Re: System Freezes During Hard Drive Error Checking

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:33:20 -0700, Chad
<Chad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am having a very similar issue to Frank's. I've used PCs forever and
consider myself good at this stuff, but I'm stumped.

Well, if you consider yourself "good" at this stuff, stop being in
denial. If you run a full surface scan repeatedly and it freezes
around the same spot over and over that should be telling you several
clusters are messed up or at least the File System thinks they are.
Did you run with automatically fix errors turned on?

Surprise, Windows under NTFS is actually pretty good at repairing
common file system errors, but you do need to tell it to fix them
during the scan, otherwise it just reports it found errors. If it can
it uses the brute force method and just marks "bad" sectors and
doesn't use them after moving what it can out of them. You'll see a
summary at the end of any scan disk operation. You should always run
with auto fix turned on.

If you truly have "bad" sectors, ie, something physically wrong with
the disk platters themselves, not just the file system it should again
mark them then skip over them.

One way to know a hard drive is "dying" is it gets an increasing
number of hard errors. This may or may not be accompanied by your
drive starting to make sounds it didn't before. Could be a radical
change or something very subtle like a change in pitch or how loud
your drive is. You can try to "fix" a hard drive or confirm it is
going bad by using a utility from your particular drive maker, like
Seagate. Aside from that things like Spinrite may fix it, but you're
probably better off just recovering what you can from the drive and
replacing it. All hard drives fail sooner or later, often with
absolutely no warning at all which is why backup is so important.

A truly "dead" drive is one that no longer spins up or lost the
ability to accurately control the read/write heads. There's really
nothing practical you can do if something on the circuit board gave up
the ghost or one of the mechanical parts like the motor gave out. More
often the read/write heads drift out of alignment with the main
symptom the drive talking longer and longer to access files or not
being able to at all. That's where something like Spinrite might help.

If your laptop is new, take advantage of your warranty.

After using a new T61 laptop with no issues for a couple of weeks, I started
getting intermittent lock-ups. Wondering if it was related to the disk, I ran
the complete disk check (with surface scan). It always freezes about 80% of
the way through the free space scan. It's always on a slightly different
cluster number, but very close. Like Frank, I leave it for hours to verify
that progress really has stopped. At that point it only responds to turning
off the power.

Other things I've done:
- Run all the PC Doctor tests (a bunch of hardware tests that came
preinstalled) - passed both when running from boot and running under Vista
- Run a memory tester from Microsoft all night long - no lock up
- Installed utilities to monitor CPU and other temperaturs - no heat problems
- Run a drive fitness testing utility from the drive's manufacturer
(Hitachi) - no errors

I'm just about out of ideas. It will freeze at 80% of the way through that
disk check every time, and I'm wondering if that is related to the lock-ups
I've been getting.

I can't afford freezes up in the middle taking notes in a lecture (the
machine's main use), but it did happen at least once a day for several days
last week.
.

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