How To Tell If HDD Is Failing?

[techtitan]

I just went to pull a video file from my extra internal HDD I have installed, and I noticed that several of the videos in that folder have become corrupt and are unplayable. This worried me as this is a fairly new drive and is where 90% of my storage/backup is done.

So, I immediately started running scans. Here are my results:

1. As it's a 1.5TB Seagate drive, I ran the "Seagate Tools for Windows" app. I ran both S.M.A.R.T Check, Short Drive Self Test, Short Generic and Long Generic tests. All came back as "Passed"
   
2. I then decided to run the CHKDSK option for that drive (using the "Error-Checking" option under the Tools tab in the drive properties). After it was complete, I tried to double check the log file. I was unable to find a result in the powershell.exe prompt for "wininit" as it gave me the "No matches found" result. In Event Viewer, I did find a CHKDSK entry. Here are the results of that:
   
   

   Chkdsk was executed in read/write mode.
   
   Checking file system on M:
   Volume dismounted. All opened handles to this volume are now invalid.
   Volume label is Media HDD.
   
   CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
   137984 file records processed. File verification completed.
   514 large file records processed. 0 bad file records processed. 0 EA records processed. 0 reparse records processed. CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
   164362 index entries processed. Index verification completed.
   
   
   CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
   137984 file SDs/SIDs processed. Cleaning up 17 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
   Cleaning up 17 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
   Cleaning up 17 unused security descriptors.
   Security descriptor verification completed.
   13190 data files processed. CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
   36425904 USN bytes processed. Usn Journal verification completed.
   CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
   137968 files processed. File data verification completed.
   CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
   1969860 free clusters processed. Free space verification is complete.
   Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
   
   1465136127 KB total disk space.
   1456915392 KB in 124090 files.
   56748 KB in 13191 indexes.
   284543 KB in use by the system.
   65536 KB occupied by the log file.
   7879444 KB available on disk.
   
   4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
   366284031 total allocation units on disk.
   1969861 allocation units available on disk.

Can anyone tell me if there are any early warning signs, based on the info above that the drive is failing or could it just be something screwy going on with these video files themselves?

[Rikky]

The results of check disk say you have no bad unreadable sectors,you've ran the manufactures tools and they've showed no problems,the drive is also new so this leads me to assume the fault is not with the drive.

You say the corruption has only happened with with movie files so the first thing to check is if the movie codec is identical to the files that won't play,you can check this by playing in vlc media player and clicking the codec details tab at the top under the tools menu,also try a few different media players such as wmp,vlc and media player classic,vlc is the most powerful as it will play broken files and attempt to fix them.

The next thing to check is your codec package,go to control panel,programs and features and look for any installed codec packages,it's best to only have one codec package so uninstall any you find and install this one.

I like this package because it will search for any unused,broken or conflicting codecs and remove or repair them as needed,choose basic version to keep things simple.

http://www.free-codecs.com/k_lite_co...k_download.htm

Corruption can also be caused by unstable cpu and memory when they were being transferred so that's what I would test next.