problems with hard drive

[timeless]

a year or two back l RMA'd a hard drive because it suddenly started asking me to scan it (and kept on becoming inaccessible while l ran the scan) lve just checked the warranty on my current and it looks like l got given a reconditioned drive which is out of warranty and annoyingly its started doing exactly the same thing that happened to my last drive, its a ST3000DM001, l have no way of putting it in my system without spending 20mins undoing cable ties it was hell putting in my drive replacements with the lack of room.

lve tried running scans within windows and in safe mode but every time l get so far the drive space bar disappears and chkdsk seems to just sit doing nothing, is there anything l can run outside of windows that may help? because lve run chkdsk through an elevated command prompt and its got to the part where it scans for unindexed files to reconnect to original directories and it notes one file so far but hasnt moved in the last 10mins.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Is that a Seagate drive? I think so.

I'd go to the Seagate web site and try to get the DOS version of their disk tool. I think it's called Seatools.

You'd run it outside of Windows. It should evaluate the drive and tell you the SMART details.

It's out of warranty, so there's nothing much you can do if it's dead. I guess it's common to get a refurb drive when you use RMA.

If it will run at all, get your important stuff out of it and most likely prepare to buy another drive.

 

[timeless]

l decided to run scan disk differntly (basically just search the problems rather than fix them since using the command prompt shows more information).

it found 15 orphaned files which l have no clue where they are hiding so l can get rid of them as it was stopping on the orphaned files. tho according to scandisk the MFT also has issue.

seatools reports no issues on any of the tests l ran be they smart/short generic/long, tho l havent ran it outside of windows crystaldisk info also read no issues.. bad sectors etc, all l can say is its "exactly" the same make/model as my last one and its developed the "exact" same issue asking me to run scan disk, gets so far then sits there and upon logging the drive does seem to show in computer management but it becomes inaccessible and doesnt show the drive filled gauge until l turn it off and on again, that said there does seem to be drive activity if l leave it but when turning on and off windows doesnt seem to register that the scan has been interrupted, lve run the tests on two different computers (ones a laptop) with the same result, the main annoyance is l dont have any spare drives l can use to backup and way too much data on the drive to back it up to my system even despite my recent drive replacements.

 

[timeless]

just a thought, is there a way to remove orphaned files? l dont really care about the ones it found.. chances are that they were from the recently deleted directory which had 45GB in it.. just a few images and a couple of video files.

if there is a way to remove the orphaned files it would be useful to know, mainly because like l said they are likely from the folder l deleted several hours ago (as thats sorta when the annoyance started), right after deleting a large folder which contained over 10000+ items mainly video and images from old site backups from a friends server (he runs an artist/animation community which will explain the images/videos) and since the directory l deleted and one or two file names corresponded to the files l cleaned up from my system, ld rather know how to get rid of the 15 so called orphaned files rather than windows recover them as thats where scandisk stalls.

 

[timeless]

just an update, l didnt manage to fix the issue, however l managed to find enough space for the files l wasnt willing to loose so l could clear and reformat the drive.. after a quick format all the problems the drive was reporting have seemed to stop, also l havent been asked to scan the drive.

if the issue happens again l'll likely be able to link it to a large deletion of a folder containing allot of files would be my guess, l just hope it doesnt crop up again.