W870CU Hard Drive issue?

I think hard drives hate me.

The hard drive in my Sager has started doing weird things. Once, while using the computer normally, it suddenly started freezing for several seconds at a time, only letting me control things for maybe half a second in between. I tried to shut down the computer, but it froze at the "waiting for programs to shut down" screen for several minutes, and I had to shut it off without closing Windows.

While it was freezing, I noticed the hard drive light was on. It would flicker every 2 seconds, and make a zzzapping sound.

Now I've noticed that the sound of the hard drive has changed. Every time it's "working", it makes a sound like small glass beads being dropped on wood. And about 3 minutes after starting Windows, it will go haywire for 3-4 minutes, with the hard drive light on, flickering every 2 seconds, and I'll get maybe 2 seconds of control every 7-8 seconds. After this period, nothing seems to be wrong with anything, as far as I can tell, and it works normally.

1) Can anyone help me diagnose and fix this problem?

2) Does anyone know of any research into mystical auras that some people have, which affect the hard drives of any computer they use? Because I swear, hard drives hate me. I've killed three of them dead in the last three months, and this would be my fourth if it's going to die.

 

Lemme guess -- WD right? That's why I demanded a Seagate 7200.4 in my box!

 

actually WD black has been one of the best out there but seagate have had many many problems reported.

download HW Monitor and HD Tune from HERE and run the tests and post your readings on here to give us a better idea if its a dodgy HD

 

So I've been putting off doing the testing, because my hard drive mostly went back to functioning okay. Until I installed Batman: Arkham Asylum. OH BOY, my hard drive DOES NOT LIKE that game!

It caused a BSOD during the first installation, which made it almost impossible to uninstall and re-install. The game then reached a point where a very strange glitch happened, and a door that was supposed to open just refused to open. After exhausting all other options, I uninstalled and did a fresh install. This let me past this one particular door, but the game had become very unstable, consistently crashing after 30 minutes of gameplay. It would also freeze upon trying to exit the game. I also eventually reached a second door that wouldn't open, and dammed if I'm going to try to fix it by simply uninstalling and reinstalling. I'm through with that game until I can figure out my hard drive.

So I went and ran a few tests with HD Tune, and it looks like I do have a bad HDD (I apologize for large pictures, I don't know how to thumbnail).


Before the benchmark could finish, it encountered a Read Error and had to stop.






This test produced an I/O error and couldn't finish.

Any important tests I missed? Anything I can do to fix, or should I be letting Tim or Donald know that I need to call on my warranty?

--Update--

Well isn't this just interesting - since I couldn't play Batman, I went back to Dragon Age and tried to load up an old save-game. The game got stuck in the load screen, with the music playing and the load animations going for 20+ minutes, and no amount of Alt-Tab or Alt-F4 or Ctrl-Alt-Del could stop it. Never had a problem with Dragon Age before. So it looks like the hard drive went bad or is going bad in spots that were fine before.

No clue what any of this means.

 

I had hard drive issues similar to what you are experiencing. What I did (out of warranty anyway) was to go to the manufacturer's website and download their HD utility and perform a low level format. this cleared up the bad sector and away I went. It may not work in every circumstance but it may be worth a shot if you don't want to send it back in.

 

The telling bits in your images are the 2 highlighted entries in the HD Tune Pro 4.0 that mention reallocated sectors and pending sectors. Reallocated sectors are sectors that have been moved to other locations on your HDD because the sector where it used to be is now bad. This is additionally borne out by the red blocks in the image right after that one, as those are damaged sector blocks. I would think a low level format as Aram is mentioning wouldn't actually fix the bad sector, if it's actual, physical damage; it'd be more likely to mark it as bad while it was formatting and thus skip that sector. Still, depending on how much space you're losing to those bad sectors, you may want to just leave them as marked and go on with things, although they may also be a warning of further failures to come.

 

I got a blue screen. Doing nothing this time - just watching videos on the internet - with no warning, no slowdowns, no "hard drive is working" light. Just suddenly blue screen. Then it couldn't get past the startup "Sager" screen. I had to turn it off, and restart. Then it got past the "Sager" screen, but froze at the Windows 7 Logo screen for 20 minutes. I shut it down, turned it on again, and now it's running a self-diagnostic, and has been for half an hour.

I'm not optimistic about the outlook of this drive, but I'd like to at least be able to oboot it up once more, hopefully.

--UPDATE--

The drive is kaput. It will not boot up at all. After turning on the power, the "Sager" screen flashes, and then a screen tells me that SMART has detected an imminent hard drive failure (or something along those lines), and that it recommends that I back up my data and toss the drive. Of course, I can't back up my data until I start the computer, so getting my data is a bit of a Catch-22.

I gave Tim a ring, and a replacement drive will be on its way as soon as I can send the drive back to Sager. Now I'm not sure whether it's worth it to try and salvage the data or just toss the damn thing in the mail in hopes of quick returns.

 

GD firefox just quit on me after almost finishing a post bashing WD

Google 'western digital smart failure' for kicks!

My external is now displaying this message but ONLY on eSATA!

WD sucks, Seagate rocks -- my experience, YMMV

 

Ouch, sorry to hear that. I think at this point you're stuck with sticking that drive in an external enclosure and trying to pull the files off that way using another computer.

 

You can back up your data with one of these...
http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=usb+hdd+adapter&cid=15813405043581033900&sa=title#p

 

Ah, that sucks man. Sorry to hear about your troubles, but at least they're taking care of you.

 

For what it's worth, it was a Seagate that failed. So much for fanboy-ism

I assume I should be able to pop it in the second HDD slot and pull files off that way? I don't really have a spare external enclosure, and they're rather expensive.

Borrowing a mate's spare HDD with Vista installed to run the computer while I wait for the replacement from Sager.

 

Sorry about your 4th HDD failure. I'm on my 3rd. My first two were Sager supplied HDD's. Original one lasted about 8 months and the replacement they sent me only lasted three. I finally swapped out the last one with a Hitachi 7200 rpm drive I had from another laptop and have had no problems so far.
For this reason, backup is crucial. I bought a 600GB USB drive for about $80 bucks which I think is a reasonable price considering the benefits of having everything backed up when you have to do a clean install.

 

Best thing iv found for data recovery is NTFS GetDataBack My m1730 killed 2HDDs in RAID0 and a combination of this and Hirens BootCD Fixed it all

 

Oh, as long as you can boot it with your mate's spare HDD, then yes, that should work as well. I forgot for some reason that we were talking about a W870CU with dual bays instead of just one, and wasn't sure if you had alternative boot media (and storage!) in the first place, which is why I suggested another computer.

 

So putting the failed hard drive in the secondary bay, the computer still brings up the SMART failure message when booting up, but it's able to boot with my buddy's hard drive. Once it's booted, though, the computer doesn't recognize that it's got a hard drive in the second bay, so I can't access my files. I'm debating whether to just skip grabbing the files off it (I've got nothing vital, just some stuff I'd *rather* keep) and send it in to get the replacement sooner.

The replacement drive is this crappy one (5400rpm Fujitsu), and now while my computer is running, the cursor rapidly alternates between the regular cursor and the "working" cursor (the one with the standard arrow with the small blue circle to the upper right). It doesn't seem to affect the computer's performance, but it's rather annoying. Any ideas?

 

Ugh. You may be well and truly stuck and unable to get your data off at this point without going through some data recovery service at this point, if you can't even access the drive. I have no idea about the cursor, however... is it accessing the HDD while it does that?

 

Iv had the same problem, what i did was to download a small portable linux on cd OD (knoppix) then you can access files through there,
Try it out man, its worth a try

 

Linux? Eep! I've got no idea how to do something like that!

I might fool around with it later, but I was hoping to drop it off at the UPS store to get the replacement next week.

If you know how to do this quickly, want to save me some time and post instructions for computer-illiterate me?

 

Im much like yourself i look at linux and go ewwwwwwww,
A guy i work with during the summer lives for linux, he ran it off a CD and it will "see" your device, that way you can check if your control board has gone wonky, if it doesnt show in linux your in deep water, you could download knoppix from here: http://www.knoppix.org/

Burn it to disk and run from disk, then its a GUI much like windows you can check it out, its a big download but it will be worth the hassle, if i remember correctly what i did was ran knoppix and saw if i could address my RAID volume, then ran hirens boot cd available here (free too): http://www.hirensbootcd.net/

Use some of the partition tools in there to see if they are detectable and try and check is your MBR okay, if it isnt you can try and get the program to fix it although this is shady stuff, one you have an addressable MBR windows will detect it, use a MinXP (off hirens cd) to startup and then run NTFS get data back (installed on the MinXP allready you dont need to download it)
It will detect partitions and attempt recovery of files, get your external HDD ready and extract the data to the external and your set, if of course that works,

Alternativly you could post it to a data recovery company and for about $100 theyll get it back for you

EDIT:
I know intense right?
Some of what i said may be off here and there but i assure you if you use hirens boot youll get your data back, iv had 3 downed RAID volumes over the years cause of my m1730 not once has that CD failed me, it just takes a day or two

 

Cheers, I'll give it a go.

 

Any luck with that Histidine man?

 

None whatsoever. Linux knew I had my hard drive installed, but it couldn't read any files from it - came up with an error message when I clicked on the drive.

I couldn't get anything off Hiren's to work with it, either.

Drive is in LA right now, hopefully I'll be hearing from Sager today or next week.