Two questions: error-checking; and index of HDD

I'm using Vista and I'm suspecting that there is something dodgy with my HDD (Toshiba MK1637GSX - beeping/scratching noise - discussed on this forum).

First of all, does anyone know much about Windows error-checking? I'm talking about the "tool" that is available when you right-click -> properties your HDD in My Computer. I've run it a couple of times - my D:/ partition comes up clean, but my C:/ has had a couple of odd reports - the first was to do with indexes being moved and the second said that it "made corrections to the Volume Bitmap". What do these mean and are they serious? There are no bad sectors, but I don't know if these are already warning signs that I need to take seriously...?

Also, I've disabled the 'index this drive for faster searching' option for both my C:/ and D:/ drives, as recommended in the NBR Vista tweaks section. But since then my disk free space on C:/ has gone down by 6GB...!?!

Any ideas guys? Cheers!

 

try downloading a something to scan the physical surface to test it for errors


http://www.google.com/search?q=HDD+...-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

there is a start for you,

bigO

 

Well it seems like your harddrive is on the brink of failure.
No software will be able to fix the scratching noise. This noise comes from the head scraping against the discs inside of your harddrive. This is a hardware error, which software unfortunately cannot fix.

The results of the scan are basically stating that their was a corrupt sector found, and the drive was able to fix it by moving the data out of the sector, formatting that small sector and putting the data back on.

Toshiba and Fujitsu laptop drives are not very good, which is one of the reasons why they are cheap, they just do not have the quality which seagate, hitachi, wd and even samsung drives have. This is why these drives burn out so quick.
I recommend getting yourself an external harddrive if you do not already have one. Then back up all of your data.
Then you will need to get a new harddrive for your system.
If your system is relatively new and under warranty, than you can contact your manufacturer for a drive replacement. If not, than you can purchase a new harddrive.
Your harddrive utilizes the sata interface, so you can upgrade to basically any 9.5mm thick sata drive on the market, which is every drive other than the Hitachi 5k500.

K-TRON

 

Thanks guys - looks like I'll be getting on the phone to Acer about this because I have a few months of my warranty left. Are they likely to give me a like-for-like replacement or put in a different type of HDD altogether? And would they create another "hidden recovery partition" on the new HDD becaues I need that for when I want to reformat etc...

I did an HDTune test and it came up completely fine, and just done another Windows error-check and this time it found no problems. Hmmmmmmmm..still I think you're right about Toshiba HDDs and I would quite like to get some peace of mind! As for externals - well I'm going for the cheap / free option of a manufacturer's replacement first.

I know that I'm not the only one having problems with this particular Toshiba HDD - lots of Dell users have had door-to-door service replacements, unfortunately Acer seem to be lacking in that department!