May Many Hard drive issues

StonedParadoX

ok firstly

okay.. i HAD TWO hard drives inside my dell dimension pc that i bought a good while ago ( year ago ) .. and i noticed one of the hard drives was getting slower and slower.. so i formatted and stuck ubuntu on and that was still slow
so i format it again and windows xp installation screen thing is telling me the drive is ****ed so i thought..hmm ill switch around hard drives and see what the problem is when im back in windows.. ONLY to find that THAT hard drive is ****ed aswell ... what could be the reasons behind that ? .. both hard drives ****ing up at the same time?

secondly
i have an 400 gig external freecom hard drive that is also having an issue
basically its only showing 1 folder of a possible 10 ..and when i stick into my mums laptop its saying / is giving an error or something im not sure.. if you want i can get the full message
But what i find stRANGE is that its only showing 1 folder ..and there used to be lots more

3rdly

i have a 500 gig media hard drive that my MOTHER dropped ..that is working but slowely ..and it sometimes has a ticking noise
basically is that hard drive knackered or not?
im thinkin of formatting it and seeing if that will help but i thought i'd ask here


cheers?

BoB_BoT

I'll start in reverse order here :P
the 500Gig drive that was dropped, back up the data and scrap it. It's unreliable and could give up the ghost any day now.

The 400Gig, try running a check disk on the drive from within windows. There could be a few faults that can be rectified.

The two other drives in the dell, again, perform a check disk on them. To do this, insert the windows disk, boot up to the install screen, select "r" and you'll be brought to a command prompt. Select install 1 if the option is given. Enter the command "chkdsk /r" without the inverted commas. Let it run through. See if any errors were repaired. Reboot and try installing again. If it can't run the check disk on the drive, you need to use the manufactures disk diagnois tools to test the drives. The drives could still be under warranty by dell/drive manufacture if the system is only a year old.

There's another possibility that the cables / disk controller is fault in the dell causing bad data to be wrote to the drive, more than likely not though.

StonedParadoX

hmm

cheers for the reply

in reverse order

the 500 gig .. ill format it and see what happens but im just gonna tell my mom she owes me a new HD

Right now iv picked up another hard drive i had lying around .. im gonna install windows right now and see what USED to be on that drive
i have like 10 drives hanging about

ill do the other things soon

cheers dude

StonedParadoX

kewl beans

it said errors found - chkdsk cannot continue in real only mode

so i googled that

so i did ckdsk /f and Y

its now sorting out ****

edit: chdsk sorted THAT problem out
now to sort out the other 2

Capt'n Midnight

Dell BIOS probably has a HDD diagnostics tool

hdtune - is an app that will give you SMART info on the drive so you can see if's it's reported errors before,
hdtune - can also do a low level surface scan so you can see if there are any real errors

windows does a high level scan and relies on the drive to do all the remapping of sectors

StonedParadoX

hey

with HDtune.. im scanning 1 of the hard drives that ****ed up ..and no errors or anything is popping up

it also says the disk health is "ok".

how can that be?

Capt'n Midnight

It means the drive hardware is probably OK
( but if the dropped one don't store anything you can't afford to use on it )

still could have software problems if the drive wasn't ejected properly

StonedParadoX

yeah

bad news about the dropped hd
when i stick it into any pc.. it lags .. EVERYTHING

and then eventually crashes the pc if i dont unplug it ..and then everything i tried to do with it opens or closes or whatever

so i think thats out the door

the other hds .. im currently running a recovery system for lost files on all the hds .. gonna take a while