My desk top Pc suddenly began to run slowly yesterday and when i typed in anything it took a few seconds for it to show on screen and eventually it
stopped responding altogether.I had to turn off the power at the switch and then it wouldnt boot up again, it just went got as far as the XP start
upscreen or into the windows recovery screen and then restarted when i tried to select any options.Checkdsk reported missing files and fixboot wrote a
new boot file but still showed files missing on trying to boot.It is a sata drive with an adaptor card for IDE connection and when i put it into
another pc with direct connection it showed as not formatted, but a trial version of data recovery software showed files still there but not
accessible.I also found that when i put it into my desktop again it seemed to affect the boot sequence as it stopped part way through the memeory test
on boot up but then another time it worked but wouldnt get any further than the XP start up screen.I have just put an old ide drive in my PCto get it
running and set the old drive as a slave but it shows as not formatted.
Is it likely to be a hard drive fault that caused it to be corrupted or a virus ? going on the fact that it just ground to a hault and locked up in
use?
Paul
You can try to clear up whether or not you have a physical disk problem using S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tools.
There's a GUI Windows version here: http://prdownload.berlios.de/gsmartcontrol/gsmartcontrol-0.8.6-2.exe?download
If the Basic health check shows: PASSED you can still investigate further by double clicking the drive in question and going to the Attributes tab.
If there is any data in the Reallocated Sector Count (raw value) the disk is failing.
Likewise for Reallocation Event Count and Current Pending Sector Count, I wouldn't trust a disk that has non-zero raw values here.
The Error Log is also interesting. None of my healthy disks show anything in here at all but I've seen failing ones log errors here.
HTH,
When I ran that it does report errors and when I ran the self test it failed with read error at 10% so im assuming it is beyond saving, its a bit
annoying as it is a 500gb drive that is only just over a year old.
Paul
quote:
Originally posted by ironside
You can try to clear up whether or not you have a physical disk problem using S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tools.
There's a GUI Windows version here: http://prdownload.berlios.de/gsmartcontrol/gsmartcontrol-0.8.6-2.exe?download
If the Basic health check shows: PASSED you can still investigate further by double clicking the drive in question and going to the Attributes tab.
If there is any data in the Reallocated Sector Count (raw value) the disk is failing.
Likewise for Reallocation Event Count and Current Pending Sector Count, I wouldn't trust a disk that has non-zero raw values here.
The Error Log is also interesting. None of my healthy disks show anything in here at all but I've seen failing ones log errors here.
HTH,