Hi all,

This post relates to a 6mth old WD400AAKS, running on an ASUS P5K-SLI (Intel CPU, nVidia 570 chipset).

First some background - please feel free to skip down to the MHDD bit if that's all your interested in!
I've spent the last few days trying to repair a PC I've been having troubles with. It came to me doing a BSOD loop. I managed to repair it to the point of getting it to boot up (almost). It got to the welcome screen and froze, in safe mode it seemed like it loaded but the screen went all crazy like bad drivers. I tried UBCD4Win which booted fine but was very sluggish and unresponsive and froze a few times. I tried a Repair install of XP which went fine until reboot (after the DOS style screens) and again weird graphics. Removed Hard-drive and tried plugging it in another PC. Data all seems fine, ran disk check repeatedly, first few times errors came up but it ran through fully twice with no errors, but still no go. Now here is where I started to get lost!

MHDD bit!
First run of MHDD - SCAN showed 2 UNC Errors - @ 0 & @ 16777217
Tried remapping and MHDD froze with ERORR in red on the screen.
Second run - Tried using the MAKEBAD tool but did nothing and came up with an error.
Used SCAN again and first used Erase Delays for 0 & 1 (errored when I tried 0 only) & 16777217, then ran full scan, this time 1 only UNC Error @ 24445506
Again used scan with erase delays on 24445506, all seemed well with no UNC errors coming up. But then just for good measure I thought I'd reboot and run it again.
Third run - ran full scan, UNC error again on 0! Argh! Again I used Erase Delays for 0 & 1 and reran the scan, all good! Now for a reboot and the forth run.....
Forth Run Just ran full scan this time, again UNC Error @ 0! WTF?!? Everything else seems really good, with only 82 <50ms and 5 <150ms with nothing over that, no other errors, all SMART info looks squeaky clean.

Any ideas of anything else I can try without deleteing the whole HDD (if I haven't already erasing 0 & 1)?
All suggestions warmly welcome. Please let me know if furthr info is needed.

Cheers.

I do not think it would be worth it to repair this drive, its only 6 mths old, should still be in warranty. Should not be too difficult to connect drive to another machine to recover any important data.

Thanks hddguy! I guess the simplest answer is often the best!

Out of curiosity.... I have since talked to the owner and he said he thought it "might've" had the power cord pulled out while it was running. What would that've done to the drive? Could that've caused this problem? Where this the case and the drive was no longer under warranty would it be possible to make this hdd be reusable and reliable? Even if it could, I imagine it would have a reduced lifespan. If it could be repaired, is it something I could do using software, or would it need a more serious intervention?

Sorry for all the questions!

Question for Jedi: Were all tests on this drive been done on your own (known good) system without ever returning the drive back to the customer/patient's PC ? Or was drive placed back into patient in between testing?

All initial troubleshooting was done on the original PC.

I did swap the drive over to my main PC for chkdsk and to see whether the disk was accessible. As I mentioned, all tests seemed to go ok on my PC, but I also did some testing on my machine with the drive linked up as a physical drive for a virtual machine. I didn't mention the results of that (in my initial post) because after some thinking and reading it seemed like that was an unreliable way to test for problems. For interest, when I tried running MHDD under VM, a number of times VMware complained that it was having trouble communicating with the HDD. Sorry I didn't record the exact message, and being under VM it is probably irrelevant.

So most of what I mentioned in my first post was done on the original PC. I assume you're suggesting that it may be something else on the PC and not the HDD? I should've thought of that myself! When I get a chance I'll try doing some testing on my main PC. Not sure when that'll be - my son is on holidays and getting anywhere near my main PC is a battle! & my other PC doesn't find SATA drives (despite the fact it has 2 ports).

Thanks for your reply. I'll be back as soon as I can with more info. If anyone else has ideas advice or can answer any of my questions I'd love to hear from you!

I am leaning towards PATIENT computer having memory fault. Seen many times. Exact symptoms you describe. Classic symptoms in fact. Try hardware tester or Memtest or equivalent.

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http://pcrecoveryllc.com

Thank you pcrecovery! Now that you mention it I have heard of OC'd RAM causing HDD corruption so I guess that could make sense. I'm at work now but I certainly will give that a go and report back.