Secondary hard drive woes

**Justinian** · February 15, 2010, 09:56 PM

A while back I posted a thread on a weird name issue I was having with my secondary drive, where I couldn't change the name. Now, the same hard drive (a 500 GB SATA hard drive) has an even worse problem.

Sometimes my computer will just randomly not detect its existence -- it disappears from the My Computer and any programs on it will not function (I get an error message that the drive does not exist). This issue is instantly fixed by rebooting, where the hard drive is visible and working (until it happens again).

Any ideas as to what I can do to fix it? Would reformatting it fix both that issue and the name issue?

**Doono** · February 16, 2010, 12:26 AM

You can try changing the SATA port you have it plugged into or the cable itself, might be a loose connection. Also I would download a piece of software called Hard Disk Sentinal, it scans your system for all your current harddrives and returns you data based on the S.M.A.R.T report, should give you a clear indicator if the drive itself is having problems

Unless the drive is approaching 2-3+ years old it should have a health rating of 100%, if it's significantly less than this the hard drive is on a path to failure and should be replaced immediatly or sent back if it's in warranty.

http://www.hdsentinel.com/dl.php

**Justinian** · February 16, 2010, 08:50 AM

Thanks, I'll do that.

I decided to pull the trigger and reformat last night, and that has finally fixed the name issue. No way to tell yet if it's fixed the disappearing drive issue though.

WHAT THE CRAP. For both my C: and E: drives it says 12% health and 9% health... I have only had this computer a little more than 2 years. I have the free program though, is it giving me bad information? I find it hard to believe that both of my hard drives, one of which has been functioning perfectly fine, are going to fail in two weeks.

**Doono** · February 16, 2010, 09:04 AM

shows 100% health on mine and yes i use the free one, check what it sais about the hard drive temperatures and so on. The info it's using is being provided by the smart functions built into most modern harddrives. Is it reporting damaged sectors and so on.

Remeber it's just a guide not a guarentee.

**Justinian** · February 16, 2010, 11:15 AM

Originally Posted by Doono

shows 100% health on mine and yes i use the free one, check what it sais about the hard drive temperatures and so on. The info it's using is being provided by the smart functions built into most modern harddrives. Is it reporting damaged sectors and so on.

Remeber it's just a guide not a guarentee.

Here's a screenie:

Is there anything I can do to fix the damaged sectors? I just can't believe both of my hard drives (when I barely use the second one) would be about to die after 2 years. It's not like I've been abusing my poor computer... I always turn it off at night, et cetera...

**Doono** · February 16, 2010, 12:16 PM

What it's telling you is the disk is performing fine, which is why you are not experiencing any issues yourself (performance would be things like spin up time, read/write performance etc). What the program is telling you is significant portions of the disk are unwriteable/readable which means your losing sectors, if you lose a critical area of the disk it will stop functioning. The date its given you is an estimate based or it's health it could survive for ages or die in a week, not an exact science. Also 40+ degrees is pretty warm for a hard disk if not under load, I would look at getting some extra cooling in that case of yours if thats an idle temp.

You can't repair a bad sector as it represents physical damage to the surface of the disk, hard drives should automatically detect bad sectors and move the data to spare sectors if the data can be read. If the computer attempts to write to a bad sector it will detect this and rewrite it to a working sector remapping the location in the process.

**Justinian** · February 16, 2010, 02:41 PM

Originally Posted by Doono

What it's telling you is the disk is performing fine, which is why you are not experiencing any issues yourself (performance would be things like spin up time, read/write performance etc). What the program is telling you is significant portions of the disk are unwriteable/readable which means your losing sectors, if you lose a critical area of the disk it will stop functioning. The date its given you is an estimate based or it's health it could survive for ages or die in a week, not an exact science. Also 40+ degrees is pretty warm for a hard disk if not under load, I would look at getting some extra cooling in that case of yours if thats an idle temp.

You can't repair a bad sector as it represents physical damage to the surface of the disk, hard drives should automatically detect bad sectors and move the data to spare sectors if the data can be read. If the computer attempts to write to a bad sector it will detect this and rewrite it to a working sector remapping the location in the process.

To be fair, that temperature was after I left it on all night (so it could reformat my E: drive). I had it off for about two hours when I went to class, and now they're at 26 C.

Yeah, if you're getting bad sectors then you should be concerned. A bad sector could mean data loss, if it wasn't able to read the data back off. A sector is only 512 bytes, so your drive has hundreds of millions of sectors, and several hundred failing isn't a huge deal by itself. But if you've gotten several hundred already, you're likely to get more, and you never know when it's going to start corrupting stuff you care about. A healthy disk will usually have zero reallocated sectors.

I wouldn't believe the figures it gives on estimated time to failure, though, or "health percentage". They sound like baloney. But the number of bad sectors is probably taken straight from the SMART data, it's unlikely to be incorrect.

Is it normal to have so many after only 2 years, or about 2 and a half? Especially in a hard drive I've hardly used (the E: drive only being for games, and thus not subject to the general wear and tear of having the OS, most programs, etc.)?

Should I be seriously concerned the hard drive will fail/corrupt my data soon and look into buying a new one? And if I do, logically I would have to replace the C: drive, so I would have to reinstall Windows on that drive wouldn't I? That would be a pain since I can't use the version of Vista that came with this computer.

Is the drive disappearing randomly because of bad sectors? I checked the SATA and power cables for both drives and they're plugged in fine, so I don't think it's the cable...

**Simetrical** · February 16, 2010, 02:12 PM

Yeah, if you're getting bad sectors then you should be concerned. A bad sector could mean data loss, if it wasn't able to read the data back off. A sector is only 512 bytes, so your drive has hundreds of millions of sectors, and several hundred failing isn't a huge deal by itself. But if you've gotten several hundred already, you're likely to get more, and you never know when it's going to start corrupting stuff you care about. A healthy disk will usually have zero reallocated sectors.

I wouldn't believe the figures it gives on estimated time to failure, though, or "health percentage". They sound like baloney. But the number of bad sectors is probably taken straight from the SMART data, it's unlikely to be incorrect.

**Freddie** · February 16, 2010, 03:57 PM

To fix those nasty bad sectors you should download and use Ultimate Boot CD UBCD and do a low level format alternatively if you have a Seagate hard drive you can use Seatools to do the formatting.

**Simetrical** · February 18, 2010, 06:34 PM

Originally Posted by Justinian

Is it normal to have so many after only 2 years, or about 2 and a half? Especially in a hard drive I've hardly used (the E: drive only being for games, and thus not subject to the general wear and tear of having the OS, most programs, etc.)?

No. However, some percentage of drives are faulty and will fail more quickly. I had a Hitachi Deskstar that died less than a year after I got it, IIRC.

Originally Posted by Justinian

Should I be seriously concerned the hard drive will fail/corrupt my data soon and look into buying a new one?

Yes, that's a serious possibility. If you keep backups of everything you care about, then you might be willing to risk it. That's up to you. Also note that if the disk does fail, there's a decent chance you'll be able to copy all or almost all the data off it regardless, but it's not guaranteed. (When my disk failed, I ended up being able to copy everything.)

Originally Posted by Justinian

And if I do, logically I would have to replace the C: drive, so I would have to reinstall Windows on that drive wouldn't I? That would be a pain since I can't use the version of Vista that came with this computer.

No, you should be able to just copy the contents of the current disk to the new disk, byte for byte. I have no idea how to do this with a Windows GUI; it probably involves downloading some dodgy third-party program. On any Unix variant, including OS X and Linux, you can do

Code:

dd if=/dev/olddisk of=/dev/newdisk bs=1M

to copy everything on the old disk, including the partitions and filesystem metadata, so you can just swap in the new disk and it will work. You should be able to use the same command on Windows with Cygwin, or any of various Windows native dd ports. But make sure you're absolutely certain that you got the device names right, because otherwise you'll copy to the wrong disk and destroy all your data. If this scares you, do a reformat instead, or look into some friendly GUI tool (which, with any luck, will actually work correctly, and not cost any money).

Originally Posted by Justinian

Is the drive disappearing randomly because of bad sectors? I checked the SATA and power cables for both drives and they're plugged in fine, so I don't think it's the cable...

I don't know. It sounds to me like Windows is disabling the disk, and it might be doing that because it detects errors and doesn't want to continue lest it destroy data. I expect you can check some logs or things for more info here, but I don't know where those would be on Windows. GED would know.

Originally Posted by Freddie

To fix those nasty bad sectors you should download and use Ultimate Boot CD UBCD and do a low level format alternatively if you have a Seagate hard drive you can use Seatools to do the formatting.

Bad sectors are hardware errors and cannot be fixed at the software level. Formatting is a software-level operation that is indistinguishable on the hardware level from other writes. If there are bad sectors, the disk itself has already remapped them, so there's nothing you could possibly fix at this point unless you want to physically take apart the disk and somehow fix a deficiency in the arrangement of iron oxide on the disk platter. The problem is that more bad sectors might occur in the future, and again, no software tool will prevent that, because bad sectors are physical failures.

**Justinian** · February 21, 2010, 08:44 PM

Thanks for the info Sim! I appreciate it.

No, you should be able to just copy the contents of the current disk to the new disk, byte for byte. I have no idea how to do this with a Windows GUI; it probably involves downloading some dodgy third-party program. On any Unix variant, including OS X and Linux, you can do

Code:

dd if=/dev/olddisk of=/dev/newdisk bs=1M

to copy everything on the old disk, including the partitions and filesystem metadata, so you can just swap in the new disk and it will work. You should be able to use the same command on Windows with Cygwin, or any of various Windows native dd ports. But make sure you're absolutely certain that you got the device names right, because otherwise you'll copy to the wrong disk and destroy all your data. If this scares you, do a reformat instead, or look into some friendly GUI tool (which, with any luck, will actually work correctly, and not cost any money).

So I'm guessing that merely copy+pasting the entirety of C: to a new hard drive wouldn't work?

**Subuatai de Bodemloze** · February 22, 2010, 12:57 PM

Originally Posted by Justinian

So I'm guessing that merely copy+pasting the entirety of C: to a new hard drive wouldn't work?

Yeah C&P won't work. You can get Norton Ghost. You could try Raiding a new drive and after mirroring is complete remove the original disk (Not sure if this will work though)
Safest bet is to buy your new disk and some cooling.. format and install new OS on it then set it as your primary and copy from the old disks what you need.

**Simetrical** · February 22, 2010, 11:18 AM

No, I doubt it. Windows stores things in magical places that aren't visible on the hard drive, I think. I'm not sure, though. What you suggest would work on Linux, with a couple of caveats (some directories you don't want to copy). You should ask GED, he knows a lot more about Windows than I do.

**atraps** · February 22, 2010, 01:06 PM

Originally Posted by Justinian

So I'm guessing that merely copy+pasting the entirety of C: to a new hard drive wouldn't work?

No not if you booted up from that C partition. You can copy it if you boot up with a different OS. I use Ubuntu. Just burn a CD with it, and boot from CD (you don't have to install).

Originally Posted by Simetrical

Windows stores things in magical places that aren't visible on the hard drive

It's visible with correct folder view options, just certain files aren't accessible.

**Simetrical** · February 23, 2010, 01:04 PM

Originally Posted by Subuatai de Bodemloze

Yeah C&P won't work. You can get Norton Ghost. You could try Raiding a new drive and after mirroring is complete remove the original disk (Not sure if this will work though)

This will only work if your RAID system supports in-place creation of RAID volumes, without having to wipe them. This is probably only possible if it maintains no metadata on the RAID devices, and likely also only if the disk isn't actually mounted. With Linux's mdadm you can do this (I just tested), using --build followed by a sync_action of recover instead of --create, but it doesn't work if the device is mounted.

Originally Posted by atraps

It's visible with correct folder view options, just certain files aren't accessible.

Are you sure? Have you ever successfully copied your OS to a new disk in Windows by just copy-pasting? At the very least, I find it hard to believe that the bootloader will work.

**atraps** · February 27, 2010, 12:35 PM

Originally Posted by Simetrical

Are you sure? Have you ever successfully copied your OS to a new disk in Windows by just copy-pasting? At the very least, I find it hard to believe that the bootloader will work.

I never said that. I said they were visible, but not accessible.

**Subuatai de Bodemloze** · February 23, 2010, 01:34 PM

Yeah well Like I said Sim I don't know if it would work but It may be a possibility. Still safest and best opt is to buy new drive and install OS on it then add the old drive and copy wat you want off it.

**Simetrical** · February 28, 2010, 12:40 PM

You mean you can see it, but get an error trying to open it even as admin? Weird, but what do you expect from Windows. I suspect there are parts that aren't even visible.