My PC has developed some kind of disk fault - windows sometimes freezes for minutes at a time (especially at boot up) and when I looked in the system log theres 100's of bad disk errors (The device, \Device\Harddisk0, has a bad block. has a bad block.). I believe this kind of error can either be caused by a bad HDD (although the PC has also frozen when plugging in external drives for instance) or a bad controller chip on the MB? Are bad controller chips common? I'm going to try and replace the HDD but whats the best way to test for a bad MB? Many thanks.
I'm assuming the odds of the drive going bad are a lot higher than a controller. Check out the wiki page for SMART and scroll down to the bottom. I'd suggest picking up some software that can pick up the SMART information. Another idea would be to check the hard drive manufacturers website for a diagnostics disk and run it. Often that can tell you if its a drive failure.
You can also do a scandisk with the block to fix errors checked. If there are some corrupted files the drive will still run but will be slow. The scandisk might fix that. The only time I had a bad motherboard, it was giving alot of input/output errors when writing to the hard drive and I couldn't load windows with the installation cd.
Well, I thought I'd fixed it, but it appears not. I got the Samsung utility and did a low level format (it found errors). I then restored XP from an old image but I've already had 2 errors in Windows system log today. Is it possible that even when errors are corrected that they can re-occur? The drive (in fact whole system) is only 3 months old!
If your already getting new errors, time to use the warrenty on the machine/drive if its still within time. Might just be a bad drive. It's rare, but it does happen.
Great. I'm going to have to deal with Samsung directly now as the company I bought the PC from has gone bust. Anyone had any dealings with them (in the UK if that makes a difference?)
Do you have access to another system? Try wiping the hard drive with HDDErase.exe. (Available on UBCD-NOT UBCD4Win) This is the only prog that will correctly wipe all sectors leaving you an out of the box drive. Only works on Intel processors though. My cousin was having trouble with a drive, using another system, HDDErase confirmed the errors, besides diskscan and chkdsk. HDDErase accesses the hardware built into the hardrive for wiping, so if it states it can't continue because of an error, good bet my cousin needs a new drive. If the controler chip were bad on your MB, you wouldn't have access to anything. It's the brain stem of your computer, problems with that and no more breathing and heart rate.
Thanks for the info. Why does need to be another machine though? And would it do more than Samsungs own utility?
Samsungs utility may be just a block wiping program. They don't clear everything. HDDErase accesses the secure erase function built into the HDD's hardware. It will Erase everything, including Host Protected Area(HPA)/Device Configuration Overlay(DCO) areas. No data survives HDDErase. A second system might help to eliminate your MB from any possible issues. You might also try Diskcheckup if you can boot into the drive. It's freeware.
Had a similar experience with a newish HDD-used Seatools to get rid of the recurring bad blocks,but these kept coming back. In my case it was a sure sign of a faulty HD-and I had it replaced. Generally hardware will in fact prove faulty within the first 12 months. Suggest you image as before and have the HDD replaced under warranty ASAP.
