Halp!

[PvtRyan]

Sorry for the o so clear topic title, just can't think of one that describes my problem.

The other day, I was torrenting the latest Heroes episode when it suddenly stopped with a 'cyclic redundancy error'. When I learned that this isn't an error by uTorrent itself but generated by the OS when a harddrive sector can't be written/read I looked for how to fix it. Some guy recommended running SpinRite to restore any bad sectors. So I did. But wasn't wise enough to read up on SpinRite and back-up any important data.

Because as I found out firsthand, SpinRite takes a long, long time to run. It's been running for 20+ hours now and it's at 19%. Granted, 19% is probably where the bad sectors are and once its past that it's gonna speed up. On the first night, I interrupted the process halfway and wrote down the progress % so I could resume later on. The next day when I tried to resume, the trouble started. The hard disk was randomly found and not found, and I couldn't find a real reason why, seemed completely random. Eventually, I managed to run SpinRite WITH a detected hard drive and decided to finish what I started. At the end of the day, it still hadn't finished and I needed my sleep (noisy PC) so I turned it off (the day before at 19.1396% and now at 19.1399%, hooray for progress). When I rebooted, I actually managed to get into Windows. The hard drive was not dead and all data was there. That was the last time I managed to get so far, no luck today.

One thing I should mention is that my PC is very slow now. It's not that its having such a hard time processing what its doing, because non-intensive stuff like the bootup screen (the one that tells you to press a certain key for BIOS access, dont know the technical term) stays on my screen for way too long. When I do press DEL to get into BIOS, it sometimes takes a full minute before I get in there, and one time it never happened. When running SpinRite, it takes multiple minutes to detect my hard drives and the time I did get into Windows, it took quite a few minutes before it was up and running. It's not the hard disk that's so slow, in the SpinRite benchmark it performs just fine.

Another weird thing is that some letters during booting are turquoise and sometimes magenta. Just randomly. Not sure if this is related but gotta mention it.

I'm not sure what the hell is going on:
- Failing hard drive?
- Corrupted boot sector of hard drive? (then why did it work that one time?)
- Do I have to finish SpinRite in order to ever use my HDD again? (yay 100+ hour process)
- BIOS trouble?

Hardware:
Asus A8N
Seagate Barracude 250GB 7200 RPM 8 MB cache (ATA)

I think that's all, so please help me!

Thanks in advance.

 

[Kyorisu]

start - run - chkdsk x: /f

Where x is your drive letter if not c:

 

[PvtRyan]

I would.. if I could boot Windows

 

[The Brick]

Boot with the xp cd and go into Repair Mode. There you can do a chkdsk. Enter "chkdsk /?" for a few more options. Also try "fixboot". If that doesn't help try doing a "fixmbr".

 

[PvtRyan]

Hmm.. I can now reliably get into Windows. Drawback is that I need to have the Windows XP CD in the drive in order to do that.. (when it prompts me to press a key to boot the setup from the CD I don't do anything and it will boot Windows after 5 seconds).

I ran CHKDSK, it reported that it found and fixed errors. I ran the Seagate diagnostic tools and it reported a FAIL on the tests. Probably gonna run the DOS version to see if this program can fix the errors.

If it's really the HDD, I'm going to backup my stuff and run to the store for a new one (or probably two identical to run in RAID1), but I'm not entirely convinced. This slowdown I'm experiencing in Windows doesn't seem harddisk related, it's sometimes halting while I'm typing this. Also, when I look at the system clock, it appears to tick faster than once every second and momentarily stops ticking every 4-5 seconds (to stay in sync probably). The HDD seems to perform fine in Sisoft Sandra benchmarks.

I'm confused

 

[The Brick]

Have yoy tried defragging?

I'll take this to PM.

 

[PvtRyan]

I did the defragging like you suggested in PM (ran in safe mode), fast program indeed :naughty:

Didn't help though. I got a new weird sympton: I just tried playing some music, and there's constantly 1 second gaps in the music, every few seconds. I'm not sure what would cause this, I mean the HDD isn't gonna spin up every few seconds to retrieve a few kilobytes of a song is it? I would assume the entire song is loaded into your memory when you open it. But yet it skips every couple of seconds. So is it the HDD or could it be my motherboard?

EDIT: Should mention that videos run fine in Mediaplayer Classic.

EDIT: It's only Winamp that skips every couple of seconds it seems, songs play fine in MPC and videos stutter in Winamp. Now I get that Winamp has become bloatware, but this is extreme.

 

[The Brick]

You could try a reformat before you but a new one. A few weeks ago my pc crashed when I was messing around with my new ram. Something must've gotten corrupted, because it just stopped booting after the splash screen. I tried every possible fix I could find with google, and nothing helped. Only way out was to make a backup and reformat the thing. Works like a charm again.

Yours might be fixed with a format. Just be sure not to save important data on that disk in the feature in case it does break


Another thing I just thought of, is that it might be the IDE cable. Those tend to break. They would work but give errors etc.. If you have any other IDE 66 cable lying around, try it.

 

[PvtRyan]

Can I have your babies Brick? Please?

I replaced the IDE cable, and it works! Booted without the Windows CD, no slowdowns!

You saved me a 100 euros

<3 <3

EDIT: Tbh, I was kinda looking forward to an excuse to get two 320 GB SATAs in RAID1

 

[The Brick]

You could still do it.

Now that I think of it. This is EXACTLY what happened when I bought my 2x 320gb sata2 drives. Still love em.

 

[PvtRyan]

The exact same problem returned, I don't have another IDE cable to replace the current one with, but two IDE cables breaking in two weeks? There's gotta be another problem. Could it be a motherboard problem? But wouldn't be that more likely to stop working entirely rather than the problems I have now (poor drive performance, doesn't boot, sometimes not recognized)?

 

[The Brick]

That's odd.. Well IDE cables cost a turd so I wouldn't hold back on getting a new one. I doubt it's your motherboard, because I've never heard of this before. I think it would be more likely to be a faulty drive... but I don't see how that's possible either.

To be safe you could get a separate PCI IDE/SATA/RAID controller.

 

[Asus]

To be safe you could get a separate PCI IDE/SATA/RAID controller.

That would be a good idea. Could be the onboard controller that is having issues.