How did chkdsk repair a failing drive (ntfs) that was even flapping in the bios? [closed]

Question

One of my client PC's blue screened overnight and wouldn't boot.

The system post was hanging also for about 10 seconds trying to find the drive. System would not boot afterwards saying "inaccessible boot device".

The BIOS also had some trouble finding the drive half the time.

I tried slapping the drive, hitting it on the floor, freezing it for 1 hour and nothing. But the drive is still spinning.

After connecting that drive to another system (xp), "drive is corrupted" on eventmgr, the XP system even had a hard time booting with the failing secondary and of course I got the "drive is not formatted" error. I ran chkdsk /R on it, it unmounted the drive (then system started responding normally), after a few tries and a few thousand "File record segment xxxxx is unreadable" errors which took about 2 hours it was done. Chkdsk was finished, it reported fixing a bunch of stuff (I wish I had copied the output) the drive was fully accessible. Even after a few hours there isn't a hitch with the drive anymore.

How can this be? This surely seemed like a physical problem with the drive. I thought chkdsk only fixes ntfs links , bad sectors, etc.

This was on a 250gig Seagate . I don't have the exact model handy.

Answer 1

Not sure why it affected the bios at all, but chkdsk marks bad sectors so that they won't be used again. You should replace the disk ASAP because it is likely to get worse.

Answer 2

Probably got lucky it started working again after the drop,freeze and thaw out.

Chkdsk log will be in event viewer but does not give much details when run in Windows.

FYI, next time you run chkdsk while in XP use the following command to generate a log

CHKDSK /R C: > C:\REPORT.TXT (this will not work if chkdsk is scheduled to run at the next restart)

Answer 3

A drive can stumble over bad clusters and take forever to get past that, it does not factualy define it as being completly dead. On the other hand it could have even been a cable or controller problem. If it is having bad sectors and adding in more over time, it WILL be dead.
You now have a disk item that is aged full of bad sectors and probably limping along (especially after being beaten silly :-). Next thing to do is see how long it will really last, so you can add it to the death statistics. I wouldnt give it a second chance.