Windows 10: Hard drive failure

Hi all,
Yesterday I came back to my computer and there was a pop up on the screen telling me that there is an update for Itunes available. So I clicked on install, but nothing happened.
Then I wanted to close the pop up, but could not. All was frozen. I had to shut down by pressing the power button. When windows was reloading, it was taking a long time, I get a message that if I wanted to stop checking the drive to hit any key. I let it check, but after an hour or so it was not advancing beyond 74 %. So I shut down again and this time I hit enter when the above message appeared to stop the check. It booted. I ran Chrystal disk info and the second hard drive has problems. To avoid the long boot up, I tried to disconnect the second hard drive, but then I get a blue screen telling me that a device in not available and to put my windows disk in and repair windows. Somehow the second hard drive has to be connected to boot, but when I connect it, it takes a long time and wants to check the drive, but never finishes.
Besides a bad drive, how come it will not boot when I disconnect the drive.
Any ideas?
Sven

:)

 

cmd formate IO error how can solve it

I would start by checking the health of the drive:

How to Prevent Hard Drive Failures by Checking and ... - groovyPost

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/check-hard-dri...

 

Updating using Windows Update Assistant Error: Disk Controller: The Current Active Partition is Compressed

Check your hard disk for errors:

How to Prevent Hard Drive Failures by Checking and ... - groovyPost

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/check-hard-dri...

 

Sounds like the boot sector and boot loader are on one drive while guess what? 10 is on another! When first seeing 10 go on was that an upgrade or clean install?

For the initial 10 upgrade here last summer 10 wouldn't even go on! *Eek*Redface After I reviewed the Clean Install guide guess what? I found out that not only did I have to unplug the 7 host/boot drive to allow 10 to first upgrade over the clone and later a clean install of 7 on the second now 10 host/boot drive but also had to unplug the two storage/backup drives as well where one saw the temp install folders and the other later found to have the boot files!*DohThat made my day!

That sounds similar to what you are seeing as far as unplugging one drive and not able to get anywhere due to the misplacement of the mbr and boot loader. But the one thing you will want to find out now is whether or not it's the drive OS that is at fault or is it the 10 install whether upgrade or not being the source of the problems.

If you nave the 10 media made up or can boot live from something like a Linux cd or dvd in order to view both of the drives while plugged in you could easily identify which drive saw 10 go on it as well as find out if you are able to access the drive or not. If not either the drive may have gone DOA on you or the Partition table may have suffered an oops! moment on you. How old is the drive? while even a new drive can go ... ut ohhhhh.. on you while some drives last a long time. There are some free tools available from each drive manufacturer as well as other freewares in order to run diagnostic tests on the main drive once and if you are able to see it made bootable.

 

Night Hawk,
thanks for your response.
I suspected something like that. windows depositing something on drive 2.
if I unplug drive 2 and then do a repair install, will that solve the problem? and will I then be able to boot normally?
By the way, I checked and it is drive 2 that is the problem. after windows was running it gave ma a warning to back up all files from drive "D" before the drive fails completely.
Thanks
Sven

 

I think you found your answer for either the Clean Install to insure the best results once the problem drive as well as any other non OS drive(s) are removed from the equation. I ran smack into that one last July 29th! and into the first week of August back then. Simply follow the steps in either of the two guides and you shouldn't run into any problems.

One thing I prefer here until deciding to allow the next Insider Preview build available to replace the Threshold 2 update when that got buggy on me would have been to see a full replacement install of Windows once an installation got messed up! The Startup Repair option might even work if you run that a few times before using the last resort options now that you know which drive has a problem.

You can try that to see if you can get the OS drive running on it's own and then decide if you find 10 still running buggy on the two other options. The bootrec commands used while booted live at the command prompt option can also work at times while the Startup Repair tool is all automatic there. You just have to run it 2 or 3 times for something like this to see the boot sector written or rewritten properly.

 

Thank you very much
I try the repair install
Sven

 

Give it a try! Let me know how it goes for you! Once that is finished you may want to go with a drive tool to check things out. The Seagate SeaTools is good for most brands of drives.

If you have a WD drive the LifeGuard Tools is good there. And Samsung has their own diagnotics app available. Those are found among 11 others seen at http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolso.../tophddiag.htm

 

You can also try this

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...c-easybcd.html

 

It wouldn't hurt any! EasyBCD is a well written program there!

 

Hi all
I downloaded EasyBCD and installed it. I ran it and I had a few problems afterwards
When I first booted it up, it got to the desktop, but would not respond to any mouse click. it was frozen. I pushed the reset button and it would not boot at all. windows wanted to check the drive for errors and repair it. I let it do so, but after that it tells me that windows did not load correctly and to choose from repair options. again I just pushed the reset button and it started to boot, but it was taking a long time. I pushed the reset button again and it booted up fine, not very fast, but it got there and so far my programs work. maybe the boot time will improve after a while.
in any event, I can now boot without the second hard drive attached.

Thanks for your help
Sven

 

I would manually schedule a run of the Disk Check tool from the Command prompt(admin) option but with the two repair switches added onto the command itself. When right clicking on the Start button simply scroll down to that option to see the new window open and then type: "chkdsk /r/f" in at the prompt. The R=Repair and F=Fix switches will instruct the tool to make any necessary repairs.

The confirmation will then appear indicating it is scheduled to run on the next startup. You still will want the drive scanned for any disk errors which will often cause boot up issues as well as problems while in Windows.

 

Night Hawk,
I ran the chkdsk at startup and it moved quickly to 10% done. it got stuck at 11% for a long time , so I left and when I came back, windows was up and running.
is there a log file of some kind that I can look at?
I also run Crystal Disk info and it comes back with: caution
so is this drive on the way out also?

 

If this hard drive fails, it would be the 4th drive in about 6 month that failed. 1 was on my office computer.
Q: are solid state drives better?
if yes, will I be able to buy a solid state drive and just plug it into my system or is there more to it.
I want this to be the last time ( hopefully ) that I have a HD problem.
Thanks for any help
Sven

 

Personally I haven't quite yet tried out any SSD still waiting for the prices to come down on the 1tb or eventually larger models. You can only write so many times to an SSD while a mechanical drive uses the armature and read/write heads that fail over time.

One way to check on any mech drive failing is to listen closely to see if you hear any clicking sounds coming from the drive itself. That would be the armature having lost tension and on the way out as it slaps up against the main spindle!

Here I have been running with WD mainly for the last 18yrs. when getting into the first custom build. back when 98SE was still new! Even a 5yr. old drive one of the pair of 1tb storage/backup drives I recently saw replaced when acting up and taking forever to access was good once removed it from the case and put the Sata 3 drive into a USB 2.0 enclosure and suddenly it works fine? You might be seeing the same problem as far as either a bad cable or even a bad port! Both 2tb replacement drives this time WD server class "Heavy Duty" Sata II drives. I generally seem to have excellent results staying with the same brand.