Hard Drive Issue

[rymanb]

I recently bought a laptop from PCS (which I am on the whole very happy with), which contained an 120gb SSD cache drive and a 750GB HDD. I installed Windows onto the cache drive and keep my most used programs on there, however for things like games I store them on the HDD.

I tried to launch a game from the HDD the other day and it just wouldn't start - a process would appear in the list but nothing would happen. When I went to browse the HDD file system to find the exe for the game, windows gave me a message saying there was an I/O problem - I could no longer access anything on the hard drive.

There was nothing really important on there so I decided to format it just to see if it would fix the problem - but Windows gave me a vague error saying it could not complete the format. Now every so often when I boot up the computer the HDD doesn't appear in the list of drives at all, and I have to restart for it to be visible again. I have since tried reformatting it and the process just hangs - data is being written and read to the drive but the format doesn't finish (even after a couple of hours, which should not be the case for a quick format).

Does anyone know of a solution to this problem?

Cheers!

 

[ubuysa]

It may be that your HDD isn't seated properly. Take the back off and make sure the HDD is properly seated in it's tray and the connector is properly home. You should probably run a disk check on it and the best way to do that given your problems is from the Windows install DVD. Boot from that and select the Repair option. Click on the command prompt from the list of options and enter the command "chkdsk /f" (without the quotes). When you get a message about dismounting the disk answer Yes and allow the disk check to run. If it finds errors you should reboot the DVD (this is necessary because of the disk demount) select Repair and command prompt again and format the disk from there.

If you have problems with these you should call PCS because then it's likely to be a hardware error I think.

If this fixes your HDD I would strongly suggest you do a clean re-install of Windows onto your SSD. This is because, from your description, you formatted the HDD whilst Windows thought there were games programs installed on there. Windows will now be in an indeterminate state and you might get problems trying to reinstall (or uninstall) those games, hence the clean re-install.