possible HD failure?

Hello,

Until last night, I haven't had any huge trouble with my gt725, but now when I try to access my large partition on my hard drive, it starts to get very slow and eventually locks up.

I have never experienced this and I can't figure out what is the issue. Looking back, all I can think of is that Adobe had some automatic updates that I installed, and then I tried to access my pictures folder and my computer started acting like the HD was dying!

I do have a LOT of information in my pictures folder as I shoot photographs in RAW format, which results in huge files. I have also recently been working on a picture that has a couple copies, each of them being at least a gig in size. Could this have any impact on how the hard drive is performing?

I doubt the HD is dying because this is such a new machine with great reviews, but it is beyond my knowledge of computers.

In addition, I installed windows 7 if that has any effect. I did a quick scan of win7 problems and didn't find anything similar as to the problem I am having.

If anyone has some ideas on getting this issue fixed it'd be of GREAT help! I really need to be able to work on my comp and get a project done before Christmas

 

Right click on each drive in your system in Computer. Select Properties and then select the tools tab. Click Check Now and select both checkboxes. Click Start and allow it to check on a reboot. Don't allow it to reboot until you have set up all drives/partitions like this.

Reboot the computer, allow it to fully check the HD and if it passes this test - then a re-install seems indicated.

I've updated the Adobe software on over two dozen computers in the last few days and I've never experienced this issue - so it must be something else on your system, possibly the install is corrupted/compromised somehow (but not by Adobe, imo).

During the reboot if it finds any problems and successfully fixes them - that should be all you need to do.

Good luck and Happy Holidays!

 

To make sure the HDD is ok, try testing it for errors with HDTune.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/HD-Tune.shtml

Otherwise... you could try Indexing all the files on the entire drive to possibly make it snappier.

 

Good point about HD Tune, but if it does find errors, it doesn't fix them, which means that you'll spend twice the time as you have to run the 'fix' I posted anyway.

Another thing to consider is that HD Tune always shows the errors - even when they have been corrected by using chkdsk! At least that was my experience before on a Toshiba with a bad cluster.

 

just open an Admin command prompt, or if not on Vista or Win 7 a command prompt run this and reboot:

chkdsk /f

It should tell you C drive in use, want to run on next reboot, hit Y for yes, at reboot you'll see all the disk checking and repairs, if no repairs, then might need be detectable in file system...good luck, jsut had HD die in one of laptops...thank God i have a windows home server, full restore in about 40 minutes.

 

I think the better suggestion is chkdsk /f /r. This will ensure that bad clusters are marked as bad and also will (try to) recover any data in those bad clusters before they're marked as bad.

This is what is essentially done when you check both boxes in the 'Tool's tab as I mentioned above.

 

Thanks guys for the responses. I am going to run a chkdsk on both drives with both checked and see what happens from there.

I really hope I don't lose all my information! Some of those photos are irreplaceable!

 

No, that shouldnt happen.

If in the rare case it does... there are ways you can try to get it back if its a hardware problem, and programs you can get (buy) to recover your files if its only a software issue.

 

2 seagate hdd died on me last week .. 5 more same modell and m.date in risky.
Bought 2 1.5Tb wd and for 2 days was running backup/recovery processes.

1. seagate died in firmware bug .. 0 way to recover from it .. head got damaged .. so even board replacement didn't help.
All data on it lost .. just os/game files from my game pc .. no big deal.

2. seagate partition tables and mbr got corrupted the sectors got damaged no way to recover from it.
Used recovery soft to rebuild and use secondary partition table .. all software's recovered .. how much data damaged time will tell .. 500Gb hdd was housing all my mp3 collection / some movies and games ....

Took 2 days to recover that 500gb data and to save all the data from the other 5 seagate hdd to wd.

Now 1/1.5 tb wd.-s are primary backup and those risky but still without errors seagates secondary backup on shelf.

 

Well that is somewhat comforting. So, I ran the chkdsk, but the HD still experiences freezes. I have a hunch that it may be contributing to a picture file I have been working on. The only reason I could see why is because it's nearly 3 gig, but I wouldn't think it would lock my HD up to the point of having to hard reboot it.

I went through command prompt to delete some similar files in a folder, and then tried to navigate there and had no issues. Currently it only locks up when I try to navigate to the given path where that file is. Oddly, the file isn't corrupt because I can still work on it in photoshop...

 

That is good news that the HD does not seem to be the culprit!

Did you try changing the Folder Options so that the 'Always show icons, never thumbnails' box is checked?

Good luck.

 

As Tilleroftheearth mentions, are you sure it's your HD that's locking up, and not the OS? The reason his suggestion might work is that your OS might be locking up when you try to open that folder because it's trying to process the file(s) into a thumbnail(s) that it can show when you open the folders.