Is my hard drive dying?

delta36

Hey all, been having a bit of trouble with my laptop recently, fairly certain my hard drive is on it's last few legs. I few months back, my laptop started behaving strangely, not responding, taking ages to log in, that sort of stuff, until it eventually wouldn't boot into windows at all (giving an error somewhere along the lines of "windows partition not found"). Booting the laptop with Linux, I could access the hard drive no bother. I eventually used a program called HDD Regenerator to "fix" the bad partitions of my drive, and all seemed to work fine again.
Forward to today, where my laptop became unresponsive apart from the mouse, and then shut down. On rebooting I was give the error "No bootable media found, insert a disk". I booted in Linux and it didn't show a hard drive that was accessible. I then loaded up HDD Regenerator again and set it to work, however, after an hour of it running it had scanned about 21mb of the hard drive, and was showing hundreds of thousands of bad sectors. I then cancelled this and rebooted my laptop again, at which point, it loaded into Windows. I then ran chkdsk and it reported back no bad sectors.
My laptop has become unresponsive a few times today after all this, requiring a few restarts, but it's currently running. Is this a sign of a hard drive failing? If so, how is it that I'm able to run Windows at all, after my laptop earlier being unable to register my hard drive as existing? Any help here would be appreciated.
My laptop is approximately 18 months old (out of warranty unfortunately), is a HP Pavillion DV6, and has never had liquid spilled on it or dropped. I'm also not hearing any unusual noises coming from it.

Monkeynut

delta36 wrote: »

Hey all, been having a bit of trouble with my laptop recently, fairly certain my hard drive is on it's last few legs. I few months back, my laptop started behaving strangely, not responding, taking ages to log in, that sort of stuff, until it eventually wouldn't boot into windows at all (giving an error somewhere along the lines of "windows partition not found"). Booting the laptop with Linux, I could access the hard drive no bother. I eventually used a program called HDD Regenerator to "fix" the bad partitions of my drive, and all seemed to work fine again.
Forward to today, where my laptop became unresponsive apart from the mouse, and then shut down. On rebooting I was give the error "No bootable media found, insert a disk". I booted in Linux and it didn't show a hard drive that was accessible. I then loaded up HDD Regenerator again and set it to work, however, after an hour of it running it had scanned about 21mb of the hard drive, and was showing hundreds of thousands of bad sectors. I then cancelled this and rebooted my laptop again, at which point, it loaded into Windows. I then ran chkdsk and it reported back no bad sectors.
My laptop has become unresponsive a few times today after all this, requiring a few restarts, but it's currently running. Is this a sign of a hard drive failing? If so, how is it that I'm able to run Windows at all, after my laptop earlier being unable to register my hard drive as existing? Any help here would be appreciated.
My laptop is approximately 18 months old (out of warranty unfortunately), is a HP Pavillion DV6, and has never had liquid spilled on it or dropped. I'm also not hearing any unusual noises coming from it.

i would
1. go out and buy a new hdd. reinstall windows on it. and then try recover as much data as possible.
or
2. backup as much data as possible, then try clone old hdd to new hdd.
after that a chkdsk and run sfc command. to check windows files are ok.
if no luck with option 2. then option 1 is the only thing you can do.


btw how many bad sectors were repaired the first time you ran hddreg.

also running chkdsk on a failed drive is like kicking your nanny in the ass while she's bending down to get something, its going to hurt. really the worse thing you can do to a drive.

riclad

i would backup, data,music, photos, do a windows reinstall ,or use the restore os program ,restore pc built in to hp laptops, usually called recovery ,restore mode.
You may have malware or a virus ,make sure and backup drivers, to a cdr or usb drive. use drivermax program to do this.
Restore wipes hardrive and reinstalls os from a hidden partition.
JUST because laptop didnt detect the drive once ,doesnt mean the drive is faulty.
i restored win7 on my sony laptop ,it was not a drive problem ,at least on my laptop.
Backup all important data ,i,m not saying drive is not faulty ,
see if it works ok, after restoration of os.

delta36

Thanks for the responses, fortunately I have a backup of all important stuff. I can't remember how many bad sectors there were all those months ago, but it wasn't a crazy huge amount. If I'm reading you right, running chkdsk on my drive could damage it more?
Reinstalling the OS is going to be my next step before shelling money out on a drive, I'd just like to be able to narrow it down if it is the drive or not, because I'll be paranoid about using the laptop even after a re install if it could fail at any moment.
It wasn't a one of time that the hard drive wasn't recognised, it wasn't recognised at all until I started to repair the bad sectors.
And just an update, was playing a game last night, and started to hear an unnatural clicking noise coming from the hard drive at certain points. My laptop is also freezing for several seconds at a time at points.

riclad

google drive click of death, if you have everything backed, up, why not use drive restore ,recovery to restore windows os.
i have sony vaio laptop,even using recovery mode, i still have to restore some, backup driver files,
copy all drivers,backup them be4 you do anything else.
you have 2 years gaurantee on pc laptops under eu law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

my old drive made clicking noise, like a watch,


next time i turn on dell
laptop ,it said,device error,
no boot device, drive was dead. it was 5 years old.
your laptop is still in warranty , gaurantee = 24 months
backup drivers ,then run chkdisk .

Monkeynut

riclad wrote: »

JUST because laptop didnt detect the drive once ,doesnt mean the drive is faulty.
i

but hddreg or the manufacturers hdd scan software, shows bad sectors, which is a bad drive.
no format, restore is going to fix that. its not a software issue, but hardware.

@delta
the only thing you can do is replace the hdd.
or as riclad said, try get a replacement under the eu 2 year warranty.(most shops will not honour the 2 years but rather the one, so you have to really puch them to help you.)

riclad

see here http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/150074-mark-hard-disk-bad-sectors.html
a few bad sectors wont stop a disk from working.

so if you do recovery it may work ,fix the problem.
no harm trying it, you may need to reinstall some programs.
when recovery starts it formats the drive, marks out bad sectors as unusable,
ie no data written to those sectors,
So it may solve your problem.
on a 80gig drive,you wont notice a few meg missing,win7 takes over 8 gig.
i,m assuming your laptop has hp restore os,recovery mode.
this restores windows from a hidden partition.