Oolite Bulletins

Since i put Windows 7 onto my quadcore, everything's been a catalogue of effing annoyances one way or another. having finally got running, routered and PSHopped, i ended up getting a 2min+ boot time the other day. the next day i got an error, and long story short an Event in the Log saying "device\harddisk0\DR0 had a bad block". did a checkdisc, it repaired bootstat.dat, was ok for a couple days. last night, long boot, same event has turned up again. did a NOD32 scan incase there was some nasty, there was nowt.

anyone got any thoughts? is it new drive time? thing's just over a year old so i'm not pleased if it's buggered. or, are there any good disc scanning/diagnostic/repair tools out there? preferably free/cheap ones


TIA

My experience with hard drives can be summarized as follows:

At the first indication of something being wrong on the disk, do the following:

• Backup your data immediately
• Throw away hard disk and replace it

Best if you don't wait for the disk to completely come to a halt, it may be too late for your data by then.

You can usually find some disk checking tools on the website of your drive's manufacturer, i also think that Seagate's 'seatools' program works with drives not originally made by them
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/suppor ... s/seatools
but i also agree with a_c, get your files backed up and a new hard disk installed, imagine how gutted you'll be if you loose all your texture files and stuff from your oolite oxp's! A lengthy session of farcry 2 was too much for my hard disk ages ago loading in all that jungle scenery and shrubbery and i lost all my files for my python remake, and my farcry 2 save game!!

Sometimes you just need to change the power supply. I've had a couple of external drives that I thought I'd lost, until some suggested the power supply - and presto, they started booting up fine again.

cheers guys.
all my stuff is on a separate partition so nowt should be lost - if C crashes i'll just slave the drive into the other machine's caddy and hive stuff off. I'll check that SeaTools thing, see if it works, i can't recall what make i've got.

Killer Wolf wrote:

cheers guys.
all my stuff is on a separate partition so nowt should be lost - if C crashes i'll just slave the drive into the other machine's caddy and hive stuff off. I'll check that SeaTools thing, see if it works, i can't recall what make i've got.

Another partition is not enough. If the HDD crashes the other partitions are likely to be not readable too. Better backup you stuff on another HDD or DVD/CD. If the MBR is destroyed you'll have a lot of problems to recover data, even good tools can fail.

Agree with Svengali... when my HDD failed a few years ago, partitions didn't save me.
I got the HDD replaced under warranty, but I lost reams of stuff.

oh, ok. i'll back some stuff tonight then. i had a previous drive crash and got stuff from slaving, but liek you say, better safe than sorry.
mate's suggested i try the bootrec stuff on the W7 disc, so i'll try that, otherwise i'll probbly just hive off an image and stuck a new hdd in.

was saying tho, it really chews me when my puter starts glitching - virtually everything i do nowadays is puter oriented and i really start fretting when it starts playing stupid buggers