HD Tune finds error in hard drive.

So my brother pulled out the 80gb Fujitsu MHV2080BH from a laptop I gave to him which recently died and he put it in an enclosure yesterday.

I just error-scanned it with HD Tune and it the program hangs at about the 42000mb mark and the hard drive keeps making clicking sounds, so there are errors there.

I'd hate to tell my brother its a bad drive. Its only 1.5 years old, what could have happened, do you guys know?

Could I still store some data on it, maybe isolate the bad parts of the drive. Make a partition with the good part and store data there?

Thanks.

Man, why did it have to go bad like that? I hear of hard drives dying, usb flash drives dying, makes me very scared now for my data. Or am I being paranoid?

 

I would just buy him a new drive, they are pretty inexpensive.
If the harddrive is clicking back and forth, its as good as dead, and the 44.3% error justifies it.

You could probably ship it back to fujitsu to get a refurbished harddrive, or a replacement drive, sepending on your warranty status.

K-TRON

 

Well, it doesn't seem to be completely useless. He had a bit of data stored on it on the laptop and it all worked when he put it in the enclosure and plugged it into his desktop PC, everything was fine.

I think part of the HDD is still useful and can't he just use that? I'm reading on Google that you can isolate bad parts/sectors of a drive.

In the Turion X2 Compaq V3000 where it was housed, a lot of heat came from the HDD compartment, I suppose it partially fried while in there.

 

You could but the fact that it is freaking out over that area and hasn't flagged it as bad (so it wouldn't try to get data from there) indicates that you should, at the very least, run a program that will flag those sectors as bad and then try to move the data from there to a portion that isn't.

In my experiences, drives that start with bad sectors develop more over time. Whether you want to chance that or not, is up to you. I believe Fujitsu offers a 3 year warranty on their drives so you should be able to send it away for a replacement.

 

I also have a 80gb Fujitsu drive in a external enclosure, its very loud

I did a Quick scan yesterday with HDtune and it passed.

 

Download and run the Fujitsu HDD diagnostics. That would provide the basis for replacement under warranty (which is normally 3 years from date of manufacture for most HDDs).

John

 

I downloaded the utility but it cannot let me select the HDD, it is a SATA HDD and on the site you told me, all the apps are for IDE or SCSI drives.


What do you think caused the drive to be damaged? The Compaq it was in, there was a lot of heat coming from the hard drive bay at the bottom, enough to burn my skin, perhaps the heat over time damaged the HDD? I just read from a 2006 post on the forums with another person with the same HDD in his Sony laptop and it got very hot.

My brother is disappointed, its only about 1.5 years old, shouldn't have been damaged that fast.

And this worries me about data storage, I want something that is reliable and will last for at least 2 years. I hear about hard drive failures, flash and ssd failures and it makes me very worried and paranoid of storing my data and not losing it.

HDTune hangs at the 42000mb mark, about half way and the read write test also gives an error at about the same mark.

Can some data still be stored on it though, is there a way to isolate the bad parts of the drive and keep data on the still good parts? I don't want it to be completely useless.

Please help, thanks!

 

If there are some errors now, then the entire drive is suspect. At ANY time something else could go bad, and your brother's data might be on that sector that goes bad. I'd highly recommend calling the warranty in on that drive, or buy a new one outright.

 

Does the actual drive still work?

You need to try a different program to make sure its 100% faulty

 

Heat can ruin just about anything given enough time.

Damage is not always dependent on time. There is no "perfect" manufacturing process so you could end up with a drive that lasts 5 years, 10 years, or a month. Just the way it is.

It's funny, you're so paranoid about losing data, yet you are still trying to find a way to use a drive that is showing itself to be bad..

 

Your absolutely right, but this drive is my brother's and its essentially for free, and he's quite poor so if he can get use out of it, so much the better. He has no critical data in fear of losing unlike me though.

The drive seems to be working at least partially, he has some applications on it and multimedia files and they are all playing fine on the several computers we have at home.

He tried to copy a few more files on it just now and got a write error, I guess the drive tried to write the data on the bad parts of the drive.

So, if possible, how can I isolate the bad sectors so my brother only uses the good parts of the drive?

If there are bad sectors, does it mean they can spread and so we should trash the drive or is it still salvageable, can he still use the good parts of the drive to keep his data on?

 

can you access data past the 4.2GB mark? I had a 12GB drive that was fine right up until the 6.7GB mark, then would just freeze up hard and do the click-click tango forever until it came back with an error. Couldn't go past that section, no matter what software I tried to have maybe just that one section marked as bad. Maybe you could have better luck, something like Windows chkdsk /r might do that for you.