Failing HDD?

antares · Mar 2, 2015

Hi all, last week windows scandisk found errors in my 2nd internal drive (WD 2TB Black) and fixed it. I later found that some files appear with 0 filesize, and are unable to be opened (pictures and acronis backup files). Is this a common occurrence? Does this indicate file corruption or hardware failure (bad sectors)? Thanks

Clintlgm · Mar 2, 2015

Yep your hard drive is dropping sectors. WD Blacks go like that I exchanged them the first time I see a sector drop. Hopefully you have your Acronis back ups on a USB drive too.

antares · Mar 2, 2015

Thanks Clintlgm, I asked because I did a file scan with chkdsk, not a surface scan for bad sectors, so it could be just file corruption due to not defragging for a long time. Anyway, I do suspect that bad sectors might be present, I will perform a low level scan to confirm this. Will report back.
(I've been using the HDD for 2 years almost 24/7, SMART status is OK and the HDD is silent, no abnormal noise)

antares · Mar 3, 2015

UPDATE: I just performed a surface scan with HDD Regenerator and it did not find any bad or delayed sectors.

RolandJS · Mar 3, 2015

Just straw-grabbing, could HD's write/read caching be part of the problem?

Slartybart · Mar 3, 2015

You might want to check the disk with WD Lifeguard Diagnostic
USB boot (dlgdiag_5_22.zip): Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS
Windows (WinDlg_v1_28.zip): Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows

Some people have difficulty running one or the other, try windows first, then if you want, try the DOS version (I use Rufus to create bootable USBs - so does WD)

Chkdsk /f often finds and fixes file system errors - mostly security descriptors in my experience. I wouldn't be concerned, but I would make a backup and keep an eye on the drive. It's been running a long time - there is a life cycle to devices and 24/7 shortens the life.

antares · Mar 3, 2015

Thanks, I just ran HD Tune Pro's full Error Scan and everything OK, no bad sectors. I will run the WD Lifeguard Diagnostic and post results.

RolandJS said:
Just straw-grabbing, could HD's write/read caching be part of the problem?

What do you mean?

antares · Mar 3, 2015

Just finished the WD Lifeguard Diagnostics Extended Test, all OK, passed. I'm starting to suspect that this issue might be caused by faulty RAM.

RolandJS · Mar 3, 2015

ahhh, you gave a better than I did - faulty ram, I didn't think of that.

Mark Phelps · Mar 3, 2015

Are you sharing the second drive with any other OSs? That can be problematic in Win8 -- as I had the misfortune to discover myself.

antares · Mar 3, 2015

Mark Phelps said:
Are you sharing the second drive with any other OSs? That can be problematic in Win8 -- as I had the misfortune to discover myself.

Hi Mark, you're right! That's exactly what happened. I removed this drive and placed it as 2nd internal in another PC with Win8.1 Enterprise (I use it in my PC with Win8.1 Pro). I noticed that when I did that there were issues with folder permissions (I couldn't access certain folders). Other than file attributes, I did not know that swapping a non-OS drive between different versions of Win8.1 could cause data loss/corruption. I always considered 2nd internal drives as OS-independent, like external drives.

RolandJS said:
ahhh, you gave a better than I did - faulty ram, I didn't think of that.

Anyway, I doubt it's faulty RAM, as I had faulty RAM before and removed the faulty sticks. I'd bee too unlucky to have the remaining sticks fail in such a short time. I'm now more convinced it's the swapping of the drive as Phelps mentioned.

Mark Phelps · Mar 4, 2015

When I asked about sharing the drive, I meant between different OSs on the same machine. I share an NTFS partition between Win8.1 and Win10TP on the same machine and repeatedly had problems similar to yours until I remembered that the DEFAULT shutdown values in BOTH OS versions is to enable "FastStartup" -- which effectively hibernates your OS whenever you shut it down and keeps any open drive still mounted.

So, I went into both Win8.1 and Win10TP, disabled "FastStartup". Also learned that selecting Restart still hibernates the OSs; instead, you have to do Shut Down when switching between the OSs. Since I started doing this, I've had no further filesystem problems with the shared partition.

RolandJS · Mar 4, 2015

..dismounting the drives, correct? Ahhh, so when I do DOS-box chkdsk /f -- it asks if I want to dismount the drive; I can click yes, and the drive will remount when finished? No harm, no foul?

Slartybart · Mar 4, 2015

antares said:
Just finished the WD Lifeguard Diagnostics Extended Test, all OK, passed. .....

Good, the drive is probably ok tehn.

Note re: Mark Phelps posts: Moving a data drive between two machines or having it accessed by different Operations Systems might cause any number of issues.
A newer OS might use slightly different approach to file system management.
You'll never get permissions to match (GUID for users)
Windows uses GUIDs for many things - they will never match.
The root addressing for disk drives might be different
....
This doesn't mean that you can't move drives around, it just means that you shouldn't expect all things to work all the time if you do. IT's easy to correct some things and nearly impossible to correct other things. There is a unique ID written by the machine that initialized the drive - the 2nd machine can't match that, so it writes a new one (I learned this when I was trying to boot-from-vhd ... the vhd had to be virgin, not created by the host machine or else it would think it was part of that machine).

I think Mark is onto something with hibernation. I have a laptop and I do NOT use hibernation. Desktops need it even less. Still some people like the comfort of knowing that it is available.

Anyway, I turn hibernation OFF
In an elevated Command Prompt, type the following commands. There is no output, it just flips the switch.

powercfg /H off
exit

The hiberfile.sys is removed on the next restart and will not be written again

It's up to you if you want hibernation on or off.

Bill
.

antares · Mar 6, 2015

Thanks everyone. From my experience of moving the 2nd internal drive between different versions of Win8.1, I always get conflicts with permissions. This time in addition to permissions I also got corruption issues. The lesson is that it's always advisable to move data from the 2nd internal drive to an external drive, and then use this external drive around machines with different OS's, always as an external drive.
HERE is a similar issue I posted some time ago related to this thread.

Failing HDD?

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