HDD Playing up & MFT Corrupted

[Morticus]

Hi,

Yeaterday my second hdd became corrupt. My pc was working fine then i rebooted my computer and it took windows about 10 minutes to load up and i couldn't access my secondary drive.

I done chkdisk and it corrected heaps of errors, then rebooted again, ran chkdisk again and was told my master file table was corrupt.

My HDD is a samsumg 250gig SATA

I'm running Windows XP pro with SP2

I've managed to recover most of my data thankfully, but would like to know if this is a hardware or software issue? The hdd is only a couple of weeks old so i will return it if its at fault. It is the HDD i keep all my work on so this is the last thing i want to happen again!

Thanks so much for your help :)

[drugo]

Hi,

Yeaterday my second hdd became corrupt. My pc was working fine then i rebooted my computer and it took windows about 10 minutes to load up and i couldn't access my secondary drive.

I done chkdisk and it corrected heaps of errors, then rebooted again, ran chkdisk again and was told my master file table was corrupt.

My HDD is a samsumg 250gig SATA

I'm running Windows XP pro with SP2

I've managed to recover most of my data thankfully, but would like to know if this is a hardware or software issue? The hdd is only a couple of weeks old so i will return it if its at fault. It is the HDD i keep all my work on so this is the last thing i want to happen again!

Thanks so much for your help :)

to happen too one time

but don't know the source

maybe someone here can answer

[insanekiwi]

did you try to create/make a new MFT?

[Hello1024]

Hardware issues

the most likley piece of hardware to fail is the hard disk itself. There are bits of software that can do a thorough hardware level disk check, so I'd try one of them. I'd start by doing a google search for "SMART" (self monitoring and reporting technology) - "s.m.a.r.t" utilities can do these checks and report the results. You may find that your computer recovery disk comes with a disk check utility (dells disk does)

Next I'd check other bits of hardware. In particular check the hard disk power and data cables are tightly fitted in. This is particularly important for IDE disk drives, as they are well known for corrupting the disk if the cable is loose. While you're there check all system fans are working, and check for excessive amounts of dust causing things to overheat.

Software issues

If possible, recover that disk drive by doing a full, low-level format, and then putting the data back on it again. I say that because not every type of corruption is detected by chkdsk, and he only way to be sure everythings good is to reformat. A full reformat will also pick up and mark bad sectors without any data loss.

It is possible, but unlikley, that software caused the corruption in the first place. Thats because windows uses some pretty thorough Journalling methods that reduce the chances of corruption. The only software thing that could mess that up is a rogue kernel mode driver. If you had frequent blue-screens or reboots, they could be the cause (a blue screen occurs when windows has detected a rogue kernel mode driver).

The most likley software problem is a third party partioning tool. Many are pretty buggy and could easily corrupt data, particularly because many run from bootdisks, therefore bypassing all the windows protections, and also most are made by guessing how ntfs works, so one mistake could corrupt data.

Overall, if the data was of very high value, or the system required a high uptime (ie. a critical server), I'd replace all the hardware, or at least the hard disk. If it's just a home PC and the problems only happened once, I'd reformat, replace the data, and hope for the best. If the problem occurs again I'd replace the hard disk. Notice the common theme here - it's probably hard disk faliure.

[drugo]

did you try to create/make a new MFT?

insanekiwi can i create or make a new MFT?