just today after backing up my files, I decided to format my main drive and reinstall windows to see if it was a windows issue or not. Well, at just 21 percent into the formatting, it seemed to be stuck there, then progress bar started going fast and I thought "How the FUCK can the drive be formatting so quickly all of a sudden" It stopped at about 60% then went quickly up to a 100% and sat their for a minute and then gave me a message saying clearly that the disk could not be formatted and that it is probably damaged.

Im pretty certain it is definately a bad hard drive now but I would also like to have any second opinions. Could it be anything else causing the drive to not format properly like bad RAM or faulty hard drive controller on the mobo?

Post by **Dalton** » 2005-04-29 02:06am

Sounds like a bad HDD to me...

DarkSilver · Post by **DarkSilver** » 2005-04-29 02:39am

sounds like a advanced case of what happened to my comp a couple weeks back.

As Destructionator 13 would say, "Nuke 'em Rico"

get a new HDD

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2005-04-29 09:50am

Yeah, fraid your drive's been shepped. Good thing you backed up.

Batman · Post by **Batman** » 2005-04-29 12:51pm

Almost certainly a bad HDD. Seagate's good but production boo-boos happen.
Looks like you need a new harddrive.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2005-04-29 01:06pm

how often did you defrag and run scandisk? not sure if that would have such a major impact or not, but it's worth looking into at least.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2005-04-30 02:04am

Darth_Zod wrote:how often did you defrag and run scandisk? not sure if that would have such a major impact or not, but it's worth looking into at least.

That has nothing to do with the error. What happened is that the drive tried to read bad sectors, which is why it paused. A low-level format may fix the problem. You might want to check for an updated firmware for the drive which may fix the issue that caused the "bad sectors". It wouldn't hurt to provide some additional cooling by installing a fan nearby to provide airflow. (thats why 90% of the 75GXP line by IBM had issues...)

If theres any data you want to recover off of the drive, I suggest you aquire a copy of "GetDataBack" (theres a FATxx and NTFS version). Just remember, the more you use the drive the worse things will more than likely get.