WD 120gb problem

Hi all

I have a 120gb 5400rpm WD hdd in my 3-months old Aspire 5715(the hdd came with the laptop) and recently I noticed something strange in my Event Viewer:

View attachment 19889

I googled around but all I can find is that this might be happening due bad sector(s). My question is if this is possible? It's a new hdd, my laptop is all the time on my desk. And if it was defective in the first place, how come I see this error in the last 2 weeks?

From what I understand of the error message, the problem appears to be on D:\ and my page file is on C:\. So why paging error on D:\ ?

Windows Scandisk came up with no errors but overheated the hdd. Tried HDTune scan, but the drive overheated again and faster this time(from 40ºC to 55ºC for 20minutes) and I stopped the scanning. I suppose it's not safe to scan(or do anything) when the drive overheats.
The drive appears to overheat ONLY under heavy error check scan..Never overheats when playing games or scan for viruses or transfers..

 

go back into hdtune, and click on the health tab.
If there are any red or yellow highlighted items in the S.M.A.R.T. scan than I would sugget replacing the harddrive.
If there are no errors and the drive says "healthy" than it is either the monitoring program that you are using is faulty, or it is time to reinstall the operating system.

K-TRON

 

The health tab is empty..? I did a 'Quick Scan' and 'Benchmark' and it's still empty..

I use HD Tune for monitoring too..

 

if the health tab is empty, than you need to enable SMART on your harddrive.
Go into the Bios, and then go into the advanced and harddrive tabs. use the arrows to highlight the harddrive, and you should be able to press enter. Then you should be able to allow smart monitorings to be recorded.

If its not there, look through the Bios for it. You should be able to find something related to harddrive diagnostics/monitoring, which are keywords for smart.

K-TRON

 

S.M.A.R.T is enabled, SpeedFan can see the drive:

View attachment 19898

I did a full scan with HD Tune came up all 'green'. The hdd reached 58ºC...Still nothing in the 'Health' tab.

 

well I would not think much of it than. If the smart diagnostics are all clear, which they are, then you should not have any problems with the drive.

Actually I see what the problem is, it is your drive overheating. every time your drive runs over 55c, you are getting readings from event viewer, which state that their is a problem. It is a guess, but it seems that the problem is happening every time you strain your drive, which means that it is correlated to the drive running very too hot.

2500th post

K-TRON

 

Congrats on the 2500th post, +rep

Hmm..I'd say no, because almost half of the time, the error occures in the morning when I wake up and start doing stuff on the laptop.
And just checked Event Viewer, there are no new erros(and there should be at least 3 if the overheat theory is right).
The laptop is NOT in sleep mode or hibernation during the night(never is in these modes actually) just with lid closed and idle.
About overheating. Acer has known issues with temps reported incorrectly due faulty BIOS (CPU - v1.34, v1.40) but I don't know if this could affect the hdd..probably not..

Edit: just noticed, 555th post

 

If HDTune`s test goes on ok, I wouldn`t give it another thought either.
You can update you BIOS, but since there is an error there, it might be hardware related, in which case , you should also check with NHC the drive.
Get more tests on it and see if they all pass, then you`re good. If at least 1 more gives you errors,then it`s definitely a problem and you need to change it.

 

Ok getting it's getting even weirder........

View attachment 19911

Apparently XP attempts(2 errors) to page in my external DVD-ROM too..

@eleron911 Ok, will do.

 

Do you have your paging file disabled or smaller than recommended ? I`d look into that also...

 

Page file enabled on C:\, custom set 1024-2048, recommended - 3055...
So you're saying to set it as it's recommended? Yeah, I could do that ...

I have NO problems with the hdd, just saw these warning in Event Viewer and I'm worried if there is some physical damage, bad sectors or something..
I guess I need to do full format and OS reinstall..

 

I used to get these errors on my desktop PC. It turned out NCQ was the culprit in my case. Once I disabled NCQ the errors stopped occurring.

 

In which case you`ll need to reinstall the OS anyway...

 

Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking..

 

Good luck, I hope the reinstallation fixes everything.
My overheating connection was a complete guess, so sorry if it was wrong. I was just trying to see if there was a correlation.

Can you disable NCQ in the Bios?

K-TRON

 

Dude, you've been most kind and helpful as always The few threads I have in NBR are all solved mainly by you... Thank you

As for NCQ...I can get the hdd in IDE mode, this will disable NCQ right?

 

Yes,that`s right.

 

Ide mode will disable the NCQ option for the drive.
Performance may decrease about 1-3% from disabling ncq, but its nothing major.
NCQ only really helps increase the speed of the drive when it is being used to move extremely small files, like 4kb and less.

K-TRON

 

As far as I remember, not all drives support NCQ(I may be wrong though), and you might not even have it.
Either way, disabling AHCI will get you reinstalling the system.

 

Thank you all.
I was planning to reinstall soon anyway, I guess I'll give IDE a shot..