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[Ecrofirt]

My F drive is primarily a data partition. It's a logical partition on my HD that's about 75GB.

Over the past day or so I've noticed it's been taking a few seconds longer to initially show the contents of the drive in Windows Explorer. Maybe 3 seconds longer than normal. I thought maybe it got fragmented somehow even though I have diskeeper set up to automatically defrag all my drives daily.

Analyzing my other drives in diskeeper produces normal results. After about 2 seconds I'm told I'm at 1.00 and have no fragmentation. With my F drive, I've had this going for ~3 hours now, and it's currently 28% done analyzing the drive. It hasn't even gotten to defragging it yet.

Now, I'm thinking this is VERY bad. Problem is, I haven't notice any other signs of drive failure. I haven't had any errors with files or anything, and there's been no clicking or anything of the sort. This leaves me a bit confused.

Is my drive fuxxored, or could diskeeper be having a problem because the drive has a several files that are a few gigs large (I'm talking single files that are 2-3GB)? Could it be some problem with the diskeeper software?

Thanks for the help.

 

[automagnus]

It sounds to me like you have bad sectors

 

[Ecrofirt]

That's what I'm thinking as well. Running scandisk is very slow, and it eventually craps out. Of course, I didn't check the option to attempt to fix bad sectors.

I've never had this problem before. Will I lose the data on these sectors? Can it be repaired without any problems? Should I back my data up before I try and repair the sectors?

 

[Joeholley]

Anytime you even suspect you may have drive problems, the first step is always to back up all your data. From there, try running scandisk with the 'scan for bad sectors' or 'surface scan' option (wording depends on your version of windows). If it fails, boot into safe mode command prompt, go to the drive in question, and run a CHKDSK command. If that comes back with bad sectors or fails, your last ditch effort is to try reformatting the disk, which will flag the bad sectors not to be used and skip over them. If you get that far and your disk is working, here's the good news:
1) You know what the problem is.
2) 1 out of every 10 disks that develops a bad sector doesn't do so again until the end of it's life. It's possible in these rare cases to continue using the disk at the lower formatted capacity once the bad sectors have been identified and are no longer being written to or read from.
3) If your disk is still in warranty, giving your company the results of the above tests is usually enough to get a warranty replacement. Some companies (Maxtor springs to mind) will want to you run a diagnostic program from their website, but if you've got bad sectors, their program will definately fail. Oh, and if you're drive was one of the last few batches of that model made and you can get a warranty replacement approved, receiving back a better/faster/larger drive is not uncommon.

The bad news is that the majority of the time, bad sectors are the precursor to complete disk failure (the 9/10 mentioned above). If you find you've got any bad sectors, don't put anything on the drive that you care about losing. Usually once the dam springs a leak, things go south quickly.

 

[Ecrofirt]

thanks for the info. Looks like I've got some work to do

 

[Ecrofirt]

Just making sure, but this would reaffirm the bad sectors idea, right?:
"The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error"

 

[Ecrofirt]

bumping to make sure this isn't some other kind of error