ssilverm

For the last few weeks my PC has been intermittently freezing for anything up to half a minute when loading applications. I was initially convinced that my motherboard was the problem as Vista's event viewer is reporting regular controller errors on an IDE Port that has no disk attached to it.

However, I have now run daignostics on my system drive (a 500Gb Samsung Spinpoint), and this has revealed dozens of ECC errors. I am uncertain of the implications of this and would be grateful if somebody could answer a few questions for me:

1. Are these errors likely to be responsible for the intermittent freezing?

2. Can they be fixed with a low-level format or is it time to bin the drive?

3. Is it possible that these are simply known bad sectors that Vista is aware of and avoids when reading and writing?

Steve S.

raptor_pa

Vista may know, but it still indicates an error, ECC is a read error and actually they occur all the time, and a subsequent read of the data usually gets the correct data. Errors are ideally not handled by the OS, but rather by the drive. The OS rarely writes to a specific location - rather it writes to the location speicified by the disk hardware, and that is where the error handling and sector remapping should occur. Bad sectors ( usually marked when written to ) are added tot he drives internal G-List. An ECC error insdicates not a bad sector, but a sector where the data could be read, not read correctly. It usually indicates a failure in the preamp or the drives cache as opposed to a failure of the sector on the disk surface.
What diags did you run?
First thing to do is get any critical data copied off the disk now and onto stable media.
The download MHDD from hddguru.com and run that aginst the drive and see if there is a patern to the sectors throwing ECC's - might indicate a bad read channel, weak head, if it is patterned.

ssilverm

The errors all seemed to be associated with one particular head. I cloned the disk onto a spare drive and swapped them around. The freezing now seems to have stoppe, but the reports of controller errors on IDE3 continue. They don't seem to be having any impact on performance though.

Steve S.