Sinister attack on my hard disk interface or just coincidence?

S

Sven Pran

DELL Inspiron 8200 with Windows XP Home edition.

I have the feeling that just before new year it began to run slower than I
was used to, particularly during startup and logon.

On December 30th and for a few days I had severe problems with blue
screens indicating all sorts of disk errors during paging, inability to read
critical system files resulting in boot failures etc. etc.

I finally managed to recover and get into business again, but on January
30th the
story seemed to repeat itself although not quite as seriously as the first
time.

A readout of the event log (EVENTVWR.EXE) reveals that there has been a
great number of the following events
(Error 9 and Warning 51 typically come in pairs):

Error 7 The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block.
Error 9 The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the
timeout period.
Error 11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D.
Error 15 The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, is not ready for access yet.
Warning 26 The driver has detected that device \Device\Ide\IdePort0
has old or out-of-date firmware. Reduced performance may result.
Warning 51 An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D
during a paging operation.

on December 30th through January 1st and again on January 30th through
February 1st.
Outside these two periods none whatsoever since March 3rd 2003.

My system includes a NAT Router/Gateway towards the Internet, I have
updated both Windows XP and my virus protection with all announced
upgrades. A "deep" scan on my hard disk with Norton Check Disk
reports no problem.

So now I wonder if I am crying "wolf" for no reason or whether there is
a danger of some corruption in my hard disk interface.

Can it be just coincidence that these incidents have occurred just during
the changing of the month now for the second time in a row?
(And remember not a single such incidence for almost a year at other times!)

Comments, clarifying questions and/or suggestions shall be welcome!

regards Sven
 
C

CWatters

Make sure you back up everything important on the drive. It really does
sounds like it's failing. Would it matter if it didn't work at all next
time you switch it on? It happens.

Then you can look for S/W designed to report drive health. eg google up
"hard drive SMART"
 
S

Sven Pran

You can bet your last penny on that I already have backup!
And I have run both Windows CHKDSK and Norton Disk Doctor.

regards Sven
 
D

dglock

most drive manufactures have hard drive checking program
available on the web site, they are free and will tell
you if there is a problem with your drive.
don
 
S

Sven Pran

DELL Diagnostic flagged an unrecoverable error and a new harddisk
is already on its way. In the meantime I am running my system from a
plug in disk to which I have successfully cloned the erratic disk.

Sven

Only chkdsk /r
can detect these types of errors.
 

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