Bad Clusters on System Drive - G73JH

Hey folks - I have had some problems with getting my Windows Home Server to get a backup of the system drive on my G73JH. I ran chkdsk /r on the system drive and quite a few bad clusters are being detected. RMA? Any other suggestions? Thanks!

 

Sounds like you got the same problem I had. RMA is the answer.

 

What's "quite a few"? What kind of drive is it? If Seagate, have you ran SeaTools on it?

 

Thanks for the reminder - downloading it now. It wound up being 4 bad clusters - I suspect now it is probably not a big deal as they are not necessarily bad sectors. Will report back.

 

Okay - I ran Seatools and the drive failed the short test. I ran the long test and it found 17 errors which it then corrected successfully. At this point, I am considering swapping the two internal drives but does anybody know offhand whether or not, when Seatools is able to "fix" the drive, is it actually fixed? I presume I should be reasonably vigilant now for further errors arising and, if so, do an RMA on the drive only (if permitted). Suggestions? Thanks all!

 

Yeah I would watch it regularly since the one's (Seagate drives) I've seen fail seemed to deteriorate rapidly. Bad sectors are normal and the OS and/or drive firmware generally handles them transparently, but if the number increases rapidly it's a good indication (obviously) the drive is headed for disaster. Note Windows will also alert you when SMART data indicates the warning threshold has been reached.

 

Thanks Mark! I am running HDDScan on the drive now to see whether it was bad sectors or some other error (Seatools didn't specifically say that the problem was bad sectors, only mentioned errors). I think, to be safe, I am going to backup the drive and swap it with the data drive. Tempted to use this opportunity to upgrade to an SSD as the system drive but am going to hold off (and maintain a good relationship with my wife) for now.

 

I hunted through my windows logs and in event viewer, starting the day that I installed a beta intel .inf updater that Chastity posted, I started getting a controller error on the port corresponding to the system drive"

Event ID: 11
The driver detected a controller error on \device\ide\ideport0

I am in the midst of doing a new surface scan on the drive but am going to reinstall the chipset drivers and see if this error continues. Now, whether the error is related to the controller or the drive itself, remains to be seen.