Hard Drive Death in 9262?

Hey all. My 9262 has been working great so far... I've had it for about 6-8 weeks now. Sadly, I believe the Hitachi 320 GB 5400 RPM hard drive I have in it has failed.

I have the single drive in there, set up ATA. The other day I shut my computer off as normal and went to bed. When I tried to start it up this morning, the hard drive made a dreaded clicking sound a few times, and now the computer won't start. I'll get a blip of a blue screen while windows starts to load and I see a STOP error, then the computer will just restart and continue that way. Safe mode, etc, does not work. I also cant see the blue screen for more than .0001 seconds so I cant read the entire thing for details.

Using the Vista disc I did a memory scan, which turned up fine. I tried to do a Startup Repair, but it fails during the disc checking segment. I made my way to the DOS prompt and ran a CHKDSK but it has an "unspecified error" during step 2 of 5 as it processes the index entries. It chokes around 142000 of 162230 every time.

I called XoticPC tech support who were great and didnt treat me like a child when I told them I knew what I was doing. They instructed me to download a Drive Fitness Test ( http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT) from Hitachi, which I did. I burned the ISO to a CD and ran every possible test, but they all came up fine. I find that strange, considering CHKDSK repeatedly chokes while going through the drive, but whatever...

I can only assume the hard drive is toast, and there is some physical issue. Luckily all my things are backed up, and tech support is sending me a fresh new replacement HDD that I will install myself. My main issue is that I'll have to reinstall Vista, reinstall all drivers, and basically spend an entire day redoing the machine the way I like and getting all of my old software back onto the machine. I would love to avoid this...

The clicking sound I hear at times when the HDD is spinning (which I've heard before on other failed drives, if my ears dont deceive me) leads me to believe there is absolutely nothing I can do. However, if my problem rings a bell with anyone who knows there is some other, fixable problem that could save me an entire day of reformatting, I would certainly appreciate it!

Thanks for reading/helping.

 

I have experienced this before and the only way I have found to avoid it is by taking preemptive action and creating an image of the hard drive before it fails as backup. I have bought Acronis (one of many programs out there that can image a hard drive) so I don't have to worry about recreating my computer in case of hard drive failure. When you look at the time I took to make the images and money paid for the software, was it worth it as opposed to just reloading the OS, drivers and software for free?

 

Each company has some tools that can estimate how long before the hdd is failing.

PL

 

Unfortunately, it does sound like a physical problem and not something that's repairable.

It might be the case that the drive is still within tolerances, which would explain why the Hitachi diagnostic came back ok, but that where it's failing has caused corruption in the boot sector (for example, bad sectors could have damaged the files on the boot sector, making the system unbootable).

I had a similar problem with a WD where the drive seemed to slowly eat itself up. The first time I couldn't boot, I formatted and reinstalled on the same hdd, after checking for bad sectors and getting them roped off. A few days later it failed to boot again, with the same problem. At that point, I just replaced the hdd and, unfortunately, got to do a complete reinstallation again (all the way from XP SP1a ).

 

My harddisk failed me also. Check this thread, the rstrui thing worked for me!
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2848906&SiteID=17&pageid=9


Good luck!

 

Thanks everyone. I tried a complete reformat including the MBR and whatnot, but alas, installation just crashes with an unknown error. It must be hardware related. I'll sadly just have to clear the HDD off and ship it back.

Thanks for all your help!

 

For those who come after:

Norton has a very useful function that Acronis lacks--the ability to skip over bad sectors. If your drive is mechanically sound, but the disk surface is failing, you can use this function to image your drive to another and retain or repair your current OS.

Generally speaking, a harddrive clicking is doom, but I have recovered drives in this condition before they utterly fail.

Run a chkdsk /r to try and move data from bad sectors, then assuming this works, image it with Ghost. Now, your new drive will include the bad sectors that were imaged from the previous install but a little known VISTA chkdsk switch /B will cause Windows to reevaluate bad sectors and (since it is a new drive), restore them to use.

 

That's a useful bit of info. Quick question: does that chkdsk functionality only exist in _Vista, or also in XP, at least to your knowledge?

 

chkdsk is in xp, too, which I think you know, but that switch (/B) is vista only--you can however, drop the drive in a VISTA machine and run a chkdsk on it that way.

Never actually tried to move the vista chkdsk.exe in the windows directory, and moving it to vista...might give that a go

 

I'd be interested to see if it works.

 

I tried it, but it wouldnt work - chkdsk instantly chokes. Alas, the hard drive is fried. On the bright side, the replacement drive came today, so props to tech support for excellent and speedy service.

Awesome to know about that new /B switch!!!

Guess I'll spend Sunday reinstalling everything while I watch football...