I/O Error

Sorry to bother everyone again, but I keep getting reports of I/O errors and do I want to retry, ignore once, ignore many, and telling me that my drive is bad. On my laptop, this happened during my first attempt to back up, and eventually after rebooting and trying again, it went away. The laptop HD was chkdsk /r a few months back and no errors were reported. I put the error down to the fact that there are still some Acronis artifacts hanging about my DELL XPS 1645 that I hope to get rid of today.

I am configuring a brand new HP Pavillion for a client and I installed HD Manager 11 Suite on it. The first day after install, I went to Total Defrag and it Analyzed just fine and I didn't go any further. A day later (yesterday), I finished installing all of the software for the client, did a full partition backup, did an archive integrity check (all successful), and then decided to try a Total Defrag. Guess what - I/O error.

Ran chkdsk /r on her computer and it came back with a couple of errors relating to clusters listed as allocated that were not and Windows 7 HP x64 reported that it had fixed those problems. Cold booted the computer, but the I/O error persists when attempting to have Total Defrag analyze the drive.

Any ideas of what is going on and how I could get this working? Suggestions welcome, and please excuse me monopolizing this forum. Still in the learning curve.

Have a great day.

Regards,
-Phil

 

Normally, I regard I/O error as an error more closely tied to hardware/driver issues. I would not expect problems found by chkdsk (other than bad sectors) to trigger this error.

It is strange you get it on 2 machines and with Paragon software being the common component.

I'm not familiar with Total Defrag but understand it is a Paraqon Product. Since you have it on the machine with HDM is there a chance the 2 installations are conflicting?

I've read of instances where card-readers in machines have gotten confused with the HDs causing I/O errors. I don't think this is your problem but you could try disabling any card-readers in Device Manager.

If I had a machine that was giving I/O errors and chkdsk wasn't reporting much, I'd normally try to run the drive manufacturer's diagnostic to check its health. They are usually much better than chkdsk on finding problems but your situation is different than general I/O errors but running the diagnostic wouldn't hurt and would rule out a possible cause. Does the HP have diagnostics included in a special partition?

I think my first move to uninstall Total Defrag if that makes sense.

 

@ garioch7,

What is backup destination? Do you use some external drive for it?
In the I\O error the drive caused the error should be mentioned. If it is not your system drive, it should be related to another drive connected to your laptop (probably to save backup)

 

I used two different WD My Book Essentials (both 1 TB external drives) on the two computers. I have chkdsk'd one of those two drives and it came back clean.

The Total Defrag is a part of the Paragon Hard Disk Manager 11 Suite. In essence that is the only Paragon product installed on both computers.

Will keep an eye on things, and yes, both the Dell laptop and the HP Pavilion have respective diagnostic software. I have run the Dell diagnostics but the laptop passes.

Thanks for your help. Have a great day.

Regards,
-Phil