Solved Two hard disk failure in quick succession

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stephen74

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Aug 7, 2024
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Hi.

Recently I went to shut my computer down and went to be and several hours later, got up to find the PC had not switched off, so I closed it down manually. Next day I couldnt get it to boot up properly. I tried powering down several times and after a couple of hours of trying various things, it power up. However, when I opened up explorer and tried to access a secondary hard drive, it wouldnt work. I was eventually able to see that the drive had been converted to RAW. I removed the drive and all was well. That was maybe two three weeks ago.

Today, I turned my computer off, and it powered down staright away, and went out. Just come back home and my computer went in to automatic repair mode and failed, and then just sat in a lopp of repair, fail, repair, fail.

I stripped my computer down and remove another secondary drive, and the computer rebooted first time.

I've not been able to check if the drive has gone RAW as well as I couldnt get the PC to boot at all when it was attached.

What could be causing my Hard Drives to fail? Ive just lost 3 TB of data. I've virus scanned the pc and it has come back clean every time.

Windows 10. build 19045 (cant upgrade to windows 11 due to hardware)
 
couldnt find an edit option.

So I managed to get the secondary disk up and running on an external disc reader and I found a folder called WINDOWS created at 08-08-2024 03:40am and a file called $SysReset dated at 08-08-2024 04:02.

Thats in about 7 1/2 hrs from now. Have I created a Time Machine?

Whats going on ?
 
Sounds like the drive is going bad. The reason I say this is I have witnessed this very thing a handful of times in my 30 years of digging into PC's. (Cool thing about that arrogant statement? I could still be wrong, it's refreshing):giggle:

That being said, I'd like to see you run some diagnostics on all drives in question. 1 at a time and post the results.

Download https://hddscan.com/

That's probably a UTC date/time and not the zone you are actually in.
 
Or perhaps the CMOS clock has lost power and reset to some weird state.
What is the age, make, and model of the drives that have died?

Luckily there was nothing important on them, otherwise you'd have backed them up. (bit of sarcasm to start your day!) :)
 
They were both relatively old.
Seagate Baracuda 3TB 2013, - This one I can see in my external reader
Western Digital 2TB, 2015. - This one is has been turned RAW and my external reader refuses to see it

The 2TB had about 1.8TB used up. Mostly stuff I can lose and easily replace with time, but a few GB was stuff that cant replace.

Both these drives were supposed to be back up drives.

This has also prompted me to make a recovery disk.
 
Yeah - nothing like data loss to bring home the point that your backup regime wasn't what you thought it was.
If those dead drives were your backup medium, do you still have the 'original' files on another drive somewhere?

And the remaining good drive, what is its make/model/age?
With your current luck, I'd be making sure you had a backup of any important files on it.
And if it is a similar age, consider a pre-emptive strike and replace it now while the sun shines.
I'm guessing it too is a HDD, if so, upgrading to a SSD may be a timely move. :)
 
Main drive is an SSD.

Dont have the originals. I was in the process of moving files around trying to clear up disk space and have trivial stuff on one drive and important stuff on another. It was only a small amount of stuff I lost that was important. I could replace some of it but Im not sure what I lost. It was most;y career ralted useful items that I've come across over the years, so useful documentation and guides, photos, - I may never have eveb ndeeded it again, but it was useful stuff to keep.
 
Might as well close. I have one dead drive and one drive thats working. Maybe just cioncidence that they both went close together, but I do seem to go through a lot of hard drives.
 
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