One or more of your disk drives may have developed bad sectors

[hotfusion]

Just a shot in the dark with this one:
13 Gb drive, partitioned into 3 partitions. First we got a blue screen a few times saying specifically that there had been a write error to drive D. (Where the swap file was.)

Following day system failed to boot, and just hung at an early stage.
I formatted the C: partition and attempted to reinstate an image back on to it. The process went fine, but on attempting to boot I got this message:

"One or more of your disk drives may have developed bad sectors......." and so-on.

I allowed it to run the full surface scan with nothing abnormal detected and so then ran Spinrite on the drive (all 3 partitions) but again with no detected problems. I did notice, however, that the number of read errors recorded by Spinrite/S.M.A.R.T. was around 400,000, although all were apparently "error correctable". Even so, that's a lot of errors to my mind.

Anyone had experience with this problem, and if so do you think it's the old failing HDD problem or something darker like a failing motherboard/IDE controller?
Remember Spinrite found no bad sectors at all.

Regards, Andy.
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[ski]

Sounds like the HD is dying.
Suggest that you back up all critical files on it, and then run the diagnostics at the HD manuf's site.

 

[hotfusion]

Thanks for your reply,ski, but I'm not so sure anymore.
I regularly backup to a network drive anyhow, so no problem there.

I've hooked up another known good drive to test the faulty motherboard theory, after changing the IDE cable as a precaution, and still get a mass of errors and a drive I can't install on.

Looks like the motherboard/IDE controller is the root cause, so I've resigned myself pretty much to buying a new motherboard, which unfortunately means a new processor and RAM.... Not to worry though, eh?

I'll test both drives in another computer to completely rule them out first though.

Anyone experienced motherboard problems of this sort before? is it a known problem?

Regards, Andy.
**************************************
My pathetic attempts at learning HTML can be laughed at here:

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[ski]

Also, connect a different power lead to the drive.

If no luck, then your suspicion regarding the IDE controller or MB as the cause may be on track.

 

[jsams]

Hi Andy,

Yes, just had this happen on a home PC. Booting starting taking long time then would not boot, Scandisk would launch and run and freeze. Curiously, it would only boot into Safe mode.

Installed new HD and all is well. I put the "bad" drive in another networked machine (as a 2nd drive) to recover files and it still gives the message at boot time, but it finally boots up. Its dying slowly, and I'm sure its just a matter of time before it becomes "drive unrecognized".

John