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System hard drive failure challenge
Hi, Dell XPS 435 Intel Core i7 Win7 Premium
Seagate ST3750528AS PN:9SL153-034 750 GB
Hard drive failure description: Computer began intermittently rebooting for no reason. Then began launching windows very slowly, sometimes I would have to go into safe mode then reboot into normal mode. After a couple of days of stable operation it would not launch Windows beyond the screen preceding the user profile screen.
No clicking or beeping noises. Drive lite comes on and blinks normally.
Repair disk and recovery disks would not load, launch or otherwise boot either or allow any recovery or repair functions.
Rebooted into the diagnostics tests and began running tests on the drive. Passed the SMART test but stalled on the confidence test indicating bad blocks. would not even begin the read, write or verify tests, just hung up and eventually aborted.
Purchased a new WD 1 TB drive and installed it, loaded Win7 from the aforementioned recovery disk.
Put bad drive into my eSATA/USB enclosure and attached it to the computer. Drive appears in Computer and Disk Manager but cannot be accessed. Disk Manager shows 2 partitions, both RAW file system.
Made a boot disk with Partedmagic and booted it up, shows 3 partitions but will not mount any of them. Now I'm thinking of trying Peppermint6 to see if it can repair/rebuild the boot sector or partition table.
My concern and first question is am I risking more damage in these attempts? I have never dropped my computer, but we do occasionally have power failures that could cause a head crash. However, the lack of any noises coming from the drive leads me to believe there is no further damage being done. This leaves the nagging question of what caused the boot sector to get progressively worse so quickly that it rendered the drive unbootable in just a few short days?
Thank you in advance for any thoughts and ideas,
Tonybalony
ps, for all the preachers out there(you know who you are), yes I have a backup but it is a couple of months old and I need some more recent files back.
I am adding the error I got in Peppermint when trying to mount the drive:
Error mounting /dev/sdg3 at /media/peppermint/OS: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=999,gid=999,dmask=0077,fmask=0177" "/dev/sdg3" "/media/peppermint/OS"' exited with non-zero exit status 13: The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing.
ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.
Failed to sync device /dev/sdg3: Input/output error
Failed to close volume /dev/sdg3: Input/output error
Of course I have not run chkdsk.
Screen shot of Disk Manager:
Last edited by Tonybalony; 04 Sep 2015 at 16:38. Reason: Added information