Is my HDD breaking/broken?

[Pooky]

So my Windows kinda locked up and started to take a hell of a long time to do anything before finally pretty much freezing, now when I restarted my PC, it freezes either on the windows boot screen, or somewhere along the progress of wanting to scan my drive.

Is there anything I can do to fix it?

 

[Electron1]

It's hard to say - could also be your motherboard giving problems.

Take out your hard drive and plug it in another machine either directly or via USB, then backup now if you can!
It will also be an indication if it is the drive or not.

 

[FNfal]

Just put the windows disk in and repair, normally software problem when it does that but may be HD to.
But like what was said above back up while you can.
What software are you using ??

 

[Pooky]

I'm using windows 8, just installed on the drive.

 

[Ninja*J]

Hi, it sounds like a hardware issue other than the hard drive. I had similar problems when I tried Windows 7 back when the beta launched. I don't think there's any actual problems with your hardware it's just Windows not liking some driver or something.

Cheers

 

[SouthBit]

Could be a number of things, but could very likely be bad sectors on the drive. It's easy to diagnose the drive:

1) Download HDD Scan http://hddscan.com/
2) View the SMART data

If there are any yellow indicators (like pending or reallocated) then it's most certainly the drive at fault.

 

[Pooky]

Thanks I will try that. Can those bad sectors be repaired?

 

[ponder]

Thanks I will try that. Can those bad sectors be repaired?

Gonna say no. A hdd will automatically try and re-allocate bad sectors to some reserved space (limited) but if you run out of that it' can't do much more. As soon as you start getting bad sectors and they amount starts increasing you might as well bin the drive.

 

[Pooky]

Okay I used that tool and checked the SMART, all the lights are green except for one which is the UltraDMA CRC Errors where there is a warning symbol.

What does this mean?

 

[sajunky]

Did you do surface scan and check for delays?
Error above might indicate interface cable problem or controller failure. Is it a new motherboard?

 

[Pooky]

Did you do surface scan and check for delays?
Error above might indicate interface cable problem or controller failure. Is it a new motherboard?

Surface scan VR-Verify performing now.

It's not a new motherboard.

 

[Pooky]

Ugh halfway through the test my screen went on standby and there was no response to moving my mouse, now I had to restart but it's giving problems again with starting up.

 

[sajunky]

Download MHDD, put it on bootable diskette or USB stick. Go yo the BIOS setup and look at SATA controller, change from AHCI to "compatibility mode" or whathever is named. It will allow MHDD to recognize HDD. Select drive. Scan is performed 2xF4 (default options). Report back delays from the scan.