a long day!!

Computer Forum General Hardware
1

OMG, Ive just pulled through a right difficult day with my hdd.
Long and short of it… it seems segments 623, 624 and 625 on my hdd are bad :frowning: Its only 6 months old too!

Does anyone know about segments on a hdd? Are they as
bad as having a bad sector. Ive done my year course in hardware and maintenance but cant remember a thing I learnt! If I remember right they are bigger than sectors, but I dont know what a bad segment is.

It started off with me booting it up earlier on, I got this screen saying windows failed last time, do I want safe mode, normal blah blah.
I selected normal. I did get bored of waiting for the thing to shutdown last night so I just flicked the switch! I didnt think anything was wrong with windows.

It got to the windows xp animation and restarted, to the same option screen.

This time I pressed safe mode. It got as far as agp440 and then rebooted.

Oh shit! So I got the windows xp floppies out. They didnt get past disc 2 of 6.

So I got an old bad sectored hdd out, used the floppies and it worked fine. It must have been the hdd.

So I got Micro Scope on the ‘decent’ hdd, it kept on saying it wasnt IDE! Though it is. So that was useless.

I eventually installed xp on the bad sectored hdd, ran the dodgy one as a slave. Scandisk picked it up and ran. It told me about the bad segments. It carried on into windows and everything was normal. Only that scandisk or the bad sector check wouldnt complete on the dodgy drive.

It now boots into windows but doesnt load explorer. I have to use task manager and new task to do anything. Ive run sandra and its performing about normal. It plays games and has no virus’ nor everything ad aware checks for. Its a mystery.
I do get a box saying browserue.dll (or summit close to that) wasnt found. It tells me to reinstall.

I started flapping when the bootup disks and micro scope turned the hdd down.

Im off to try and get windows going properly again.

Its bloody anoying cos for the first time in ages and ages I actually bought a game! In fact 2. Microsoft Flight Sim and Secret Weapons of WW2 and a second hand joystick… I havent been able to use any of them! Maybe someone is watching me!

I really cant lose any of the stuff on that drive either. Usually I can get by without whatever Ive lost but Ive got loads of photos of the moon Ive taken. Ive traken loads for years but these are little better than normal, god knows why!

2

No one really has talked about bad segments. I’d stop using that hard drive now until you can get a new drive setup to copy your stuff too.

3

I had a mess around and I got that missing file… browserui.dll from the windows I installed on my old hdd. Simply pasted it into the correct place, and its worked fine since.

Only that the font of internet explorer keeps changing. And this website has changed the most too! lol You wouldnt recognise it!

Im gonna have to burn the 40 odd gb I want to keep and send it back to western digital I think.

One thing with the drive… It gets quite warm, but I cant cool it down. It in the middle hdd slot of 3 and the side of the case is usually just leaning against the case. I might buy a hdd cooler from overclockers… see how it goes though.

4

They’ll get somewhat warm, but I’ve run drives with bad ventilation and not had issues. If you’re running some 10 or 15k RPM SCSI drives…that’s another matter. I don’t know if they’re still sold, but Vantec has some HDD coolers. I got them locally for $20 each, but you should find them a bit cheaper online. It’s got 2 60mm fans and isn’t really loud.
If you need to check your drive’s health, WD’s got a tool online if you got the drive OEM. If you bought it retail (and still have the setup floppy) you can boot off of that and run one of the diagnostic tools that’ll say wether or not your drive needs to be sent back for repair.

5

Regarding that diagnostic disk, is it the same for all drives ?

'cause I just bought a WD1200JB and I have the disk so I could zip it or ace it and send it to you.

EDIT: It’s version 10.0

6

Yeah, I think its that disk you have to use to ‘activate’ it.
Or you had to format it with the wd disk first… For some reason though I cant boot off it.
I obviuosly got it to work… I think I used a win9x one!

Ill try and download it. It may be the floppy which is knackered.

7

Well there doesn’t seem to be any files on that disk that are on bootable floppies.
I don’t think it’s supposed to be bootable. I think you have to boot with a bootdisk, then you put that one in and run your diagnostics.

8

Ahhh, right, ill try that then…

Roll on another day… Yesterday I was booting from WD drive fine, but today I get a message saying I cant boot from this drive cos
system32\drivers\pci.sys is missing.

So I change the boot hdd to the old one and get
system32\drivers\ntfs.sys is missing.

Im gonna have to reinstall windows on the small drive, again, and copy that missing file over, again!