Dying hard drive or just Windows problems?

I have a laptop that is now slightly over 3 years old. Lately, installing routine Windows updates has a non-trivial chance of the system becoming unable to boot Windows until I run some combination of chkdsk and system restore. Fedora Linux is installed on the same hard drive and it has not failed to boot so far. The weird part is that chkdsk seems to help (in fact, the last time this happened it ran twice in a row without my intervention), but it never finds anything bad. I'm wondering if there is some way to tell if the hard drive is dying or if this is just Windows misbehaving. I've backed up the data, but my work requires me to travel for long periods of time and it would be highly unpleasant if the hard drive dies while I'm not in the US. Does anyone know how to tell the difference?

 

hi
can you download HD Tune in my link below and then run a sector scan to see if it finds any bad sectors.

2 bad sectors is enough to make the whole drive go titz up. i had this a few years back and had to replace the drive.

 

Thanks a lot! I ran the Error Scan in HD Tune and it got through about 230MB with 13 red blocks. At the 14th damaged block, it stopped and very soon after so did the operating system -- I could still move the mouse, but clicking on the start menu didn't do anything and even ALT-CTRL-DEL didn't work so I had to reboot with the power button. I think it's pretty safe to say that the drive is dying. Now I just have to pray that it lasts until December so I can buy an SSD in the US.

 

how many

i only had 2 bad sectors and it buggered everything up, it just depends where they are compared to what files are on that section of drive.

sorry to say it sounds like its ready for the rubbish bin.

is there any important documents on there?

and last until december, think you will be lucky if it lasts until next month or even week.

 

That does sound like a lot, doesn't it? And it only got through less than half of the disk...

That said, I suspect I'm relatively safe because I very rarely install anything new on it and everything old sits in non-broken places. That's why the Windows updates are so painful -- they install new stuff and not only that, but if they fail then so does Windows as a whole. I was going to install Wasteland 2, but that's obviously not a good idea at the moment.

I've backed up all of the documents, photos, music and even the Mozilla profiles. I guess I can buy an SSD when I go to the US in October, but it will have to be from a brick-and-mortar store since I will only be there for a week and won't be staying at a permanent address. There's a MicroCenter near Chicago; I'll probably just go there.

 

The sooner you buy a new drive the better. No guarantee that this will last at all for you.

You may want to disable ALL automatic updates from the O/S to the graphics drivers to the programs you use. Not that user initiated writes don't happen anyway, but it may be enough to not write over an existing good file from a program or the O/S to a sector that has gone bad (and Windows doesn't know about yet).

Make sure to really think about which SSD you want next - I REALLY do not recommend Samsung TLC drives from any generation at this point (Original 840 and the current EVO's, both 840 and 850) - and just to be safe; I would not be taking a chance at ANY TLC drive from any manufacturer either.


See:
Samsung 840 EVO read speed drops on old-written data in the drive

See:
Read speeds dropping dramatically on older files; benchmarks needed to confirm affected SSDs

 

Interesting, tiller. That would certainly be an argument against purchasing an SSD with tri-level cells.