Hard drive utilities?

[pantichd]

Hello,

My hard drive has started "cranking" a lot lately. Whenever I try to do anything on it the hard drive activity light stays on and I can hear the drive cranking.

I tried doing a defrag but it didn't seem to make a difference. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for other utilities that might help me identify the problem.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[Kocky]

What do you mean with cranking ?
Does it make a constant sound or does it go up and down ?
How old is this drive and where have you used it for mostly in the past ?

 

[jbotz]

You might check to see if this drive supports SMART reporting. You might also check what your free space is on this drive. If the drive is full and you're trying to use it for virtual memory, it will "crank" as you described.

 

[pantichd]

Sorry, I should have been more specific.

By cranking I mean that I can hear the drive moving. It's not constant in the way it would be if it was stuck on something. Actually, what it reminds me of is the way it sounds when you're doing a defrag. You know how the drive is just going nonstop because it's reading and writing so much.

It eventually reads/writes whatever I'm trying to do but it just takes a very LOONG time.

The drive is less than 1 year old and I've only used it in this pc.

 

[pantichd]

OK, I know I'm showing my ignorance here so please be nice. : )

How do I know if it supports SMART reporting?

The drive is not full. It has over 20GB of free space.

 

[jbotz]

Typically at boot you will see a message about the HD. It will say something like "Primary Master HDD - SMART capable, but disabled". Should be an option (normally under advanced options) to enable SMART monitoring. You will take a small performance hit for this, but nothing major. Also, might check your UDMA settings for the drive. Auto would be your best bet, but check what your drive supports vice what your motherboard supports.

 

[SYAR2003]

Here 's some S.M.A.R.T monitoring sw.
Dowload and install (30day trial)

http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/13/8/13-8-23.shtml

http://www.santools.com/smartmon.html

 

[pantichd]

jbotz - thanks for clarifying that.

Yes, it is SMART capable and it's enabled.

Now that we know that, how can I use that? Is there some utility that can assist me in finding out what's wrong with the hard drive?

 

[pantichd]

SYAR2003 - Thanks for the links. I'll check them out.

 

[HughAdamson]

It's not unknown for a hard disk to fail even with 20Gb of free space and still quite young. I've had 2 disks die on me and it "sounds" like yours is moribund. "Clunking" retries - takes a random, sometimes long time to find data?
Total disk failure is looming.

Don't do any more defrags.

If you have access to network storage, back up your vital data files - your programs can wait until later -- if not, go buy and install a new disk as secondary, and copy ALL your data files to it. Of course, if you have a set of up-to-date backups (?!?) they now may even pay a dividend on the time invested.

Now go buy and install yet another disk (big enough to hold your opsys and applications, but not your data) as primary drive, format and load your applications. Install your new data disk as secondary drive. You will be pleased with the result.

Depending on your original drive's condition keep it as a spare or visit its manufacturer's website and see it it's still in warranty. If it has 2+ months warranty left and it's faulty - return it for a replacement otherwise chuck it. If it's still good, keep it as a spare, but don't trust it.

Drives are cheap - data is priceless.

 

[pantichd]

Well, it turns out it's my 2nd drive (not the one where the OS is installed) that's bad. I disabled it in the setup and everything works as normal.

After identifying the drive but before disabling it I tried to go to it via command prompt to see if I could get the data off it but it just hung up (sorry, don't remember the error message).

So then I tried to format the hard drive but it gave me the same error. If the error message is important I can enable drive again and write down the message.

My question is... Is there some way I can just reformat the drive? I would assume that doing that would mark off any bad parts of the hard drive and let me use the others. OR am I just SOL?

I hate to just throw away the hard drive if I can use at least part of it.

 

[edfair]

A format should identify the really bad sectors and lock out the cluster involved. But since it errors there you may need to go back one step and fdisk and remove the partitioning information, then recreate the partition and format again.
If errors there, then you could try the manufacturer's diagnostics for information of the condition , and if OK, then do the zero fill/low level format that takes it back to "as shipped" and do the fdisk/format over again.

In any case , make sure you are operating on the secondary drive. You fail to correctly choose, you lose your OS and everything else.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.