Hard drive problem

Tozer

Hi - my 2.5 year old Dell Vostro laptop (running Vista Business) took a bit of a knock today and I'm a bit worried about it.

I have run the checkdisk program and all seems ok. However, when I restarted Windows, it failed to start up properly. After running startup repair, it started normally (albeit a little slow).

Starting Control Panel takes ages and seems to cause everything to freeze. Eventually it works.

I am also getting the error message "Microsoft Windows Search Indexer stopped working and was closed" which never occurred before.

Any ideas much appreciated!!!

ohyeahitssorcy

The trouble with mechanical hardrives is the actuator arm with the read write head on will jump across the platter if the laptop takes a knock especially if it is on at the time this can lead to it corrupting some data across the disk in extreme cases it can damage the platter and/or the read write head take the opportunity to back up all your important user files and data just in case it becomes unbootable might be an idea to find out your hard drive make and use the manufacturers disk program to check it over if there is one, hopefully you havnt damaged the platter or read write head so at worst it could be corrupted data which might need a reinstall of the o/s or at least a repair/recovery.

Tozer

Thanks for that. It does sound like it may be corrupted data.

Is a reinstall a major issue? If I do this, do you think I ought to change the hard drive first? Its a 120GB drive at the moment and it seems I can replace it for not huge amounts of money. Will probably have to get a friendly computer shop to do it for me!

Edit: something definitely not right - my latest attempt to back up has resulted in a Data error - cyclic redundancy check.

????

ohyeahitssorcy

As you say something is definately not right, there are several problems it could be either the file itself is corrupt or it is being corrupted when being moved does it do this with every file or in the middle of lots of files ?

If it transfers some files ok but not others then the data on the hard disk has been corrupted if you cannot transfer any files at all then it could be a memory problem.

There are methods to try and recover the corrupted data if it will transfer some files but not others but i dont know how successful this would be.

Try downloading the hard disk manufacturers diagnostics program and seeing what that comes up with.

HO87

Does it also show I/O error?

AHAR

Have a look to see if it has a Drive Diagnostics option on the boot menu. Press F12 while the Dell logo is on screen just after turning on.

Tozer

Thanks all. Will have a crack later when in front of the laptop.

It tries to back up and starts off happily enough but then fails. Fortunately, I backed it up just last week.

If I did have to reinstall, would it be advisable to swap the HD out first?

kwikbreaks

The drive checker (right click properties on the drive then select tools) can scan for damaged sectors if you check the option. You should do that first before splashing out any cash imo. If it finds a damaged area on the disk it will mark it bad so it won't get used in future. Of course it is possible that the head was damaged...

Tozer

kwikbreaks wrote: »

The drive checker (right click properties on the drive then select tools) can scan for damaged sectors if you check the option. You should do that first before splashing out any cash imo. If it finds a damaged area on the disk it will mark it bad so it won't get used in future. Of course it is possible that the head was damaged...

Is that the Chkdsk function? It seems to keep on trying to reallocate things (takes ages!) but then keeps on retrying to re-run.

Replacement (but larger) drive seems to be 'only' about £40 so it may be money well spent.