HDD error

[trynreadm]

just the other day a friend had dropped of his computer to get it worked on, as I was looking at and about to start backing it up I look over at my computer and what do you know...it's frozen. My screen saver is stopped mid movement. Well, I try ctrl-alt-del. Nothing, caps lock and numlock aren't working...so I do a hard reset. As the computer boots and is about to load I get a Hard disk error. No numbers or any real helpful info. I then went into my BIOS to make sure that my harddrive was being recognized and it was. After that, I then grabbed for my windows 7 recovery disk. Ran the hot fixes that come along with the recover disk. Restart, same thing. Then I go ahead in the recovery disk again and load the command prompt run a "chkdsk /f /r" on the harddrive. It cycles through and I restart. Same thing, I then ran "sfc /scannow". Restarted, same thing...so I was a little troubled. I then went ahead and grabbed my "Iboot" disk and restarted, got the Iboot front end and started my "OS" partition. Windows magically started up with no issues. Once I got into windows and went ahead and backed up everything that I had been to lazy to back up already and then ran a defrag, another chkdsk /f /r, another sfc /scannow, and that's about it, I think...I might have done one or two other things, but just don't remember. If anyone could give me some help as to how to get a proper load without having to reinstall windows that would be great. I would just rather not have to go through all the trouble of re-installing all my programs.

You know I noticed you are a lot more calm and collect when working on someone elses computer, but when it comes to your own computer messing up, emotions come into play...me I got really angry, because of course, things like this don't happen to me...

Thanks in advanced for any help

 

[OldSchoolPC]

If it is indeed your hard drive failing, and not a software issue, then just clone your HD to a new one. Otherwise those bad sectors are gonna get worse and worse in my experience. If your HD is within warranty then it won't cost you anything but shipping.

 

[trynreadm]

The computer is still under warranty I was just hoping I could fix it first, then bring it in for replacement. Kind of a learning experience. I figured I could still get windows to load without having to re-install it or clone and replace the HDD. I'm assuming I would have to at least re-install windows? And the computer will automatically not use the bad sectors of my harddrive? I thought that's what defrag was going to do, rearrange and tell the computer not to use those bad sectors.

 

[wtigger]

And the computer will automatically not use the bad sectors of my harddrive? I thought that's what defrag was going to do, rearrange and tell the computer not to use those bad sectors.

Defrag doesn't fix bad sectors. It only rearranges the file clusters to "optimize" the drive...

You need a utility that does a "surface scan" (on a bootable CD) and THAT will fix the errors and mark the "bad" sectors as unusable... Then you can image the drive and restore it to a good one... Seagate SeaTools and many others can do this. I use HDD Sentinel.

In my experience, getting a good image off a drive with bad sectors is hit or miss. I do a surface scan first before any image, Acronis especially chokes on drives with bad sectors...

 

[gikstar]

I have an old copy of Ghost and you can set it to force the clone.

 

[joydivision]

Personalty I don't clone bad drives, because you just end up copying the damaged file system over. A new hard drive is the perfect chance to start from scratch

 

[Paul Rodgers]

Personalty I don't clone bad drives, because you just end up copying the damaged file system over. A new hard drive is the perfect chance to start from scratch

I would much rather clone a failing drive and have the chance of no major problems than digging around a failing drive to get all the files that aren't saved in normal places..

 

[wtigger]

Personalty I don't clone bad drives, because you just end up copying the damaged file system over. A new hard drive is the perfect chance to start from scratch

A surface scan and CHKDSK and SFC usually fix most things... Then image it. Saves the applications that most people don't save the install disks for, and most of all data that is scattered all over the place...