Surface test hangs

[vjmedina]

Hi,

I have a 1.5TB seagate hard drive inside a multimedia box, connected to my computer via usb with Windows 7 64bits. The disk has two primary NTFS partitions of equal size, one of them (the second partition) is full and the other one is almost empty. I managed to copy nearly 100GB just fine, but after that every file I try to copy stalls when it reaches about 600MB. I thought it could be a problem with wrong sectors, so I first tried with windows chkdsk with no luck (it says that the drive is fine, but when I check the option to fix wrong sectors it stalls at around 20%). Now I'm trying with Hard Disk sentinel, but the surface test (read test) stops responding when it reaches 6%. I would have thought that in case of wrong sectors it would just notify me which ones are wrong, so I'm not sure what could be causing this.

Any ideas?

Many thanks in advance.
-Victor.

[vjmedina]

By the way, I did disable the energy saving option on the usb hub.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message and question.

Yes, according the information, I'd also suspect the problem is the hard disk surface.
There may be some (or many) sectors which could not be read and these cause that the copy operation fails.

When the hard disk finds one (or more) such sectors, it starts to examine them and tries to re-allocate (replace them with sectors from a spare area). Basically this is what chkdsk should do on the logical volume, but performing in a better way as it is done on physical drive level (the bad sectors reported by chkdsk (if any) related only to the current partition, they can re-appear any time if you re-partition or re-format the hard disk).

During this procedure, the hard disk may respond very slowly or even it seems it completely freeze. This is normal as described in the Help -> Hard disk tests -> Surface test "During the tests if bad block(s) are found, it is possible that the software and/or the operating system is not responding during the re-allocation. This can take some minutes or even hours - depending on the size of the affected surface area." and also at www.hdsentinel.com/smart

The best way to force the hard disk to fix all problems and prevent the use of these damaged sectors would be to use Disk -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface . This has special methods to fix the such problems - but it requires to restore the hard disk surface to an empty state, so you will need to backup all files (if they can be read) first.

Please check http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests and
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq_repair_ha ... _drive.php
for more information about the tests should be used to reveal and fix hard disk problems.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks, I completely agree.

[vjmedina]

Thanks for your reply.

Just one more thing. Will this procedure delete all the files in BOTH partitions, or it does it independently for each one? It's just because I don't care about the data on the partition that's giving errors, but the other one has important information and I would need to find another HD to back it up to if it gets deleted too.

-Victor.

[hdsentinel]

The complete hard disk will be overwritten and cleared. This means that all data on both partitions on this hard disk will be erased.
It is displayed in the window before starting the test and in the warning message showing a partial list of files/folders to be deleted on the related partitions.
So you would need to make a backup before using this procedure.