Hard disks always die eventually. But for me it has always been a problem for other people. My Hard drives never die- or rather, I would prefer not to believe that since I actually cannot effectively back them up.

My Hard disk setup is pretty simple: I have two drives and two partitions- a System Drive- C:, of course- labelled “BOOTDISK”, and a secondary drive, labelled BIGDISK, which appears as D:. I’ve used this setup for a very long time through any number of computers- the drives are different but I adhere to this method. When I first put this computer together, I only got one Hard Disk for it. the 750GB which si now the C: drive. to keep with my drive layout- and avoid problems with existing software, I created two partitions. I copied over what was on my then current D: drive- which was a 500GB Hard disk- to a 500GB partition on the 750GB drive, and installed Windows 7 on the first partition of that drive. When I bought my secondary- a 1.5TB Drive- the intent was data storage. I copied everything over to the new drive (after formatting and preparation and all that), and then deleted the older BIGDISK partition and expanded the System drive to fill the 750GB drive. Life was good. I had way more space then I figured I would ever need.

Fast forward to today- My C: drive has 64GB of remaining space, and my D:\ drive has 205GB. Worse still, the D: drive is simply no longer reliable. This started some time ago- the SMART monitor built into Windows 7 insisted that my secondary drive was going to fail yesterday, around 2 years ago, perhaps one, was when I got these messages. I did chkdsks and all sorts of disk checks- the SMART information implied failure, but nothing else did. I passed it off as abberant behaviour, likely caused by overheating. This was sensible.

More recently- in the last few weeks, I’ve been getting things that are a bit more forward in the “lose faith in your data storage solutions, all ye who use Magnetic Platter Drives” section. First, the Drive simply dissappeared from the system one day. Poof. Gone. This happened a few times that day- it was curious, and mostly very annoying. My first suspect was the Power Supply- even if the Hard Drive was a bit of a bad son it seemed reasonable to avoid jumping to conclusions, and the Power Supply is like the evil little gremlin that sits in your computer, willing to let other components take the fall when they simply couldn’t do what they were designed to do because the evil vindictive Power Supply refused to give them the appropriate voltage. This was an issue I had with one of my previous machines- my ancient 350Mhz AMD K6-2 system that I basically learned Programming with- good times, so it wasn’t without precedent. My initial look at SpeedFan kinda supported my theory, the 12 volt rail only had 1 volt.

Of course, with a few seconds of actual logic I realized that being able to even run speedfan sort of superceded that piece of information, so I rebooted into the BIOS and used it’s sensor information to determine that the power supply was- much to my relief- actually still working fine and peachy after all. While I was there I rearranged the disks- I had both drives sitting in the forward drive cage, and decided to remove the floppy disk drive and place the secondary drive in it’s spot. This required the removal of the graphics card, CPU, and Memory from the system in order to safely access that particular area without risking breaking anything. I put it all together, worked out the mistakes I made (GPU wasn’t seated properly afterwards, for one thing) and finally powered back up and gave it a go.

It seemed to work fine for a few days- then suddenly, the drive just stopped- I/O error. The behaviour is curious- I don’t know what triggers it, my original idea was that specific files or clusters, or sectors had gone bad, and since the drive had no reallocatable sectors left (thus the bad SMART data) it simply gave up. But there was no seeming rhyme or reason; I could watch recorded Television programs for days on end- gigabytes of data reading- and then the drive would decide to basically fart in my bathtub when I went to explore the drive to clean it up and try to copy over important data. My first thought was once again of previous experience. Another “BIGDISK” also had similar issues back when I was on a Windows XP system. The drive would basically just lock up, solid, on a disk access. I even had specific files that would always cause it just by viewing their directory entry, since explorer would try to open them for more information. This frustrated me for a long time until I finally ran a chkdsk /r on the drive, performing a full surface scan of the drive. The chkdsk found bad sectors, resulting in files that had incomplete or missing information, but the sectors were marked and no longer used. I still have that particular drive- it has 4K in bad sectors but is otherwise just peachy. So I figured I could do it with this drive; the drive may be dying a slow death, but if I can mark the bad sectors I might get lucky and have it work as well as my other drive for years afterwards- plenty of time to replace the drive. My enthusiasm was curbed. I left the computer at a boot-time chkdsk /r of the secondary hard disk. When I returned, I expected it to at least have begun the surface scan- instead, I discovered the chkdsk had stopped while “verifying File Data”. In retrospect, this makes sense. I wasn’t sure and didn’t have internet access at the time (that is a story for another day…) but thought it was the step where it does the Surface Scan. the % simply wasn’t moving though, so I wasn’t sure. (even after an hour it sat there). My suspicion now is that I should let it run, possibly for an entire day- possibly even two- just to try to have it run through. Surface scans might sit at a ‘frozen’ % complete until that scan completes- I don’t know. This is definitely on the table, and something I should do. If I can get the drive in a usable state, rather than a quantum state where any disk access to the drive is a gamble, like my ancient drive from before that still works today, then I think I will be safe. I will eventually get another drive- copy the data from the “bad” hard drive to it, and then relegate the “bad” drive to a tertiary data disk for storing data that isn’t as important.

Anyway decided I should blog about SOMETHING and a rather collosal failure of the system I use for most of my development seemed like a good start. I also started several other very wordy posts, too; I should be posting those in the following few days.