Suspicious drive ativity

I am beginning to suspect that I have a hard drive (D about to fail. It seems like there are always issues with my computer that were quite perplexing but now that I suspect that it could be the drive, it seems like all the problems can be traced back to the D: drive. If I try to back up something from the D drive it always ends up failing, no errors, just everything stops, I have to RESET. I can backup stuff from the C: dive no problem. I can still access images and things from the D: drive but it takes a while for some things to appear. Suspiciously longer than usual. The drive light on my computer is ALWAYS blinking. I am trying to do a Check Disk on drive D: and it will not do it because it says it is busy. I have nothing else going on. Since I have rebooted the light has not stopped for at least 15 minutes. That is crazy long when there is nothing going on.

What should I do?

 

Check you event viewer for any problems that may be reported
check you hdd cables they can go bad causing those symptoms
there is a program that i have used which is great in a pinch but not a solution called HDD Regenerator, it will scan and isolate any bad sectors to your hdd wihtout loss of data, its not free but I do believe there is a 14 day trial on it.

 

I Will give it a look see. I hve removed the suspected drive and the sytems works perfectly. So now I know its the disk, All I need to do now is get the info off of it. Windows can not seem to get past the CHKDSK part. It always wants to spend about a week fixing the USN Journal. Any experience with how to bypass all that crap?

 

Your best bet for dealing with a suspicious drive would be to go to the drive manufacturers web site and download their diagnostics utility and see what it has to say about your drive.

 

almost sounds as you have a failing ntfs filesystem on the drive, this can be very troublesome getting your data, you could try using a Ubuntu Livecd but even that may have troubles if its the filesystem corrupted.

 

I went and purchased a new drive and also purchased an external docking station for internal drives called Black Widow by Thermaltake and I have to say it is quite cool. Although when I am done here, I think I will return it as not sure what the purpose of the design is, seems to be aimed at gamers. Perhaps I am just missing something, it says it's hot swapable but my system does not see it when i put a drive in the dock when the compute is on. It offers a eSATA connection and I am using that but I am not sure what the advantage is of having an internal drive outside the desktop? Anyways, what it lead me to discover is that the drive was getting hotter than an oven, I almost could not touch it, or at least parts of it. I could get information off of it but it was very slow going and then it would just stop. So I got this idea that perhpas that was the problem. So, since the drive is external to the case sitting in this docking station, I put a big fan on it. Al the sudden the data just stared going. Still having some trouble here and there and not operating at 100% but as of this writing have almost retreived 100% of the data.

 

glad to hear you're atleast getting your data off it

 

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Ha - reminds me of the good old days, spraying Freon on circuit board ICs to isolate problems...I've also heard of iPod batteries, X-Boxes, etc., being put in freezers for temporary fixes...

Good job...

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Thanks for all the great advice.