BC f4 error when heavily using my new HDD

tritous,

Don't worry. Chkdsk is not going to mangle anything. True is that if the hard disk is going south then any use of the disk can be the last.

What I do recommend is that you immediately copy any data dear to your heart from that disk to a USB drive or USB stick or even to your new hard dirve.

After you have the data copied over, then definitely run:
CHKDSK C: /R
here I've used C: where you will want to use the appropriate drive letter.
The /R is going to check the entire disk, even where you don't have data and is going to mark any bad sectors as bad so that the drive does not try to use those sectors.

In the old days, we had to specify both /F and /R but now /R includes /F.

It's set up as a single partition, windows handles it correctly as a primary, although the fact that I'm only using it as an auxiliary simplifies things a little. The Bios I'm unsure about, it shows it in the BIOS as 860GB, but windows instantly saw it for the real size. It would seem there are no newer BIOS versions available anyway, actually there were only ever a handful of them for this Mobo anyway, it's been very stable in firmware as well as as hardware.

I've managed to copy 90% of the data from my 250GB onto the new drive, avoiding the bits in bad sectors, page files on the new drive work, temp files do, and i've migrated a few things from my 500gb across too. everything I wanted to migrate to the new disk is on there as well as backed up where it originally was. It's just a case of trying to confirm if these errors and instabilities have been because of the new disk, the old disk, or something else completely. I don't want to complete the migration until I know I can trust things again. The plan was to move everything from my 250gb to the new disk, some of the heavier items from my other drives too, and use the new disk as my main data storage and scrap my old 250gb. In the future I may well get a 50-80gb SSD for system and paging, use my 500gb just as a backup and primarily operate off my 3tb, but again this needs me to be able to trust in the new drive.

tritous,
Is your 500 GB drive good?

If yes, then move everything over there and then create three 1 TB partitions on the 3 TB drive.

Did you read that link I provided? You will find the info there rather instructive for your situation.

I'm tired of small partitions. The main reason for getting the big disk is that I made the mistake of partitioning my 500gb into a nicely organised 4 partitions: system, apps, data, games at 30, 30, 200, 240, only to end up with completely disproportionate growth at 29.8, 10, 70, 240 used. my 250 gb hd became the spillover to deal with steam being a git, and I wanted to have a less limiting partitioning of just 100gb for sys and apps, a few terra for data and games, and a backup: primarily for data since everything else is recoverable.

I did run the boot time checkdisk yesterday, it managed to tell me which were the corrupted files and I've recovered the rest saving me some weeks of redownloading data: replaceable doesn't mean easily replaceable. The tools from seagate suggest that my other two drives have no problems. Sadly while it supports a "fix errors" option on the other two which have no errors, no such function is offered for my 250gb disk which does.

It's clearer now that my 250gb disk is dying and there is likely no way to fix it, luckily at a convenient time when i have a new disk to replace it. My important data is now on both my 500gb and my 3tb, and regardless I want to get rid of the ancient disk; it's served me well for 50,000 hours; I am actually impressed it lasted for such a long time.

What I need to know now is are ALL my problems traceable to trying to read data from a dying disk, or is there a chance that there is a second issue lurking around too? I don't have the tools to analyse the minidumps or the experience in HDD failures to identify the repercussions, only enough to analyse there is a definite issue.

After this is solved I think I'll have to lurk these forums a while and help a few people in return, it's only fair afterall.

tritous,

Code:

What I need to know now is are ALL my problems traceable to trying to  read data from a dying disk, or is there a chance that there is a  second issue lurking around too?

now think about it. How can anyone really, honestly answer that question?

Let me suggest seeing if any problems remain after you have dumped the old 250 GB disk.

If any problems show up, then we will go after them.

After dumping the old disk, then you might want to clean all events out of the event logs so that one has a clean slate.
Clear Event Logs Using a Batch File.zip

Clear Event Logs Using PowerShell.zip

Take your pick. I use the PowerShell approach but the batch file approach is simpler for most.

A fair enough point. I suppose that either way if I know the old disk has problems then there will only be a benefit to removing it at this point. It's easy enough for me to clear my logs manually, I've always preferred the manual approach to things anyway: I like to keep my mind up to date with my PC.

I'll get out the screwdrivers in a bit and take out the disk, with my data backed up between the other two there is a bit more margin anyway if there are other issues.

tritous,
I suggest you take a look at either one of those event log cleaners. You will find that it is possible to view the names of the logs that are cleared. You will also realize that you would spend many, many minutes clearing all of those logs manually.

nah, it took me around 30 seconds. its only a couple clicks per log and there are only 6-7 different event logs to go through.

My machine has always been stable and I keep it fairly light of unnecessary utilities so I'm not packed full of logs. What I am packed full of is the downloads for the automatic updates, but that's a different fight.

no notifications, and the SMART test passed with the SeaTools too. That said this machine has always been so fast booting you need a videocam and a frame by frame view to see half the information. I'm about to shutdown and pull the drive out now anyway, and I'll do another general bios checkover then