Faulty Hard Drive

[breadandbubbles]

alright so i had some stuff coming in from utorrent and i got this cyclic redundancy check error thing with a file....

turns out its really likely that my hard drives not doing so good. SMART says ive got 87% health, but windows chkdsk got stuck at 3%, and SO did Spinrite V6, at the same spot.

ive gotten everything i needed off the hard drive (except the faulty file).

now i dont know what to do. i mean...is the hard drive garbage? spinrite cant fix anything.

i was wondering if there was a way to get my hard drive to work around the bad sectors. but then im wondering if the bad sectors could spread?

ive looked everywhere for answers, but i think im missing a key word here. sometimes all your searching goes out the window without that one key word.

if i could get some fll help here, that would be GREATLY appreciated, but i understand that this topic is ALL OVER the internet. if i could get some help, advice, maybe a little past experiences from you folks, or just a good start, well...thank you in advance.

[Tarun]

According to HDTune, who is your hard drive manufacturer?

Unfortunately, Spinrite (like everything else at GRC, including Gibson himself) is utter garbage. Once we get your hard drive's manufacturer, we can get you the hard drive diagnostic utility from the manufacturer.

[IcemanND]

I have used 'Hard disk drive regenerator' with great success

[breadandbubbles]

ive HEARD that he was crap. i read a whole thing about it.

actually, while i was using the software, it seemed crappy. hard to explain. just....felt like garbage. just had that feeling, ya know? thats why i started looking into it in the first place. jsut had a bad feeling.

but so many people swore by it...ah well. anyways, its definately Maxtor. i'll use those tools though, to get more info.

[Tarun]

its definately Maxtor. i'll use those tools though, to get more info.

Get Seatools from Seagate and use that. It'll work like a charm and it's amazing at fixing the drive.

[breadandbubbles]

WOW. SEATOOLS IS AMAZING.

it worked like a charm. you guys are right, spinrite IS crap. or, at least, it is only capable of fixing a very specific problem that i, at least, dont seem to have. its certainly not a miracle solution.

BUT MY FILES ARE NOW READABLE. no more cyclic redundancy for me!

thanks guys.

[Tarun]

Glad to hear everything got fixed!

Just a small tip, but if your Maxtor drive is noisy, you can try and use Hitachi's Feature Tool to enable Automatic Acoustic Management and a few other features. I was surprised when it worked on my server's Maxtor, but it went from being loud when it was seeking, to whisper silent. Usually a manual setting of 253-254 will work, but you can test it in real time to find the silent spot.