Bad Block: failing drive, or "meh" ??

cognus · 06 Jun 2016

Toshiba laptop went down. can't boot. ran usual diags, windows 8.1 unable to boot anything on the drive as is.
hooked to a good system: assigned drive letter, windows disk manager shows all partitions "healthy", but windows cannot access the partition [the main partition on the troubled drive] at all.
system error logs show loads of errors on "drive d" [or drive 1 as it calls it].
Toshiba's own tool shows it passing short test, passing quick test, no SMART warnings [all green].

my question: toss it?
this is a typical Toshiba laptop drive from a Toshiba satellite.
Thumb up, or Thumb down?

LMiller7 · 06 Jun 2016

Looks like time for a new drive.

The drive has experienced a fall, something conventional drives have little tolerance for. This causes physical, not logical problems in a drive. The drive does not work when connected to a different system, indicating that the fault is not just a connection problem. You don't need further confirmation.

Of course other problems in the laptop cannot be ruled out.

RolandJS · 06 Jun 2016

It might be a large logical failure. When my hard-drive became unstable as reported by DiskMgr & Acronis Disk Director, I was able to completely delete one by one all partitions, thus Unallocate the entire 1TB internal hard-drive, format the entire 1TB HD, rePartition C and D, some Windows would need System Reserved 100MB partition first, and then I simply restored my previously madeNsaved OS partition ["c drive"] and data partition ["d drive"]. Everything's aok now.

RolandJS · 06 Jun 2016

"...The drive has experienced a fall, something conventional drives have little tolerance for..." I missed this part! That pretty much points to a very likely hardware failure; if it's only a logical failure that is thoroughly fixed and tested -- that's a blessing.