HDD's Acting Up After Hard Shutdown

[Cespenars]

Hello everyone. My PC got shaken up pretty badly after a recent hard shutdown. Both my main and secondary HDD's were acting up for a couple hours. The secondary seemed to be unreadable and I wasn't sure if it was completely dead or not, trying to interact with it always resulted in permanent hangs or crashes. Even opening My Computer showed the drive but would load endlessly.

What's more alarming is that my main HD (an SSD) was also severely affected. It took 8 minutes to boot Windows and once inside any simple action would result in a hang of "Windows Explorer". But it was unstable. I was still able to run check disk & system restore although I'm not even sure that did anything.

It was just a couple minutes into writing this that everything seems to be ok now, my E: suddenly got an autoplay popup and everything seems to be in order. Hell I'm not even sure if it'll work when I restart.

Anyway I wanted to ask your guys opinion on what it is that just happened. Was this a disk failure? Is this a sign that the drives are dying? Too many errors/bad sectors? The drives are starting to age at six years old. Also I have been crashing semi-frequently during gaming recently, usually because of my GPU forcing a shutdown due to overheating.

EDIT: I'm running Windows 7 x64 and the drives are a Crucial M4 and two Western Digital's.

 

[CKWD]

Hello Cespenars!

A hard shutdown could cause a lot of damage of many variations to a system, as it doesn't close the operating programs or parts safely, and it basically interrupts the processes of the HDD quite suddenly, so the “response” of the device is unpredicted: it could spin down securely and nothing happens to it, it could scratch the surface of the disk with the head, the motor could fail to spin up the disks again, the head could get stuck, and additionally – the motherboard could short circuit, hence damage the PCB of the drive. A hard shutdown could be analogous to pulling the cable out of an external drive while its playing a video.

The fact that your secondary drive malfunctioned the system when trying to interact with it, shows that its health was damaged. Also, using chkdsk is very helpful but sometimes when using it on a damaged drive it could accidentally harm it more, as it requires the drive to do a lot of I/O processes.

The overheating seems to be an additional problem that shouldn't be overlooked.

The cause of the problems after the hard shutdown could be the drives themselves, or it could be motherboard. My advice would be to take out the drives and connect them externally to another system, in order to check their health and status. You could use a USB to SATA adapter for the purpose. Make sure you have backed up our most important data somewhere else, just in case. You have three drives, which implies a lot of information. Check the drives' health using the manufacturer tools, when such, check the SMART values, also use a third party software to check for bad sectors and the transfer speed. For the WD drives you could use the WD Data Lifeguard software, perform firstly the Quick then if the state of the drive is not so bad – the Extended test.

Post the results afterward here. Another thing to try is to change the cables and the SATA ports of the drives and see if they operate better that way.

Post back and good luck!

CK_WD