Is my hard disk about to fail?

[Phil]

I am not able to read some files on my second hard drive (IBM Deskstar) that
I bought about 3 years ago. In the Windows XP Home Event Log (Event ID 51)
this message appears as a Warning (!) "
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging
operation". When I copy the file, it fails with the message "The request
cannot be performed because of an I/O device error". I can read some files
from the drive. I have run chkdsk and that reports no errors. Has anyone got
any advice on what are the next steps that I should take to find out what
the problem is?

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

Phil;
Go to the hard drive manufacturers website and get their hard drive
diagnostics.

 

[Phil]

Jupiter Jones:
Thanks for info. I downloaded the Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test. It found
sector errors and I requested them to be fixed. I rebooted and still found I
had the same I/O problems. The problem always occurs on the same files,
which makes me think that there is a problem with the disk not the cable nor
the motherboard. Have you any other suggestions or comments that may help
me?

Phil

 

[Leythos]

Jupiter Jones:
Thanks for info. I downloaded the Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test. It found
sector errors and I requested them to be fixed. I rebooted and still found I
had the same I/O problems. The problem always occurs on the same files,
which makes me think that there is a problem with the disk not the cable nor
the motherboard. Have you any other suggestions or comments that may help
me?

Phil, backup as many files as you can to CD-R or CD-RW or some other drive
or backup source, NOW.

When a drive starts failing like that it's only a matter of time, the
longer you continue to use the drive the more likely your loosing
everything is going to be.

If you can get another drive to replace it, the retail ones sometimes come
with at Diskette that will COPY one drive to another, if not, then you
will have to reinstall everything on the new drive and then copy the data
from backups to the new drive (or from the old drive if it's still working).

 

[Phil]

Leythos,

Good advice. It is difficult to back up 30Gb but by various means, I will
probably lose just a few files. Fortunately it is not the disk drive that
contains Windows XP and most of my important data.

What surprised me was the lack of informative messages or windows tools that
would help me diagnose a hard disk failure.

Phil

 

[Richard Urban]

Windows is software. Hardware is - well hardware. The hardware manufacturers
are responsible for developing the necessary tools for diagnosing their
product, just as the manufacturer of your hard drive has done.

Same for a really good RAM tester. You are not going to find any free
utility that will work as well as a hardware based tester.

The best that windows can do is chkdsk. It will find many corruption errors
which it can fix. It will also find bad sectors/clusters - which it can not
fix.


--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

Leythos,

Good advice. It is difficult to back up 30Gb but by various means, I will
probably lose just a few files. Fortunately it is not the disk drive that
contains Windows XP and most of my important data.

What surprised me was the lack of informative messages or windows tools
that would help me diagnose a hard disk failure.

Phil

 

[P. Thompson]

Windows is software. Hardware is - well hardware. The hardware manufacturers
are responsible for developing the necessary tools for diagnosing their
product, just as the manufacturer of your hard drive has done.

Not true. SCSI, IDE, et al all have mechanisms for reporting the
nature of detected problems. Windows chooses not to relay that
information in a meaningful manner.

The best that windows can do is chkdsk. It will find many corruption errors
which it can fix. It will also find bad sectors/clusters - which it can not
fix.

Windows could communicate what the IDE interface is returning as an error
accoridng to the IDE specs. Further analysis may indeed require the
manufacturer's utilities, but Windows could do a much better job
communicating meaningful hardware errors.

Here is a tiny subset of errors that scsi can report:

"Write error - recovery needed"
"Write error - recovery failed"
"Write error - loss of streaming"
"Write error - padding blocks added"
"Id CRC or ECC error"
"Unrecovered read error"
"Read retries exhausted"
"Multiple read errors"
"Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed"
"L-EC uncorrectable error"
"CIRC unrecovered error"
"Data re-synchronization error"