Is my HDD beyond repair?

Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
Hi guys, i'd appreciate a bit of advice on an issue i'm having with my PCSpecialist PC, I think the HDD boot sectors are shot but i'm not sure, here's what's happened.

I switched it on last night and it loaded up to the Win10 login page fine, before logging in I had some tidying up to do so I left it, when I came back it was just in time to see a message about a device failed and then went to a blue screen and rebooted.

When it rebooted it loaded up the Win10 startup repair tool and did it's thing, then rebooted again. It then loaded up into a screen with there option boxes (cancel and run windows 10, advanced tools and shut down), clicking cancel and run windows just reboots the PC and loads back to the same screen again ad-infinitum, shutdown of course works, and the advanced option loads a screen with all the repair and restore tools.

I've tried all the repair and restore options and none of them have made any difference, I just keeps booting into the windows repair software.

I've done a few minor troubleshooting tasks as follows:

1. Checked the connections on the HDD: all fine.
2. Checked in UEFI/Bios to see if the HDD is missing: On the basic screen there's that nifty little drag and drop utility for boot devices, it doesn't show in there.
3. Pressed the F key for boot options while booting: The HDD shows in that list and when it is chosen will load into Windows 10 with no issues at all.

This leads me to think there may be an issue with the boot sectors of the disk which identifies it as a bootable drive, but i'm not sure. Is anyone able to advise me further and if it is an issue with sectors on the drive is there a way I can fix it? Would reformat/install work?

My Specs are:

InWIN GT1 BLACK GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU): Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-4670 (3.4GHz) 6MB Cache
Motherboard: ASUS® Z87M-PLUS: m-ATX, USB3.0, SATA 6.0, XFIRE
Memory (RAM): 16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (2 x 8GB KIT)
Graphics Card: ASUS® NVidia GTX960 Stryx 2Gb
Hard Disk: 500GB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 16MB CACHE
Second Hard Disk: 1Tb Seagate Barracuda
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive: 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Power Supply: 450W Quiet 80 PLUS Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan
Processor Cooling: Super Quiet 22dBA Triple Copper Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler
 
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Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
Stephen M said:
You could use a live distro like gparted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php to have a look at the HDD, that may highlight a problem, it will show all partitions, swap, flags etc.
Click to expand...

Thanks i'll look into that. I have a few things to look into in the EUFI/BIOS that a very kind support guy from PCS has suggested, it may not be the disk but might be that UEFI is off in the boot menu (I upgraded to Win10 some time ago and apparently you're supposed to have UEFI and some other settings on for Win10 which wouldn't have been on when built because it was Win7) and my HDD isn't selected for boot there somewhere, so ill check that out and if not look into your suggestion.
 
Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
Yeah I had a feeling it wasn't the drive and could be something in the BIOS, that's why I had a look, but I couldn't see anything obvious, hopefully a setting or two will fix it. I think i'm lucky so far that I can still force it to load windows via the F8 boot manager, so I can still use it until I get it sorted.

Although i'm thinking about downloading a full ISO of Win10 and installing it from scratch anyway so I have a clean OS, I originally upgraded from Win7.. can I install a full Win10 without having to insall Win7 first? and if so will I need to enter the license code? if I do have to which license code, the old Win7 one or is there a Win10 one somewhere I have to enter (I don't recall it giving me one)?
 
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Frank100

Frank100

Rising Star
Hi,

If your BIOS is showing legacy mode or something similar then you will almost certainly be having problems. I have Windows 10 running on a spare laptop with it set to UEFI mode and I haven't tried it in legacy mode to see what would happen.

If it is a hard disk issue it won't be the boot sector itself. If it was it wouldn't be able to read information like how many bytes per sector on the disk, how many sectors per cluster or the master partition table. If that were the case it couldn't locate a partition from which to boot. It is still possible it is a disk fault with certain valuable system files being in these bad sectors. Which make/model of disk is it out of interest?

Frank100
 
Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
It's whatever the generic standard HDD is that PCS supplies for the low end option, no idea what make or model.
 
Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
Found where the problem is, it's actually my second drive that's playing up. Somehow something's happened to it that makes the UEFI/Bios think that it's the primary boot disk and it's overriding the actual boot disk, but when it tries to boot off of the secondary drive it fails and runs windows off the primary which thinks your running windows as a repair tool for the secondary .. if you understand what I mean .. I've removed the secondary disk and the PC's working fine now, will have to replace the secondary drive when I can afford a new one.
 
Frank100

Frank100

Rising Star
Hi,

The UEFI/BIOS starts the boot process and passes the 'baton' over to the first device in a list of devices in the boot order, where it will look for a partition table and a marker to say a partition is active. If there are no active partitions, (which start with hex 00,) then the UEFI/BIOS looks at the next device in the list. It continues this process until it finds a partition entry which starts with the hex value 80. When it finds this it reads the rest of the partition entry to look for the starting cluster of that partition, where is should find boot code. If there's a problem with that boot code you will have problems booting up.

As the first disk boots fine when in the computer on its own it might appear that the second disk is interfering with it but it can't actually do that. If the UEFI/BIOS is set to choose your main drive as the first boot device, having located the active partition on this disk it will load from there and will ignore all other partitions on all other devices for much of the boot process. It will later on check what other partitions there are. If you had an active partition on a second device then it wouldn't 'throw' the installation at this point.

In your case it sounds like it is trying to boot from the second disk first. The UEFI/BIOS will probably set the hard disk boot priority based on which SATA ports they are plugged into and it might update this order when you add and remove devices. You can change that order in the UEFI/BIOS and save the changes of course but they can revert if you take one out, or try one on another SATA port and you would need to go back and check the order.

What I would do is plug the two disks in and make sure the OS disk is set as the first boot option and maybe even disable the second disk as a boot option if your UEFI/BIOS allows that. Take note which SATA ports it says they are plugged into. I tend to put my OS disk into SATA 0 on cheaper motherboards as they can be more picky about settings than higher end boards.

From your description it sounds like your BIOS is set to UEFI mode and your first disk is configured with GPT partitioning schema but the second disk is configured with the MBR schema. It also sounds possible that you have a partition on that second disk that has/had part of a Windows installation in it and is marked active (has hex 80 at the start of the partition entry). If that is the case what is happening is it is trying to load from a broken OS on the second disk or a working OS which is on a disk using the MBR partitioning schema.

When Windows Vista and later installs it creates a small partition of about 100MB which it marks as active. Sometimes when you re-partition a disk that used to have an OS on it, it doesn't allow you to remove this partition. It's possible such a partition exists on your second disk.

That's my thoughts based on what you've described. A look at the partition tables of both disks would tell us exactly what's what on that score.

Frank100
 
Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
Interesting, but i'm not sure. When the second drive is installed it's not just taking the primary permission, it's stopping the primary disk from being detected by the bios, it's not in the boot order at all and can't be put in the boot order in advanced, it doesn't even display as existing. When the secondary disk is removed the primary disk shows up fine. There are no partitions on the second drive, it is a 1TB drive I added and did a straight format on, it's never had an OS installed on it and it only contains audio, picture, and video files.
 
Frank100

Frank100

Rising Star
OK. Will it only show one disk in the list of attached SATA devices or does it show both but only shows one of them in the boot order menu?

If the main disk isn't being seen by the BIOS then it can't boot from it.

Is it possible there are defective SATA ports? Or is it possible there is a means by which you can enable or disable SATA ports within an advanced menu.

If it can't see your main disk whilst the second disk is in there it can't boot from it. I don't see how it could start booting into Windows if the UEFI/BIOS isn't seeing it.

I strongly suspect your second disk isn't faulty but it is a UEFI/BIOS/motherboard issue. I suspect if you added a different second disk on the same SATA port you'd have the same issue.
 
Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
Frank100 said:
OK. Will it only show one disk in the list of attached SATA devices or does it show both but only shows one of them in the boot order menu?

If the main disk isn't being seen by the BIOS then it can't boot from it.

Is it possible there are defective SATA ports? Or is it possible there is a means by which you can enable or disable SATA ports within an advanced menu.

If it can't see your main disk whilst the second disk is in there it can't boot from it. I don't see how it could start booting into Windows if the UEFI/BIOS isn't seeing it.

I strongly suspect your second disk isn't faulty but it is a UEFI/BIOS/motherboard issue. I suspect if you added a different second disk on the same SATA port you'd have the same issue.
Click to expand...

* When the second drive is installed it doesn't show the primary one anywhere inside the bios, but it does show in the F8 menu.
* When the secondary drive is not connected the primary drive shows up in all the right places.
* All ports are enabled.
* I've switched the cables around in every configuration I can think of, and still the same happens.
* I've salvaged an old hard drive from another machine to test putting a different second drive in and the pc runs fine with that in it, it only seems to happen when I put that specific drive in it.

Just so I can be sure there's no hidden partition or anything on the second drive (unlikely but you never know), what is the easiest way to completely scrub the drive, remove/replace all partitions and reformat? (might need to give me step by steps if you can, i'm not good at this aspect of PC's)
 
Frank100

Frank100

Rising Star
Your technical fault defies logic. It must be Friday 13th or something.

I suppose the possibility that could make some sense is the part of the disk controller that relates to identifying the drive to the BIOS. You'd need a bit of kit like PC3000 or DeepSpar to diagnose that. These tools could also probably fix any controller errors because data relating to the drive is help in a secondary controller but this is not accessible to the first controller, to prevent the secondary from also failing.

It might now be interesting to see how the drive behaves if you put it in a USB caddy, or via a SATA to USB bridge.

As for wiping disks I have a bit of dedicated kit that does multiple devices at once in my office. I used to use an old version of Eraser which could wipe an attached disk including wiping sector 0 thus removing all partition information as well. I don't think the newer version does this anymore, I think it can only wipe within each partition.

I suspect the suggested possible 100MB partition isn't present on disk 2 because you would have seen it in Disk Management in Windows when it was still working. Hidden partitions are kind of just that, something Windows wouldn't interpret anyway and therefore wouldn't interfere. This might mean you needn't worry about wiping everything to ensure there is no hidden partition interfering.

If you can find out the make and model of the disk (I presume PCS leave the manufacturer's label on it), then you could check out the website for that manufacturer to see if there is a utility that might test the disk.
 
Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
OK, just had some progress, you talking about Disk Management got me thinking.

I've stuck my second drive back in and forced it into windows. Under file manager there are three drives showing, one is 100mb and has no label, I previously thought this was the recovery partition on my primary hard drive, but looking in file manager when the second drive isn't installed it's not there, so it must be on the second.

Now if I look in Disk Manager both drives have only one partition, however the second drive has 100mb of unallocated space.

I've no idea how it got there as I bought it and formatted it as a standard partition from the start, maybe it was a returned item refurbed (I bought it from Maplin a couple of years ago) and sold as new, or maybe when I upgraded to Win10 added a recovery partition to my second drive and it's recently corrupted (I don't recall seeing it before the upgrade but I may not have noticed it) and that's what's causing the issue.

I'll try allocating that 100mb as a standard partition and format it later on after i've had my lunch, and see what happens.
 
Frank100

Frank100

Rising Star
Are you able to send screen shots from Disk Management showing what Windows can see for each disk? The location of the space is significant too.

I can also see the drive allocations.
 
Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
Ok, I think I got it sorted out now (sorry I forgot to take pictures and by the time I remembered I've fixed it).

I was sitting there about to mess with partitions when I had an epiphany, I remembered when I tested a spare drive I didn't use the same cable, I unplugged it and plugged another cable on the spare into the socket. So (thinking it probably won't be that but its worth a shot before I screw with partitions on the hdd) I swapped the cable and lo and behold it works perfectly.

Looks like the main issue was a dodgy SATA cable, thank the deities for that.

As to the partitions, after swapping the cable it now shows (instead of having 100mb unallocated and a +/-980gb partition) as having a 100mb OEM partition, a +/-19gb standard partition and a +/-980gb partition, I can only assume that what I purchased as new from Maplin was in fact a returned HDD they just formatted and resold.

Unfortunately 18 plus months later it's a little late to return it, but I have sent them an email complaint.

Thanks for the help guys.
 
Androcles

Androcles

Rising Star
On a side note I almost had a panic attack about my GFX card too, while I had the cover off I was playing a pretty intensive graphics intensive game (Tomb Raider) and looking over I noticed the fans weren't running on the card, 20 minutes of checking forums and looking at settings I had a sigh of relief, the Strix range of 9xx cards have a feature where the fans will only kick in when it hits 60 degrees and my card playing Tomb Raider (even with the side off) wasn't even hitting 50 degrees :D
 
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