Obscure hard drive problem...

Dahak · Post by **Dahak** » 2005-06-20 05:20pm

Maybe someone has an ingenious idea...
I currently have a very obscure problem with my SATA hard drive in my XP box.
Occasionally, it would just freeze up, and you hear the hard drive doing something, just like the heads were trying to find a spot to read, but fail, then after a few times trying, it moves on, normally and XP de-freezes. Occasionally, it will crash with a BSOD and a kernel page error.
Now, in the event table, there's an error saying that my viasraid didn't answer in the error waiting time, and a warning, that there was an error while swapping in \Device\Harddisk1\D.

I ran a test tool from seagate, and it says that the SATA raid controller is fine, and the physical hard drive works, as well.
When I try to do a chkdsk on one of the partitions, all NTFS, it stops with an error message before the final step...
Is it a hard disk problem? Or is the NTFS partition that fucked up? And if so, do you know a nice tool, which may check or correct this, besides the Windows one, which seems to fail?
I really, really don't want to buy another HD right now...

Jaepheth · Post by **Jaepheth** » 2005-06-20 08:23pm

Have you tried defragmenting?

I'd probably back up everything and reformat

Dahak · Post by **Dahak** » 2005-06-21 06:09am

Jaepheth wrote:Have you tried defragmenting?

I'd probably back up everything and reformat

Defraged, chkdsked, every damned tool I could lay my hands on...
And reformating is...tedious. I shy away from re-installing GBs of games...

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2005-06-21 10:19am

How much space is left? It could simply be a capacity issue, as alot of drives will start freezing up after getting so full.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2005-06-21 12:22pm

Occasionally, it would just freeze up, and you hear the hard drive doing something, just like the heads were trying to find a spot to read, but fail, then after a few times trying, it moves on, normally and XP de-freezes. Occasionally, it will crash with a BSOD and a kernel page error.

Your hard drive is very probably dying. Back up any important data on the hard drive now.

Dahak · Post by **Dahak** » 2005-06-21 01:07pm

Uraniun235 wrote:
Occasionally, it would just freeze up, and you hear the hard drive doing something, just like the heads were trying to find a spot to read, but fail, then after a few times trying, it moves on, normally and XP de-freezes. Occasionally, it will crash with a BSOD and a kernel page error.
Your hard drive is very probably dying. Back up any important data on the hard drive now.

It has been doing it for some time now, several months in fact, and it happens very infrequently. And it's a new one, not nearly a year old. If it is dying, it is a very slow death...