Is my HDD about to shit the bed? (Yup, PC still fucked tho)

[Eel O'Brian]

My PC has been hard locking randomly for a month or so. Screen just freezes, HDD light stays on, have to flip the power switch to shut down. Ran chkdsk and it showed nothing. Thought it was Chrome, since it seemed to happen whenever I was browsing, but I uninstalled that and it's still doing it. Ran 3 passes on memtest and it shows all clear on the RAM. It's not making any noises other than the initial spin up on boot.  I don't know what else it could be. Any good HDD testing programs out there I could run it through before I drop $ on a new drive?

[Brehvolution]

Do you have another disk to clone it to?

Or another smaller drive to install windows and a few programs for some testing?

In my experience, HDD's fail hard or gradually. They usually start making funny noises(like ticking) when they are about to go.

[Eel O'Brian]

No, I only have the one HDD. I've had it since 2010, Doug gave it to me when I built my PC. I do work the hell out of it, between gaming and regular use. The only other thing I can think of that might be causing the freezing is something going wrong with the motherboard, unless memtest just didn't catch something during the passes. It only makes noise on boot, but it is pretty audible.

I downloaded Seagate SeaTools, gonna give that a try and see if anything comes up there.

[Momo]

[Eel O'Brian]

Welp, just checked my event logs, hadn't thought to do that before. Shitload of bad block errors showing up Time to spend some money I guess.

[Momo]

Well CHKDSK /F in the mean time to try and keep you ticking over

[Eel O'Brian]

Yeah, gonna go get another drive this evening, and although I really should start fresh and reinstall everything I don't want to redownload 400 GB of Steam games so I'm gonna try cloning it.

[Eel O'Brian]

Well, that was way easier than I thought it would be. I bought a Seagate Barracuda 2TB, and used the Seagate DiscWizard cloning program. Took about an hour or so to clone.

[Rusty Shackleford]

I might be telling you something you already know, but if you've got important stuff on the drive it might be worth it to spring for another identical disk and run a RAID1/mirror array. Total data redundancy across both drives in case one fails, and most mobos support RAID nowadays.

[Eel O'Brian]

Yeah, I'll look into that. Had a scare with windows not loading a few weeks back, so I've gotten pretty good about backing up important files to Dropbox and several other cloud services (just to be safe), but that would save me a lot of grief with larger stuff like games.

[headwalk]

drag for drinky, he'll no longer be able to read your posts as you're typing them.

[Rufus]

He cloned the disc, so I imagine Drinky can still turn on the webcam and stuff.

[Eel O'Brian]

Just for kicks, I hooked the old drive back up, wiped it, and ran a program called HDtune to see what it would tell me. The old drive was throwing up red Failed results in the "End to end error detection" tests, and yellow warnings in a couple of other places like spin retry, etc. According to the results it's a wonder the thing didn't shit out on me before I got it cloned. Anyway, HDtune is a good program if you ever want to check your HDD out.

[Eel O'Brian]

Fuck. Just hard froze again. I have absolutely no idea what could be causing it. Well, my HDD was failing, so at least that wasn't a waste of money.

[headwalk]

Fuck. Just hard froze again. I have absolutely no idea what could be causing it. Well, my HDD was failing, so at least that wasn't a waste of money.

is it happening randomly or on load? i've had two PSUs hit the dirt on me and both deaths were led to by a trail of hard locks.

no idea how you'd sleuth it out without borrowing a part though.

[Eel O'Brian]

just randomly, this time I was just opening windows explorer - but it's happened before with nothing open, just goes unresponsive

the only other thing I can think of is that I've seen a lot of people complaining about hard freezes with Nvidia drivers from 320.xxx onward

and i have had some display driver crashes/recoveries in the past

[Eel O'Brian]

I should add that it's never happened while playing a game, though

[headwalk]

and there's nothing suspect in your logs recorded right when then crashes happen? maybe save one so we can all take a look at your dirty registry.

[Eel O'Brian]

Before, it would record the bad block error, and sometimes a controller error for the disk. I installed the new drive to a different sata port to make sure the port wasn't fritzing out, and used a new cable that came with the HDD. This time the event log just threw up a generic critical "unexpected reboot without clean shutdown" error, nothing else.

[Eel O'Brian]

saw a nvlddmkm error a few minutes before it froze

here's the log from right before it froze to just after:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1006274/Hard%20Freeze%20log.evtx

[Eel O'Brian]

Froze again, and the event log showed another nvlddmkm error a minute or so before the freeze. Now I'm thinking my Nvidia drivers are corrupted. I'll do a full uninstall and run Driversweeper tomorrow. If that doesn't work, I'll just say fuck it and do a full wipe/reinstall of Win7.

[archnemesis]

I was just going to recommend a full reinstallation. Maybe you could use the opportunity as an excuse to put in a smaller SSD for the OS and applications partition.