Win7 Home Prem - chkdsk problems, Drive Bad or Just Reinstall Needed?

I have a 2 yr old dell tower with windows home premium, I kept getting chkdsk error messages and upon bootup oneday it just said there was no drive found. I put in a new hard drive and used my dell recovery discs to get windows installed fresh day one again, running like a champ now, but I wanted a few files off that other drive so I put it onto and external usb dock and was able to go right in get everything I wanted safely off it.

Once I had my data off it I decided to just format the drive, after formatting it I ran seagates hard drive tool it passes every short and long test I threw at it, I know it kept saying chkdsk but could that have just been something corrupt within the windows installation not the physical disc being damaged?

At this point I have run the seagate tool 2x for short and once for long test and now have it running an extended test via another program called DiskCheckup.

Hate to toss the drive but not sure if all those chkdsk errors were just software related or hardware related, any other tests or things I should do to this to confirm the drive is ok to use? It's a 1.5tb seagate barracuda so i sure could use it for some internal storage but I don't want to risk it if it's a hardware issue.

Thanks for the advice.

It would appear that the drive is running fine now, but may have intermittent hardware issues. Personally, I hate to throw away a drive as well. If it were mine, I would use it as a mobile drive (usb dock) for a while to see if any issues arise. Of course, I wouldn't put any files on it that I didn't have on another drive, or on a cloud of sorts.

One thing that I always do whenever I suspect a drive has hardware issues is put my ear up to it. Usually, you can hear a hiccup in the drive, or a ticking, when the drive itself is bad. This may or may not be found by software that checks the disk.

I do have a feeling it might have been software related as I was having issues with some malware but I "thought" I had all that cleared up, certain things would say program.exe not found and i was like what is going on?!?! (stuff I used plenty of times before) I figured they maybe were infected and were removed, even my openoffice writer.exe was effected (couldn't find it).

I do recall trying to do a short and generic short test with the seagate tool before it totally showed as no hard drive, and it failed both, then just kept telling me i needed to run chkdsk, id reboot let it run did that a few days of working then after a few days on reboot i got that lovely message of no hard drive found.

Then to put a new drive in reinstall windows pop it into a usb dock and see it performing fine, passing tests long short etc, well it stumped me, I made sure to run full scans of the disc with malawares, superantispyware, spybot, avg, and it didn't find any trojans or anything but I just wanted to confirm before i took a few folders of pics and music off the drive into the new drive that they were clean and fine to do that, then I just formatted it fully, and it just purrs along fine no hiccups no issues with long or short scans, guess I will try something like cc cleaner and just have it write zeros to the entire drive a few times, if it does that ok then i will cautiously use it as a 2nd backup for a bit, but i hope it was just a corrupted windows (software thing) vs hard ware thing, cuz so far now that I zapped it clear it's passing everything so I am stumped, I thought the chkdsk was a hardware thing but now I am wondering.

Im not a geek first of all, so don't trust me in anything unless you are sure I am right. It seems like you started having problems and suspicion after you took files from the other drive. It is either the fact the files are corrupt, or those files are missing other files they need to run (such as dlls, etc, etc,). Or it may be that the two drivers have a difference maybe in an update of a company. I'm not very sure, but I hope I helped. <3

FTLOSM,

Sounds like a good plan. It can be quite difficult differentiating between a software problem and an intermittent hardware issue sometimes. Just be careful when using it until you've used it without any issues for a period of time that makes you comfortable.

Right now it's running a 7x over wipe with cc cleaner's drive erase program hasn't stopped or anything been going over 12 hrs now, I had used that seagate tool for short and generic short and long tests all passed fine, will try that other program too just for giggles, but it seems like the drive is acting and performing normal now that it's not the "primary os drive".

Pretty sure my windows got really messed up there nothing was working right and constant chkdsk messages BUT I kept thinking chkdsk was more of a hardware thing (thinking ok this drive is bad), so I figured I'd ask here "could" chkdsk be software related because it sure seems like it might be now that the drive is wiped it seems to be performing and passing tests it would not pass when it had a primary os on it.