Old Computer Freezing, Hdd Errors Found, Possibly Repaired?

The computer is a way too old Gateway (FX530XV) running Vista with sp2. I'll try to give as much detail about this as I can, so pardon the longwindedness.

Everything was running normally (famous last words) until a sudden freeze when trying to open Mozilla Firefox. The entire system was locked, so I had to hold down the power button to shut down. But when it shut down, I noticed there were no internal sounds of a shutdown coming from the tower. The monitor went dark but it was like the hard drive had already quit. That didn't seem good.

Upon reboot it wanted to run chkdsk. It seemed to go fine. Windows loaded and all seemed well. I opened Firefox again just to test it and the exact same thing happened all over again. Froze up, I held the power button, no internal sound, reboot, chkdsk. This time, chkdsk did some "deleting index file" type things but otherwise was the same as the first time. It wasn't bringing up errors or talking about bad sectors or anything.

By now I was thinking Firefox had become problematic. I tried Chrome and had a tab or two open as I started searching for issues on Firefox locking up a computer. But 2-3 minutes after it came up, the system froze once again. Same thing with no internal sound on shutdown. I had thought maybe the problem was isolated to running Firefox, but apparently not. The system would freeze 2-3 minutes after loading Windows no matter what I did. Even if I did nothing. But starting Firefox did seem to trigger it faster.

I got it into safe mode, where it worked fairly well. It did freeze up once or twice, and then I'd have to run chkdsk all over again or safe mode wouldn't load. But I was able to back things up to an external drive. I ran anti malware bytes and nothing was found. Then I ran CrystalDiscInfo.

I had probably last run Crystal 2-3 weeks ago to check an external drive. The main hard drive was fine. But now it said caution, with current pending sector count and uncorrectable sector count both having a value of 10. The hard drive is barely 3 years old.

I have boot CDs with MemTest86 and Seatools from Seagate (the hdd is a Seagate). I ran them both. The memory came back fine but the hard drive failed the Seatools short test. I ran the long test and it reported 16 errors. I told it to repair the errors, it said they were fixed, and it passed a subsequent short test.

I went back into safe mode and ran CrystalDiscInfo again. It's now saying the drive is good. Current pending sector count and uncorrectable sector count are both back at 0.

I booted back into Windows normally and it seems to be running fine. Even Firefox runs with no problem.

I guess my question is can I really trust that this is fixed? Or now that this has happened, is it just a matter of time before there are more problems?

Any answers, advice or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

Flaws in modern disk drives are, most often, from two possible causes. The first is an excessive G-shock where people are not being taught that the drive is extremely fragile when operating. This is very common in laptops; but, rarely true in desktops. The second is a defect in engineering or manufacturing. Seagate, these days, assembles hard disk drives; but, they contract with numerous other companies for the platters, head assemblies, spindle motors, etcetera. Defects in any of those parts only become known if a significant number of that model fail for a common reason. Reallocated sectors and pending sectors are big red flags to me that demand a replacement be obtained with a (hopefully) successful cloning to get away from the failing drive.
Recently, I had a laptop 500g drive which reported reallocated sectors and the client was experiencing freezes. After cloning it to a new drive, he was happy. I then wiped the drive, after which, much to my surprise, it scanned clean and reported no reallocations; but, when I further tested it (I have a BAT file that creates files which double in size each loop) and left that running overnight, the PC went bang, suddenly rebooting itself.
I wouldn't trust that SeaTools or any other utility could possibly fix a hard disk drive. If you have all of your stuff backed up and don't mind starting from scratch then that's your choice, isn't it?

 

I have many Seagate drives (Barracuda line) and have had no problems with them. I do have one that clicks now and then which is a bad sign . . . but it is around 8 years old and has been clicking now for at least a year.

Like davismccarn said, drives can fail just due to random chance . . . manufacturing error, a substandard part, board component failed, a speck of dust made it into the drive, etc. If your diagnostic tools say the errors have gone, that is a good sign but I wouldn't trust the drive 100%. Create a back-up of your drive right away. This program does a good job, and is free:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/easeus_todo_backup_free_edition.html

Make sure to create a bootable rescue disk with whatever back up program you do use. You can back it up on DVD's (if the back-up isn't terribly huge) or an external drive. That way when/if it finally crashes you will be able to restore the OS to a new drive. You can get hard drives off the internet for a reasonable price . . . I'd consider getting one that has more capacity then the one you have. Then use the existing drive for non-critical file storage.

I have one 250GB Seagate drive that some diagnostic software flags as nearing failure due to errors, etc for the last three years. It's in a computer I use as a DVR and it has been running fine all that time, so your drive might not gasp its last for a long time . . . or it will tomorrow. No way to tell.

 

Thanks for the answers. It's continued to run like normal since I ran the Seagate tools. I did get a new drive, though. Just gotta put it in.