Troubleshooting & SecurityIf you need answers or advice regarding problems with your computer hardware or software or need to discuss your computers security, firewalls and anti virus software then you should post your thoughts to this section.
Im running 2 sata HDDs - the first (c is 250gb, and the second (d is a slightly older 80gb.
Anyway, they both appear to run fine in terms of no awful noises or problems. Except for the past 3 weeks (since ive been playing mir ) my event viewer has a few entrys a day about a controller failure on my D drive.
Quote:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\D.
Yesterday i cleared the D drive completely and moved about 30gb over to my C drive. Then a few hours later my pc locked up completely in windows (even mouse froze) and with a hard reboot it went to a chkdsk screen which was green! and found quite a shitload of issues, quite a lot of which seemed to be with my D drive. I also checked eventwer at the time of the crash and there had been recent entries to say controller problem.
I checked this via google and people say its a device conflict, but i checked on msinfo32 and theres no conflicts there. Im a little concerned that the d: shouldnt be in use yet its spamming event viewer. Also why there are so many things found by chkdsk if the C: isnt the one with the problem?
I was gonna install win7 onto the d: and see how it goes, but im not sure thats the best idea now
my experience is when an ntfs partition starts giving chkdks errors its a sign of doom. its obviously found file system errors, and I don't think they always get properly fixed.
the simple fixable errors get fixed without any intervention by chdksk, as the ntfs maintains a special file to always be able to restore the file system to the previous good state if power is lost during a file update.
if you have two drives its a good idea to have both with a bootable OS installed, you can then boot from one drive and repair the other from within windows by locking the drive then you can run chkdsk or other utility on that drive as it isn't used by the OS, unless you've set it up awkwardly. this means you can more easily see whats going on than the boot time check.
also its a good idea to run a low level non destructive read test usually the manufacturers provide a floppy disk based program, this makes sure there are no hard drive probs. any errors at all spell trouble.
if you have any disk doctor type tools these can cause problems in themselves too, boot time defragmentation is probably the most dodgy.
first, perform a complete backup of your entire system
make sure your sata cables are tight, and cannot be pulled off with minimal force,
make sure there are no bends in the cables greater than 90 degrees, and that the sata
cables are far away from 12v rail power leads, and that they are not cable tied or bunched
with any other cable inside the unit,
visit the hard drive makers website and download diagnostic software for each HDD
make diskettes and peform extended scans of either HDD,
try to get a manual and see if the drives need jumpering because of possible speed issues
with the sata controller on the board,
if the drives are stacked too close together in the drive bay, they can get too hot
to operate, some drives have a thermal cutout, but more often than not data is corrupted
anyway,
disable write caching in the HDD properties in device manager, particularly if the pc's
power management policy turns off the HDD after a certain amount of time,
It's possible that there is nothing wrong with the drive physically, just that the
partition and operating system on it has reached it's 'half life' and it's time to
del the partition and reformat anyway, this should really be done with every hard drive every 2 years.
Just in reference to the age this is a 3 year old install of XP on c: ofc. The d-drive is probably 5-6 years old, since a format. I formatted today and the event viewer entries have gone for now.
I have powersave practically off and pc is on 24/7/365, even if i go away on holiday.
I do a full backup and reformat every year, as you can see by your chkdsk output,
it's really easy for the cluster's checksum to get corrupted, with the many thousands
of read/writes taking place,
if ur backing up anyway it's not so bad; I'm not a fan of not being able to use the pc
for hours on end when it does decide to go tits up.
16mb and sata 2 will give you a very good boost, win7 loves these big fast drives,
you can always shrink volumes and partition the drive whilst win7 is running
as well.
resizing partitions while win7 is running sounds both amazing and potentially disastrous.
I wrote a super duper ntfs recovery program for ntfs when nt3.51 came out, because so often chdksk failed to resolve errors, however hdd drives were struggling to get many GB back then and I mapped the whole drive into virtual ram which made it fast as hell, hence now it falls over on anything close to 2gb which is about the limit for user data under 32 bit :s maybe i should redo it in 64 bit eh,,,
I wrote quite a fast algorithm for computing the layouts etc, which i think got taken up by some open source proggies.
I do it with every new pc with a large drive, I partition the drive into 3, the 2nd partition has
the full restore/ reset data on it, and a small 3rd partiton has all the drivers, etc,
Silly Harddrive Problems
is 250gb, and the second (d
) my event viewer has a few entrys a day about a controller failure on my D drive. 
Linear Mode
