Windows 8 100% bad groups of sectors

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ChuckBradley

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My wife has an HP laptop, model 14-1023cl if I can read the faded label correctly. If runs Windows 8 with one of the add-ons to make it look more like earlier versions. Maybe 8.1 instead? Sorry, I don't know. Avast runs daily. A few days ago it was very slow, and froze with a blank dull blue screen, not the BSOD. Rebooting was very slow, but I finally got into process manager and discovered MS had removed all the useful information, or I could not find it. I tried to run AVAST. After about 24 hours, it thought it was 18% done. The next time I looked, the system had frozen again.

I removed the disk and plugged it into a USB port on another computer, through an adapter I have. Windows Explorer does not see the disk. Avast does not see the disk. MBAM sees the disk, scans it in just a few minutes, much faster than usual, and reports no problems. Device manager sees the disk and reports it as empty. HDtune sees the disk and reports all the chunks are bad. A chunk is a bunch of sectors that depends on the capacity of the disk.

I expect this problem is not Microsoft's fault. Agreed?

I have never seen a disk go this completely bad or this quickly bad. Do you think it is safe to put a new disk in the computer? Or could a hardware fault in the system be causing the disk failure?
 
Solution
If Seatools returns errors on SMART, DST, or Short or Long tests, the drive has failed and must be replaced!! In any case, it would be helpful to have the exact Make/Model of the hard drive. This laptop is about 7 years old (2009), and if you or your wife never had that hard drive replaced, it's way way way overdue! Laptop hard drives are only designed to last 2 years. Desktop hard drives only 3 years. If that is the original drive that came with the laptop and you say you've never seen a hard drive go bad that fast, you don't see many laptops!! If you do repair computers for a living; it's quite rare to see one on a laptop go over 5 years, and 90% of those have aging failures and are on death's door...
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If Seatools returns errors on SMART, DST, or Short or Long tests, the drive has failed and must be replaced!! In any case, it would be helpful to have the exact Make/Model of the hard drive. This laptop is about 7 years old (2009), and if you or your wife never had that hard drive replaced, it's way way way overdue! Laptop hard drives are only designed to last 2 years. Desktop hard drives only 3 years. If that is the original drive that came with the laptop and you say you've never seen a hard drive go bad that fast, you don't see many laptops!! If you do repair computers for a living; it's quite rare to see one on a laptop go over 5 years, and 90% of those have aging failures and are on death's door by the time I see them.

Laptop drives are cheap; and you can get a new one for under $80 on ebay or amazon. Since your existing drive has multiple failures, making an image backup is out of the question. You'll have to reinstall her Win8 or 8.1 from factory Recovery Media (DVD or USB). If the laptop is in good enough shape, you can make a set of DVD recovery discs using the HP Media Assistant or similar before you replace the existing hard drive. If the HP utility fails to create the recovery discs set, it's being hampered by the failing hard drive, you can order directly from HP with a short phone call; cost is $29-$99 US. You can get those in 2-3 weeks.

Make sure to create a manual backup of all Personal Data on that existing drive to external media prior to replacing the drive!
You can also download a free program such as the free AOEMI Backupper to help you backup your Library files (that's where most of you personal stuff is such as documents, photos, movies, E-mails, etc.) to external media.

After installing Win8/8.1 onto a replacement hard drive, you will need to reinstall all your wife's programs that are on her laptop now from install media or from websites on the Internet. Once that's done, you should then install whatever AV program you have and your webupdates and finally copy back or restore your backed up library files from external media as the last rebuild step, this way your AV can scan any lurking viruses or malware that was hiding in your wife's library folders prior to them coming back into a freshly built laptop.


Best of luck with the drive replacement,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>
 
Last edited:
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Solution
ChuckBradley said:
Seatools aborts with a fatal error during device discovery, throw something or other that it would not let me cut and paste.
Click to expand...
This doesn't sound good.

Try running Seatools in safe mode perhaps or try running a chkdsk anyway and see what it reports.
 
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The disk label is covered by a metal cover that looks like it will not go back on properly if it is removed. I will pry it off today, report the make and model, and look for diagnostics from the maker. We have backups of the data.
 
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The disk is made by HGST, apparently owned by Western Digital. It is 1 TB, 5400 rpm, SATA 3.0Gb/s. I find no model number, but HDD:5K1000-1000 and HTS541010A9E680, and two different part numbers, H2T1000854S and 0J33073. There is also a date JUN-13, compatible with the purchase date of the system, 2013. I was not able to find any diagnostics at hgst.com.
 
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Windows does not see the disk when it is in the original system. Windows Explorer does not see the disk when I attach it to another system. Without a drive letter as supplied by Windows Explorer, chkdsk can not know what disk to check
 
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If the drive is also missing when you look in the bios, try swapping to another port, check cables and if it still refuses to show up it may simply be beyond help.
 
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I took a disk from an older, dead notebook and replaced the bad disk. I cursed HP a lot for making the two components that a user is most likely to change, HDD and memory, the hardest components to get at. Then I physically destroyed the bad disk. It took a lot of experimenting to discover that the boot process has changed for Win8, and HP set the BIOS to prevent the legacy mode. Anyway, now it boots and to answer my original question, it was not a fault in the system that caused the disk failure. The replacement disk has an old version of Windows, so I will have to wipe it clean. I have multiple backups of all the data, but I lost (or never made) the recovery disk for Windows. I will be loading some version of Linux instead of buying Win8. Thanks very much to all of you for your suggestions.
 
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