How To Tell If HDD Is Failing?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by techtitan, Oct 16, 2012.

  1. techtitan

    techtitan Specialist

    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:


    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?
     
  2. Rikky

    Rikky Wile E. Coyote - One of a kind

    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_codec_pack_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.
     

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