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Everlasting Boot

Miretank

Miretank

Lurking
Damn, I am pretty sure that my HDD is on it's last days, but I don't think it'll cost me much to ask you guys some things...

Happens like this: I have a Maxtor 6E040L0 40GB, about hmm 2 years old. Last times I am getting such annoying experiece: if I install any big-sized program (or something that strikes directly the registry, including drivers also), the reboot and the following boots take about 5 minutes 'till the login. The only solution I've experienced for that is to reformat. I guess this is happening due some of bad sectors, CHKDSK pointed some errors. But, do you think it's reversible? At least to make my boot normal again. :/

I've tried Microsoft BootVis with no satisfatory results. Any other ideas? =)
 
Martin

Martin

Active member
Administrator
I thought you were talking about some new Zelda game. The everlasting boot! ;)
 
B

bcrew1375

New member
Have you already backed everything up? If the HD is still working, you better get it off while you can. Is there a possibility you need to defrag?
 
General Plot

General Plot

Britchie Crazy
bcrew1375 said:
Have you already backed everything up? If the HD is still working, you better get it off while you can. Is there a possibility you need to defrag?
Click to expand...
Actually, if the hard drive is infact on it's last leg, defragmenting would not be a very good idea, as it's possible that could push it over the edge.:p
 
OP
Miretank

Miretank

Lurking
Defrag gives me messages like "not all the files could be defragmented".
And yeah, I'll start to look for a new HD. But there aren't any programs to recover bad sectors?
 
t0rek

t0rek

Wilson's Friend
Bad sectors are un-recoverable. They just can be marked to not be used again, but when a drive have a lot of bad sectors, new ones will surely appear.
 
ScottJC

ScottJC

At your service, dood!
Bad sectors happen because the drive head is damaged and spining at slightly the wrong angle... this it starts scraping bits off the surface of the drive... as it goes on the scrapings themselves start to infect how the header spins so it starts to jump a bit causing even more damage - this is why you hear more noise too.
 
OP
Miretank

Miretank

Lurking
Called mother at her work, she said she can afford a new one for me.
But now, what's better? Seagate or Samsung?
 
Falcon4ever

Falcon4ever

Plugin coder / Betatester
with those options i would go for a seagate.
Make sure it's a 7200 rpm model ;)

(Altough i still prefer a Western Digital if available)
 
OP
Miretank

Miretank

Lurking
Hmmm, 7200 rpm? K, will make a search.

What's happening to my HD... is it may be a cause of viruses? Cause I don't use any anti-virus programs.

And I'd like to know how to prevent such problems, now with the new up-coming HD :)
 
t0rek

t0rek

Wilson's Friend
Go for a Seagate of course, Western Digital are a good option too. Man, your HDD has physical damage, a virus can't do that. It happens when the HDD is DOA, is too old or has been physically damaged by vibration or shocks.
 
BlueFalcon7

BlueFalcon7

New member
actually, I had a bad hard drive last november. It was very annoying, and I never knew how it happened. It had worked for 4 years. And one day, it gave me the BSOD (blue screen of death) and said that pagefile.sys was missing or corrupt, and my OS wouldnt boot up. I reinstalled my OS, to find that the hard drive only held 4 GB (it had originally held 40 GB or 37.2 if we want to be precice) It really sucked because I had to get another, but my parents were lazy, and it was 2 weeks before they finally ordered a new one, which came 2 days after we ordered. So I had to use a "loner" hard drive that my dad pulled out of an old computer where he works. I eventually plugged in my old one in as a slave. I made a little hole in it and I was looking at it writing data, which looked freaking sweet when it was in action. I stopped the reader with a screw driver, and it gave me an error, like data sector not accessible or something like that. Later, I just took apart the hard drive.

When you have a bad hard drive, or see hard drives that are going to be thrown away, open them, and get the magnets out of them. Those magnets are Neodenyum, a rare earth element, that can be extremely magnetic. The neodenyum magnets are the component in hard drives that make them so expensive.

edit: Also, get western digital, IMO, they are better than Maxtor or seagate.
 
smcd

smcd

Active member
Miretank said:
Hmmm, 7200 rpm? K, will make a search.

What's happening to my HD... is it may be a cause of viruses? Cause I don't use any anti-virus programs.

And I'd like to know how to prevent such problems, now with the new up-coming HD :)
Click to expand...

Hard drives can "go bad" after lots of use. Sice this is a 40GB drive it is probably several years old, and if you regularly reinstall, reformat, defragment, use bittorrent, and other such activities that cause huge loads on the drive, it can reduce the "normal" lifetime of it. Plus there are also other issues that might come into play such as temperature, humidity, power surge/spike, shock (dropping, banging)... and the occasional faulty part :)

In the future you can use SMART to monitor the health of the drive and run tests on it to see if anything is appearing to go wrong and will usually allow you enough time to make a backup before it dies. (Freely available command line tools for linux/windows and others are on sourceforge "smartmontools") http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
 
OP
Miretank

Miretank

Lurking
seth said:
Hard drives can "go bad" after lots of use. Sice this is a 40GB drive it is probably several years old, and if you regularly reinstall, reformat, defragment, use bittorrent, and other such activities that cause huge loads on the drive, it can reduce the "normal" lifetime of it. Plus there are also other issues that might come into play such as temperature, humidity, power surge/spike, shock (dropping, banging)... and the occasional faulty part
Click to expand...
Big thanks, that really clarifies a lot of questions here. :) How can I measure the HD's temperature?
 
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