Solved Hard drive Issue's Slow Boot up, cant open!

iQuiet · Nov 3, 2012

Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 ATA Device (secondary hard drive)
OCZ-AGILITY3 ATA Device (SSD) (Primary)
Is the current hard drive i have, Last night as i was gaming, my desktop flashed and changed back to the default windows colour (blue) and then remained like that for 15 minutes, after i closed the game, it returned back to the original colour, Ever since then, My computer boots up extremely slow, used to be 10 seconds, now upwards of 10 minutes! & my secondary hard drive when opened loads extremely slow, and some of the icons when i press the start menu don't show. I can still load things from the primary hard drive fast, anything from secondary hard drive is extreme slow. I tried transfering my files from secondary to primary, and it was scanning for 15 minutes and i gave up.
Can anyone please figure this issue out?

Thanks in Advance.
-Quiet

iQuiet · Nov 4, 2012

Any help?

Indianatone · Nov 5, 2012

iQuiet said:
Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 ATA Device (secondary hard drive)
OCZ-AGILITY3 ATA Device (SSD) (Primary)
Is the current hard drive i have, Last night as i was gaming, my desktop flashed and changed back to the default windows colour (blue) and then remained like that for 15 minutes, after i closed the game, it returned back to the original colour, Ever since then, My computer boots up extremely slow, used to be 10 seconds, now upwards of 10 minutes! & my secondary hard drive when opened loads extremely slow, and some of the icons when i press the start menu don't show. I can still load things from the primary hard drive fast, anything from secondary hard drive is extreme slow. I tried transfering my files from secondary to primary, and it was scanning for 15 minutes and i gave up.
Can anyone please figure this issue out?
Thanks in Advance.
-Quiet

Hi,
Sounds like you possibly have an issue with your Hitachi Hard Drive.
Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring Try this program on the free trial. It will tell you if there is a problem with the Hitachi Drive. You can also run this software from Hitachi Downloads
Then you need to back up ASAP. I suspect if you disconnected the secondary hard drive temporarily your Windows will work and boot faster.
Tony

iQuiet · Nov 7, 2012

The results are as follows.. On this driver, If i was to replace this hard drive, do i need to do a clean install?
The hard drive only has 2 files on it, windowsImageBackup and mediaID.bin Nothing else. Or can i replace the hard drive by just plugging in a new hard drive, what would be the proccess to fix this issue?

Indianatone · Nov 7, 2012

iQuiet said:
The results are as follows.. On this driver, If i was to replace this hard drive, do i need to do a clean install?
The hard drive only has 2 files on it, windowsImageBackup and mediaID.bin Nothing else. Or can i replace the hard drive by just plugging in a new hard drive, what would be the proccess to fix this issue?

Hi,
This is just your secondary drive so all you need to do is to physically replace the drive in the computer, initialise the new drive in Control Panel Administrative Tools Computer Management Disk Management and format the new drive. If you are not sure what to format post a screen shot of the disk management window and forum members will help you. You do not need to reinstall Windows.
Your Hitachi drive is not to be trusted and is really bad.

iQuiet · Nov 7, 2012

If I do not use this hard drive, am I able to unplug it and leave it out of my system? Will this cause any harm or issues? And will my computer remain the same? As the hard drive has nothin on it, if I unplug it, my computer should remain back to normal correct?

Slartybart · Nov 8, 2012

iQuiet: You are correct.

You can and should remove the Hitachi drive (disc0: D:\ - in the diagnostic screen shot you posted)
Disc1: C:\ should be your system drive (System, Boot, etc)
-> but just to be certain, please post a Disk Management screen shot of your system.

Right click Computer, select mange, select Disk management
close the action pane, close the navigation pane and maximize the window

Alt+Prtsc captures the window, open paint, past the capture, save the image and attach it using the paper clip on the posting menu.

If everything looks correct, then you can remove the Hitachi drive from your machine. If something needs to be changed, we'll do that before removing the Hitachi drive.

iQuiet · Nov 8, 2012

Thanks so much for your help! Here is the picture your asking for! please let me know if i can remove my hard drive!

Slartybart · Nov 8, 2012

Everything looks fine. I wanted to make sure that the System Reserve was the system & active partition and that C:\ was boot & page partition (see attached).

Go ahead and pull the drive out of the machine. After a day or two, please post how your machine is performing.

Thanks,

Bill
.

Slartybart · Nov 8, 2012

If you have any software or scheduled tasks that expect a drive letter D: , you might want to reconfigure the software and disable the tasks. Don't know if that necessarily applies to your system.

iQuiet · Nov 8, 2012

No, the hardrive is basically clean except for some useless games i dont even play. But does the primary partition matter? or its totally fine?

Slartybart · Nov 8, 2012

Ok, it was just an afterthought. I thought I should ask about stuff that might try to access the disc after you yank it out.

The primary drive is fine. It is currently Disc1 with partitions "System Reserve" and C:\

When you pull the Hitachi drive out, the primary drive will probably be reported as Disc0 with the same partitions because there is no other drive cabled. Post another disk management screen shot after you pull out the Hitachi.

So you are good to go... power down and disconnect the Hitachi (you know about static right? - just touch the chassis to discharge any buildup on your fingers). Power it up and post the screen shot.

Slartybart · Nov 8, 2012

You might want to check your cabling. The primary drive should be on the end of the cable, any add-on drives should go on the middle connector as a slave. If the drive is jumpered "auto-detect" (most are) it shouldn't cause any difficulties.

I don't know how you built your system, so it's up to you if you want to do any cable changes at this point. I'd probably wait to see how it comes up without making any further changes. You can always do that later or if the system complains about it when you restart.

The utility reported the Hitachi drive in pretty bad shape, so it's questionable to begin with. Sometimes however you can recover a "bad" drive by writing zeros, creating a new partition, formatting, and running chkdsk. This is also something I would try later and I wouldn't put anything important on it even if the recovered drive reports healthy.

iQuiet · Nov 8, 2012

This is the image you asked for, Computer is running smoothly, boot up is back to under 10 seconds

Much appreciated, Check the image out, and let me know if there is anything i need to do!

Slartybart · Nov 8, 2012

Great!

Disk Management looks fine, thanks for posting it.

You could try to recover that drive, although I'm not sure about the condition or reliability.

Please mark this thread as solved. If you want some help trying to resurrect the Hitachi, please open that on new thread.

It was a pleasure working with you iQuiet
Bill
.

Indianatone · Nov 8, 2012

Glad you got iQuiet taken care of Slartybart.
That Hitachi hard drive is still under warranty you should push for a replacement. If you find that drive monitoring software useful let the author know. I have no connection with him other than I own and use a copy of the program and it has saved my bacon once or twice.

Slartybart · Nov 8, 2012

Indianatone: your direction to the utility made it easy. All I had to do was check that the primary drive wasn't relying on the other drive and the rest is history.

How do you know the drive is still under warranty? or should there be an If that drive....

I do agree - RMA it if applicable.

Thanks for your help.

Indianatone · Nov 8, 2012

He only has 68 days run time on the drive, depending on where it was got from the warranty varies from 1 to 5 years so there is a pretty good chance it is still under warranty. Worth a try.

Slartybart · Nov 8, 2012

Indianatone: Absolutely brilliant!

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