Stuck hard drive

Anyway, yesterday I fresh installed Windows 7 on my Asus G51vx-RX05. Everything went smoothly. I turned it off before I went to bed.

Turned it on the next morning, and noticed I was hearing click-whirs coming from one of my hard drives. I used HDTune to check both hard drives. Both are healthy, both have no bad sectors. I installed the latest Intel Matrix Storage Drivers, and when I was prompted to restart my computer, I did so.

Now the problem. After POSTing and after the "Windows is starting" splash screen, I get a screen telling me my second hard drive (WD3200BEKT Scorpio Black) needs to run a consistency check, and that I have ten seconds to press a button to cancel it. I allow the countdown to finish, but it gets stuck at 1, and stayed like that for five minutes. I've had this HDD since mid-July and it only has gaming files on it.

I reset and the same thing happens. This time, though, I hit a button to cancel the check, but nothing happens. Despite hitting buttons, it still counts down to 1, and stays stuck there. I've yanked the HDD, and I boot normally.

Any ideas? My guess is a dead hard drive, but I'd like to check any other solutions before I RMA it.

 

Since you can actually boot into Windows, it may be a Windows problem. Pretty unlikely though. Just to check I'd try and repair Windows though.

 

You think so? What I don't get is the stuck countdown timer. Looks like a problem with checkdisk, but...

 

If it was making funny noises then it's probably a hardware problem. Is there any data on there that needs to be backed up?

 

Not really. Mostly game files that are easily replaced. I just wish it had given me some warning, though. I had reskinned all of my CS 1.6 weapons and now I would have to do it all over again.

But I'll still wait a couple of days before I begin the RMA process.


EDIT: Issue resolved. I just uninstalled the Intel Matrix drivers and I cna boot just fine. I'm still click-whirring, but I'll figure out the answer to that some other time.


EDIT2: Issue actually still there. After turnng it back on after I woke up, I have the exact same problem, with check disk stuck at the 1 countdown. However, if I boot into safe mode it bypasses the check. If I restart from safe mode it runs normally. Going to try to repair Win7.

 

Clean install? Try that.. might solve problem...

 

After I did the safe mode -> regular boot, I ran a full on checkdisk.

Now it seems to be behaving. What the hell, man.

 

Still clicking?

 

Actually, it still clicks when I'm idling--insofar as a HDD can idle. When I run something on it, whether it's a game from that drive, or a benchmark, or a disk check, it doesn't make noise.

Wait a second, it's not making any noises now. Spooky.

EDIT: Started making click-whirs again. Anyway, I'm preempting this and copying most of my Steam downloaded files and the occasional saved games to my external. No clicking while the writing is taking place.

 

Yep, I'd say back up your stuff. Good idea.

Are you going to RMA it or are you going to wait for it to die?

 

I'll let it die, and then RMA it.

After that I might go for that two-platter 640GB model and sell the one I get back from RMA. The higher density should keep things fairly close speed-wise, right?

Or maybe the 500GB one. The 640 seems a bit pricey

 

Yep, the higher density will help. 5400RPM or 7200RPM?

I wasn't aware they made a 2.5" 640GB drive yet...well not from the main manufacturers anyway.

 

You know, I'm not sure. This Seagate 7200RPM one looks promising.

But this WD 500GB 5400RPM drive looks promising as well. After all, this drive won't have time-sensitive tasks, just simple game loading and stuff, so that aspect coupled with a lower price makes it very attractive. Plus since the game HDD sits close to the northbridge, it should run cooler than my current one.

Decisions, decisions.

Sure do.

 

Forge,

I would definitely consider the 500GB Scorpio Blue over the Seagate 7200.4 (I've returned 4, 7200.4's) and even over the 640GB Scorpio too (check Tomshardware.com they're slower than the 500GB Scorpio).

The Scorpio Blue 500GB that I currently using has proven to be not only reliable, but also faster overall than the 7200.4's I've tried. The 7200.4's are so slow, they seemed 'broken' to me - but remember that I was used to Hitachi's 7K200 before I made the jump to 500GB on my notebook and the 7K200 has 'snap'.

 

Skip the Seagate... buy the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500... its about $110 on Newmegg... it owns anything outside there...

 

I keep getting this whir again, and my Hitachi secondary drive got a random consistency check at boot. It didn't hang up, but the fact that it showed up worries me.

Take a listen. I don't think this is normal.

By the way, this happens whenever the computer is on, and occurs every ten to fifteen seconds. The hard drive is not being accessed.

 

I couldn't hear a thing...

 

sounds like crickets chirping to me..

 

There's a sound other than the static from the amplification. Kind of a whir, I guess. You might need to boost up your sound and put your media player in a loop.

 

I think I heard that.

That's nothing. My 200GB Fujitsu that came with my notebook sounds like a coffee grinder on steroids when it's doing stuff. It almost sounds like it's crunching itself.

 

Hmm. The only thing that worries me is that my secondary, non-OS HDDs only started making that noise--and doing random consistency checks at boot--when I switched over to Win7. I've clean installed twice, so I'm ruling a bad OS as a factor. I've also installed the latest storage drivers. And the consistency checks on my storage HDD occurr ever other time or so that I boot. They don't hang up this time around, but who knows.

I'm just scratching my head as to why it's happening.

 

It's also worthy of note that the sound ceases when I run a disk check of the drive in question, and during bootup into safemode, the computer will take an abnormally long time--five or more minutes--on "classpnp.sys."

 

Is the disk check startup program a facet of Windows? If it is, I'd really be inclined to think it was a corruption of windows causing the hangups on disk checks.

Then again, you said you did a clean install.. Do you have another machine or external enclosure you can put the drive in question into?

 

At the moment, no. In any case, the drive that has problems--both the WD 3200BEKT before it and now the Bitachi 7k500--keep having that error. Running the checkdisk while in OS--since I don't access the drives unless I'm gaming--gives me a perfectly healthy, error-free drive.

Is it possible that a bad OS drive could affect my other drive?

 

You installed Win7 multiple times, but did you check your power settings?

And, do you have write caching turned on?

Try this experiment:

for the next couple of days, let your system idle for 30 minutes before turning off.

this is to let the system flush all files to disk if write cacheing is turned on.

if the check consistency warnings go away, you can be pretty sure that writes are not being committed to disk before shutdown, and hence, write cacheing is turned on.

 

Power settings are always set to performance.

Looks like write caching is turned on, seen via device manager. Let me turn it off and see what happens.

EDIT: Turned it off and took a quick look with WEI and HDTune benchmark. Turning it off on both drives seems to have improved performance, oddly enough.

 

Hmm. So I disabled the write caching on both HDDs, my OS/programs one and my media/games drive.

Booted it up today and it needed to check for consistency. Counted down to 1, got stuck for five minutes, upon which I shut down via power button. Booted back up again, and again I needed a consistency check. However, when it reached the "1" countdown, the message vanished and I booted up into desktop.

Sitll have no idea why this happens. Like I've said, this problem has hapened with two hard drives--my old WD and now the hew Hitachi--and only started with Win7.

And it still makes that "chirping" sound.