Hard disk on it's way out?

Oriental Slave said:

The output from chkdsk:

.....

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

472553471 KB total disk space.
51585432 KB in 236752 files.
168580 KB in 57612 indexes.
4 KB in bad sectors.
432523 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
420366932 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
118138367 total allocation units on disk.
105091733 allocation units available on disk.
Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50.

So it found only 4KB in bad sectors, and was unable to log. I'd really like to see you get Passmark DiskCheckup run on it, or Speedfan, as Fafhrd mentioned.

Oriental Slave said:

What would I be looking for in the Passmark screens?

In the SMART Info tab, check the values (description). Anything in red is failing/has failed. If it has a date, that's an anticipated fail date based on what the HDD is doing at the moment. The TEC (Threshold Exceed Condition) column gives indication of a failure or anticipated failure date. This info may, and quite often does, change over time. You want to leave the program running (minimized) for an hour or two, and see if any of the data changes.







Click on Configuration and set it to record SMART and warn you with a popup.




Some failure modes can tell you quite a bit, if you research them. For instance, a Reallocated Sector Count failure can quite often be corrected with a full format+CHKDSK, and the drive will be completely healthy and able to be used again.