HDD Failure

claytoncarney · 04 May 2023

Running Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. OS is on an SSD and data is on 3 1TB HDDs. Began hearing some noise a couple of days ago; figured it was dust accumulation on cooling fans. Opened the case today and blew all the dust out.

Long story short: appears that one of the HDDs has failed or is failing. I isolated it as the source of the noise. With that drive plugged in, the system either won't boot at all or takes a couple of minutes to boot. If it does boot, the suspect drive is not recognized. With the drive unplugged, the system boots quickly as normal. I've tried using a different SATA port and cable, but no change.

The noise is intermittent and is probably the drive heads thrashing back and forth. Don't know how to troubleshoot since the system does not recognize the drive.

The answer is probably obvious ("it's dead, Jim"), but I thought I'd ask in case someone has any suggestions.

dalchina · 04 May 2023

A couple of ways to detect early progressive failure for the future:
a. e.g. Crystal Diskinfo (free) - set to monitor drives against preset thresholds. Deterioration -> a report.

b. If you use disk imaging to create a backup of the partitions on the drive, then during the imaging process, Macrium Reflect (and possibly others) performs a CRC check on the source partition. Failure -> a report, and this can detect incipient drive failure.

I hope you've a backup of the data on that drive.