Hard drive strange behaviour

[Cryosec]

Tech guys from the community, I need your help. I've been having a strange problem with one of the HDDs in my desktop. Long story short, I've updated to the Anniversary Update the day after it got released. A couple of days later I tried to change my OC just for the fun of it. Obviously the first attempt failed. I stabilized the OC and went on with my life. Next thing I know, my hdd started causing heavy lag when used and strangely disconnected (while the file explorer would still show me the disk) randomly (but only if something was using it for read or write operations).

 

I checked for bad sectors, defragmented it, checked for health status and so on. CrystalDisk Info said it's fine, scans fixed everything out of place but it still disconnects when used. Can't say how this works, because I run games on it and it works fine, but when I downloaded torrents (legal torrent, if you really care), the disk just disconnected causing reading error in BitTorrent and the impossibility to create even a new folder anywhere on the drive.

 

Anyone knows what's going on? At the moment the only work-around is completely shutting off the pc and turning it back on, reboot doesn't help.

[Squish4058]

You could try a few things to eliminate windows causing the issues itself, I had an issue where when copying files, you know how the progress bar has a little shine on it, the shine would basically freeze/jutter for half a second then continue, but I later realised it was the whole OS freezing> I assumed it was the disk but apparently it was windows update

So if you know how to, you could try an ubuntu live cd or usb and go copy some random files and see if it disconnects?

Also try the hard drive in another pc if you can

[Tusk2435]

Try downloading gsmartcontrol (open source piece of sw that lets you keep under control smart stats), select the drive that gives you problems and try an Extended Self Test for that drive. Also check if some smart stats are not good looking.

[Cryosec]

Just now, kris2340k said:

So if you know how to, you could try an ubuntu live cd or usb and go copy some random files and see if it disconnects?

Also try the hard drive in another pc if you can

tried ubuntu and failed. can't mount the disk because win10 won't let me (I could mount it read-only, but that won't be useful obviously)

 

Just now, LionSpeck said:

Try downloading gsmartcontrol (open source piece of sw that lets you keep under control smart stats), select the drive that gives you problems and try an Extended Self Test for that drive. Also check if some smart stats are not good looking.

Doing it now, ETA: 1h 54m

[Squish4058]

You cant mount a normal usb stick?that screams issues lol
You can use any normal computer to make them and if you have any spares you can make CDs too

 

[Cryosec]

30 minutes ago, LionSpeck said:

Try downloading gsmartcontrol (open source piece of sw that lets you keep under control smart stats), select the drive that gives you problems and try an Extended Self Test for that drive. Also check if some smart stats are not good looking.

Quoting you again, tried the test twice, kept failing at 10% (saying "interrupted (host reset)", but I didn't even touch it). Also, here are the stats, which don't look perfect - also, I had this HDD for barely a year

[Cryosec]

14 minutes ago, kris2340k said:

You cant mount a normal usb stick?that screams issues lol

Cant mount the hard drive, usb boots normally

 

sorry, I wasn't clear enough

[Tusk2435]

Just now, Cryosec said:

Quoting you again, tried the test twice, kept failing at 10% (saying "interrupted (host reset)", but I didn't even touch it). Also, here are the stats, which don't look perfect

Actually just by looking at the values, they look really good! They're just like a new drive, which to me is really strange... (Don't worry about that pre-failure it says, it's not an error). I think the problem is not hardware related (at least regarding the disks and head of the HDD). It might be a dead HDD board which tbh I never heard about, or it could be the SATA power cable / data cable or even the motherboard. We should start removing variables, so would you try changing the PSU's SATA power connector and the mobo's SATA connector?

[Squish4058]

4 minutes ago, Cryosec said:

Cant mount the hard drive, usb boots normally

 

sorry, I wasn't clear enough

the one your having problems with?

 

Does it show up in the partition manager
to get to it just press start, type "partition" and hit enter

 

[Cryosec]

10 minutes ago, LionSpeck said:

Actually just by looking at the values, they look really good! They're just like a new drive, which to me is really strange... (Don't worry about that pre-failure it says, it's not an error). I think the problem is not hardware related (at least regarding the disks and head of the HDD). It might be a dead HDD board which tbh I never heard about, or it could be the SATA power cable / data cable or even the motherboard. We should start removing variables, so would you try changing the PSU's SATA power connector and the mobo's SATA connector?

Changed the power connector, mobo SATA port and SATA cable. gsmartcontrol test still stops by itself, but I didn't get any read errors while downloading the torrent files (which usually occured within a few minutes). Could have been a broken SATA cable, because I've already changed the mobo port some time go (while I had this problem).

 

I'll update if it happens again

 

[kirashi]

59 minutes ago, kris2340k said:

You cant mount a normal usb stick?that screams issues lol
You can use any normal computer to make them and if you have any spares you can make CDs too

 

 

Windows 10 does not write the "clean bit" to drives upon shutdown unless "Fast Startup" is disabled in power options.

Linux operating systems won't mount "dirty" filesystems to prevent data loss. It's annoying, but it's part of Windows 8/10.

45 minutes ago, Cryosec said:

Cant mount the hard drive, usb boots normally

 

sorry, I wasn't clear enough

 

It's odd the drive works fine when you read games off of it, but chokes when you write torrents or data to it.

What make and model of HDD is it? Curious in case it's a write-caching issue with the drive firmware...

[Cryosec]

Just now, kirashi said:

What make and model of HDD is it? Curious in case it's a write-caching issue with the drive firmware...

WD Blue 1TB HDD, had it for about a year

[kirashi]

Just now, Cryosec said:

WD Blue 1TB HDD, had it for about a year

Huh. OK interesting. It's not a Seagate 7200.11, so that's a good thing.

I would continue to run gSmartControl on it a few more times, just to be sure.

Is it possible to try another hard drive on the same SATA port using the SAME cable?

That might tell you if its your motherboard or the drive itself.

[Cryosec]

Just now, kirashi said:

Is it possible to try another hard drive on the same SATA port using the SAME cable?

That might tell you if its your motherboard or the drive itself.

I could try the same cable, but I doubt it's the mobo port because I've already tried a different port some time ago and it didn't help. I'll test it as soon as I can

[Cryosec]

2 hours ago, LionSpeck said:

Actually just by looking at the values, they look really good! They're just like a new drive, which to me is really strange... (Don't worry about that pre-failure it says, it's not an error). I think the problem is not hardware related (at least regarding the disks and head of the HDD). It might be a dead HDD board which tbh I never heard about, or it could be the SATA power cable / data cable or even the motherboard. We should start removing variables, so would you try changing the PSU's SATA power connector and the mobo's SATA connector?

Update: it happened again. this time stuff got weird. The download, after the read error and a file check, went back to 5.8% (it was at around 80% before). Now, if I try to create a txt file on E:\ (the HDD), I get a "file cannot be found" error or something like that (it's in italian). Cable, port and power, none of these fixed it. How could it be the HDD? Could it be an OS problem? or maybe even CPU?

 

Edit: it's getting weirder. RAM goes up with the download and chrome just crashed twice while I was writing here. I'm starting to think it's the OS.

[Tusk2435]

9 hours ago, Cryosec said:

Update: it happened again. this time stuff got weird. The download, after the read error and a file check, went back to 5.8% (it was at around 80% before).

This means that the P2P application noticed 74.2% of the torrent was corrupted or missing, so that doesn't sound really good.

9 hours ago, Cryosec said:

Now, if I try to create a txt file on E:\ (the HDD), I get a "file cannot be found" error or something like that (it's in italian). Cable, port and power, none of these fixed it. How could it be the HDD? Could it be an OS problem? or maybe even CPU?

 

Edit: it's getting weirder. RAM goes up with the download and chrome just crashed twice while I was writing here. I'm starting to think it's the OS.

I still doubt it's the OS, because when disks mess up applications have really strange behaviors. Chrome probably started eating ram because it suddenly didn't have a place where to put the download and then crashed.

If you want to check if the OS system files are ok, try running

sfc /scannow

in the cmd; if it finishes without errors, try also

chkdsk C: /r

this one should ask you to reboot the system while doing it.

I would recommend you to run also

chkdsk E: /r

but if the OS isn't able to have an uninterrupted connection with the disk, it wouldn't finish, and that would be pretty useless, but I would still give it a try.

[Cryosec]

2 hours ago, LionSpeck said:

If you want to check if the OS system files are ok, try running

sfc /scannow

did it, no errors

 

2 hours ago, LionSpeck said:

I would recommend you to run also

chkdsk E: /r

already did it several times before, still happens

 

2 hours ago, LionSpeck said:

chkdsk C: /r

C:\ is on another drive (the SSD)

[Tusk2435]

22 minutes ago, Cryosec said:

C:\ is on another drive (the SSD)

I suggested you to do it on C because you thought it could be an OS issue, so that would have checked if the OS drive had any problems, even if unlikely.

I still think it's an hdd hw issue, we pretty much excluded the most likely other causes...

[Cryosec]

4 minutes ago, LionSpeck said:

I suggested you to do it on C because you thought it could be an OS issue, so that would have checked if the OS drive had any problems, even if unlikely.

I still think it's an hdd hw issue, we pretty much excluded the most likely other causes...

I'll do it as soon as I can. Also, if the OS isn't the issue, what could be?

[Tsx]

You say that you try a little oc. Set the bios to default an look if this would fix it.

 

You could also try to put the hdd in an external case with usb 3. Most Mainboards actually have a dedicated controller for usb3 so defect sata ports would be no problem for usb3. If you could use the hdd in the external case normal you should try to reinstall Mainboard drivers for chipset. 

 

On Windows 10 you have an option for resetting the system without loosing data this might be a possible solution too.

[Cryosec]

2 minutes ago, Tsx said:

You say that you try a little oc. Set the bios to default an look if this would fix it.

 

I've OC'd it back to 4.5GHz that time (which I also did time ago and it worked), but now it's stable at 4.1GHz

3 minutes ago, Tsx said:

You could also try to put the hdd in an external case with usb 3. Most Mainboards actually have a dedicated controller for usb3 so defect sata ports would be no problem for usb3. If you could use the hdd in the external case normal you should try to reinstall Mainboard drivers for chipset. 

too bad I don't have one ahah

 

3 minutes ago, Tsx said:

On Windows 10 you have an option for resetting the system without loosing data this might be a possible solution too.

I hope this will be the last option  

[Tsx]

4 minutes ago, Cryosec said:

I've OC'd it back to 4.5GHz that time (which I also did time ago and it worked), but now it's stable at 4.1GHz

You realy should bios default settings only to be sure that this is not the problem. 

 

 

[Cryosec]

1 minute ago, Tsx said:

You realy should bios default settings only to be sure that this is not the problem. 

will do. if this comes out to be the problem, well, fuck. I liked the performance improvement  

[Cryosec]

On 7/9/2016 at 1:49 PM, Tsx said:

You realy should bios default settings only to be sure that this is not the problem. 

 

 

So, today I tried this. I was installing a game on the drive, to see if it would disconnect as usual. Obviously, it happened (so I know the problem is still there). I've set back both multiplier and voltage to auto, and oh look, now it doesn't disconnect.

 

This means the fuckup was in the CPU, right? not even a year after and it's already giving me problems?

 

 

EDIT: aaaand it happened again, this time while running a VM on the disk.