Does this sound like my HDD is dieing?

Today, before windows booted up, it went into a blue screen with the windows XP logo in the upper right corner and started checking my HDD. I don't remember what exactly it said the test was, but lines kept popping up during the test that said something like "file segment #xxxxxx could not be read." I would estimate that about 70-100 lines came up for file segements that could not be read.

Now when I try copying files from my Half Life 2 mod to my external HDD it says "Cannot Copy file: could not read from source file or disk.", even though I can still play some of the files I'm trying to copy.

Somebody plz help.

 

Copy all you data to another drive now. That certainly does not sound good.

 

I restarted my computer and it's doing it again. It's says that it's checking the disk for consistency. Any ideas why it wasn't letting me back up my files?

 

That happened in my sister's laptop a while back. I replaced her hard drive and everything was fine.

I had a similar issue with not being able to copy files. I never figured out why exactly it couldn't copy the files because I just hooked the old drive up to an adapter and pulled the files off using a recovery program. That's what I'd recommend doing. It is the easiest solution and the adapters only cost a few bucks.

I suppose you might try booting into safe-mode and copying the files too... Worth a try.

 

A hard drive that is on death's door will sometimes show itself to be in that condition by failing to deliver data to the operating system within a reasonable amount of time, or by failing to write data in a manner that can be verified. The most likely scenario, if the machine has been in use for a considerable amount of time is, indeed, a dying drive.

You can *sometimes* (rarely) see this behavior if the power supply on the system is overworked and not producing sufficient power to operate the drives. Sometimes you can hear this with the drive(s) repeatedly spinning up/down. I had this happen to me on an old but relatively important system, and a new power supply brought two old hard drives back to life.

Windows will check for disk consistency anytime it detects that it was not shut down cleanly the last time it was used. There's a status flag that gets written to the registry on startup, and when a clean shutdown is executed, the last thing to happen is for the system to clear that flag. When Windows restarts, it checks the value of that flag and acts accordingly.

Clearly, the most likely scenario is that your drive is dying. If you can plop it into a different machine, you might be able to grab something off of it before it is finally kaput.

-Dave

 

The problem with the files was that they were read only (thank god). But yes, it seems like my HDD is dieing. This really sucks. It's for the computer in my sig. Hopefully I will be able to get a new HDD soon from a local store so I can get back to the slow and tedious work of Half Life 2 facial animations ASAP.

 

The hard drive in my sister's laptop that I talked about before had that problem ongoing for 6 months before I replaced it. So hopefully you'll be as lucky and won't need to replace it ASAP.

 

first tell me.. how old is your HD?

I faced same problem...i changed the USB to IDE Chip ..(i changed the entire casing) of External HD & problem gone!
IC fault