Chkdsk /F can't fix a bad sector, what now?

OK Thanks guys,

I forgot - how do I bring up the event logger in W2K?

Actually I think I found it - by "Event Logger", do you mean "Event Viewer"?  In W2K?

If so, I've got a lot of warnings here and some errors, how do I know which are critical and which are not?  What do you mean by "bad disk errors" jhyiesla?

Should I be looking for something that specifically says "Disk Error"? I don't see any errors that specifically say "Disk Error", most of it seems to be related to some applications.  What speficically should I be looking for in terms of an impending hard drive crash?

I use a bootable application called SpinRite to test hard disks. I have been pretty satisfied with it so far. Does anyone have any opinions on SpinRite?

All of the errors are related to one application  nview-info.  Here are a couple of description from Event Viewer:

The description for Event ID ( 1 ) in Source ( nview_info ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. The following information is part of the event: NVIEW :  Explorer: WAIT_TIMEOUT, while waiting for a read to clear - resetting read event

The description for Event ID ( 1 ) in Source ( nview_info ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. The following information is part of the event: NVIEW :  Explorer: WAIT_TIMEOUT: (process 0x3e8) (thread 0x3b0) (wait 0x3d) (pwait 0x13) 

It seems that the first of these started about a months ago, that most of the errors occurred about a week ago, and I have had no more of them for five days now.  

On the warnings, they all seem to be related to my Newr burning software, here is a description:

Timed out sending notification of target device change to window of "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Nero\Lib\NMIndexingService.exe"

Should I be worried about these?

Sounds like a bad drive.

srepphan,

So I read the Wiki on your SpinRite.

So is SpinRite gonna fix my sick hard drive(s) and make everything all better for the rest of my life?

I am whimsical, because I have had so many hard drive crashes in my lifetime, I am starting to wonder if  ALL hard drives are garbage.

Outside of buying Adaptec SCSI's, will SpinRite help an abused PC owner of seagate and Maxtor drives live a better life?

hard drives do not have the eternal life, so be prepared that they can die on you.
there is no software that repairs a disk, though some to claim to do it  : http://www.dposoft.net/
but from what i heard, it is only temporarily.
the modern disks have a number of spare sectors, which are used in case a bad sector is detected (by chkdsk) so it is flagged, and not used again.
What you have looks like you used all the spare sectors on your drive.
you can test your disk with the manuf's utility : http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287
if the status is bad, it has to be replaced

On the system event viewer, I have about 50  disk errors in the past 2 months.  The errors (at random) said:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0. "

"The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, has a bad block. "

The drive is bad. Make sure to backup often until you get a replaement. No piece of software can "fix" a hard drive. All hard disks eventually go bad, but it sounds like you have particuarly bad luck. I always advise that a hard disk will last 3 years(that is the standard warranty). Most will last well beyond that.

Darn.

Man, this is the third time in  1.5 years I've had to replace a drive.

Are Maxtor or Seagate drives crap? Because that's what I always buy and these drives are only about 1 or 1.5 years old max.

Wno makes the most reliable SATA drives?

Srepphan is correct, no software can fix a hard drive with physical bad sectors. As I stated above I would backup your data often just to be safe and would replace that drive soon. If you do it soon (before it gets worse) you can clone the drive instead of reinstall and restoring your data from backup. The clone process is very easy - just follow the instructions from the link above.
Good luck.

note that it can be your disk controller too; that is why i would test the disk(s) on this system, and on a known good one, to be sure.

By disk controller, do you mean the SATA controller on the motherboard itself?

yes; that is what i mean

Can a bad disk controller built in to a motherboard, or a separate PCI SATA controller card cause physical damage to a hard drive?

not damage to the platters, no. It's possible for a controller to damage the drive circuitry, but if that happens you have much bigger problems.

did you test the drives yet ?

Nobus,

Actually yes I took srepphan's advice and bought SpinRIte version 6 this morning - 89 bucks.  A bit steep but I'm trying it out now.

It's going to take 22.5 hours to test the disk!  Anyway it's running now, been running for 2.5 hours now 11 percent complete, I'll let you know what the results are tomorrow.

Gee if I had a terrabyte drive it would take a whole weekend to run it!

It's running just fine on my 500 gig SATA drive - I booted SpinRite up from my 1.4 meg floppy drive, whole program is only about 150K in size.

There are two very good informational videos about SpinRite on their web site, that sold me.

This brings me to another question to any of you spinrite users - is it safe to take out the floppy once spinrite is running?

Because I actually have several old drives and a second new PC.  I have kept every one of my hard drives that have crashed over the years, I was thinking about running a scan on them too using my new PC while spinrite is doing it's work on my main drive, to see if I can recover any of my long lost photos on some of the other drives.

BTW I'll leaave this thread open for a week or so, to report whether or not spinrite fixed my original problem before I close the thread.

Yes, once the program loads it is fully in memory. Im glad I could help, I always thought it was a good product, Ive never bothered to shop elsewhere. Guess I got lucky.

srepphan,

Have you ever run it off a USB thumb drive?

No

why don't you use the manufacturer's diags? i posted them, and they are FREE (and much faster!)

OK here are some prelim. results.  It took SpinRite 24.25 hours to scan my 500 gig sata drive at operation level 4.  The error rate was 1,565  and the seek error count was 3,027,945 with a total of 1.991 trillion bytes read/written.  There were no recovered, no defective and no un recovered sectors found on the drive.

I re booted, ran chkdsk, and chkdsk still finds that bad 72kb bad sector.  However, so far the The System Event Viewer has not logged any disk errors, the last time that happened was when I could not get a DSL connection about two weeks ago.  The pc has been running for about 30 min so far.
So far, I can say that SpinRite has not harmed my drive.

In case anyone is interested in a thorough test though, I'm going to run my machine for about a week or so of heavy use of all my web design applications, and report back if any disk errors were reported in that time, and then a day or so after that close the thread - because sometimes I went for several hours or even days without any reported disk errors and then they start popping up again.  Some of the errors stated that  "the devive, \Device\harddisk\DR1 has a bad block", or "the driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0"

The System Event Viewer in W2K will be the true test to see if SpinRite did it's job.

nobus - I appreciate your input - the reason is, because I watched that SpinRite video on their web site, and according to the designer of SpinRite that Gibson guy who has been at it for over 20 years, SpinRite is far more thorough checking for and correcting disk problems than any other solution, and the reason why it takes so long is because it is extremely through and stable.

The video claims that the reason why many of the other manufacturer diags don't work when SpinRite does work, is because SpinRite takes so long to run a scan. Check out their video on their site.  SpinRite has been in development for over 20 years and is the most complete and advanced disk repair application according to what the vid says. It even runs on different operating systems because it is written in assembly language, it will even repair disk errors on a Tivo drive or run on Linux.

Also because in the past, when ever I have had a hard drive crash, and I have had many the past 18 years, I have never been able to recover the drive or fix problems with any of the free solutions, which is exactly what the guy on the video said, that often times the freeware does not work.  And the work I do in web design is worth the 90 bucks to protect it.  I also have a backup solution  I have been using Storage Craft for about a half year now.

To me it's worth trying to repair a drive before it crashes, because even though i have it backed up and can clone it to a new drive, it's still a pain to do that and it usually takes me a day to get it cloned and up and running again even with a back up.  And if some data is missing in the clone backup file, it still won't work anyway.

Because lets say my drive crashes, and my most recent backup data is bad.  I still have to start from scratch.  So then I have to re install the OS from scratch.  Then I have to go to the MS site and download all the recent service packs and bug fixes.  Then I have to re install all my adobe products.  Then I have to scramble around for license keys and usually call adobe to re activate them because on line re activation often does not work.  Then I have to try to get my photos back then I have to re load my most recent web design files.  It's a real pain in the butt usually takes me two or three days to get it done.
Granted, if it's mechanical or electronic failure there is really not much I can do.  But if it's only a disk media error, then I'm in luck.

I don't really mind paying the 90 bucks, IF spinrite does the job it claims it will do.  Time will tell on that one, that is, if I wasted my money or not  the only way to find out for sure is to try it out.  If I get any disk errors reported in W2K in the next week I promise to report that on this thread so you guys won't waste your money if it don't work for me.

i have known Spinrite as one of the best for many years already, so you don't need to tell me what it does or does not.
BUT who knows disk internals better than the manufacturer?
note that the diag does NOT repair, it only diagnoses your disk as good or bad.
that is why i suggested them -  a quick way of knowing their status
and your money is NOT wasted - as said; it is the best tool for disk access.
but you still have bad sectors... (if they are surface errors, you still need to replace the drive)

nadsab1... did anything suggested here solve your issue?

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