D partition "not responding"?

[Johanna]

Earlier today I heard a the noise of the hard-drive repeatedly trying to
access something but failing.
A message popped up saying something a long the line of "The D drive is
not responding".

D is a a 50 GB partition on a 60GB Maxtor 7200 rpm drive that is approx
3 years old. Most of my program installations are on D and it is 75% full.
The other partitions are C where the OS and some small apps reside, and
G where my pagefile is.

The D drive suddenly appeared in Task manager (to my surprise - never
seen a drive there before!) as a non-responding program.
I was not able to kill the explorer.exe and rebooted the machine.
This solved the problem.

I am puzzled though: I have never seen this behaviour before and have no
experience of a hard-drive dying.
What was it that happened? Is the hard drive in trouble or was this just
a freak thing?

I just recently the whole machine for viruses and I really don't think
it's a virus, but I am scanning again just to be safe.

If the hardware is on its way to computer heaven, I'd like to transfer
my data and get a new internal hard drive sooner rather than later. I
would be very grateful for your advice!

Johanna

 

[Michael Hawes]

Earlier today I heard a the noise of the hard-drive repeatedly trying to
access something but failing.
A message popped up saying something a long the line of "The D drive is
not responding".

D is a a 50 GB partition on a 60GB Maxtor 7200 rpm drive that is approx 3
years old. Most of my program installations are on D and it is 75% full.
The other partitions are C where the OS and some small apps reside, and G
where my pagefile is.

The D drive suddenly appeared in Task manager (to my surprise - never seen
a drive there before!) as a non-responding program.
I was not able to kill the explorer.exe and rebooted the machine.
This solved the problem.

I am puzzled though: I have never seen this behaviour before and have no
experience of a hard-drive dying.
What was it that happened? Is the hard drive in trouble or was this just a
freak thing?

I just recently the whole machine for viruses and I really don't think
it's a virus, but I am scanning again just to be safe.

If the hardware is on its way to computer heaven, I'd like to transfer my
data and get a new internal hard drive sooner rather than later. I would
be very grateful for your advice!

Johanna

If you do not have backups of your data, get a new drive ASAP and use
Ghost or equivalent to copy to thr new drive, then remove original and
configure new drive as boot drive. Boot from new drive on it's own. If you
later reconnect the original drive as slave, you can run manufacturers
diagnostic on it to check it.
Mike.

 

[Rod Speed]

Earlier today I heard a the noise of the hard-drive repeatedly trying to access something but
failing.

That's the drive recalibrating when it cant read the platters.

A message popped up saying something a long the line of "The D drive is not responding".

D is a a 50 GB partition on a 60GB Maxtor 7200 rpm drive that is approx 3 years old. Most of my
program installations are on D and it is 75% full. The other partitions are C where the OS and
some small apps reside, and G where my pagefile is.

There is no point in a separate partition for the page file.

The D drive suddenly appeared in Task manager (to my surprise - never seen a drive there before!)

That is just the title for that particular Explorer window.
Thats normal when you are looking at the root of a partition.

as a non-responding program. I was not able to kill the explorer.exe

It can take quite a while to kill it.

and rebooted the machine. This solved the problem.

I am puzzled though: I have never seen this behaviour before and have no experience of a
hard-drive dying.
What was it that happened?

The drive has developed bad sectors in the area where the D partition is.

Is the hard drive in trouble
Yes.

or was this just a freak thing?
Nope.

I just recently the whole machine for viruses and I really don't think it's a virus, but I am
scanning again just to be safe.

Bit dangerous if you arent fully backed up.

If the hardware is on its way to computer heaven, I'd like to transfer my data and get a new
internal hard drive sooner rather than later. I would be very grateful for your advice!

If you arent fully backed up for the files that matter,
dont keep using that drive, get a new one quick.

Run Maxtor's PowerMax and see what it says about the physical drive.

Post the Everest SMART report.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181

 

[Johanna]

Great response - it is all clear to me now. Thanks Rod!

I have scheduled a disk check for the next reboot (got a zillion apps
open and don't want to reboot until I've finished what I am doing).
I will find the Maxtor disk check software that you mention and run it.

If I find anything at all that's not 100% healthy I'll take that as a
sign that I must get the 500GB HD that I wanted for a while...
Bit-torrent, me?, no never ;-)

I upgraded my PC only this summer, but didn't upgrade the hard disk
because it didn't seem strictly necessary as I have plenty of storage on
an external disk.

As for the page-file: As I suspected!

The reason for the setup is that a guy who I managed in a previous job
helped me install everything when I ordered my previous PC. He swore the
G:disk setup was the best practice despite my scepticism. I had hired
him myself for supposedly being a really good tech allrounder to fix
stuff, so I decided to take his word for it. I was also very touched and
grateful that he wanted to help me out - I didn't feel very comfortable
putting together a Shuttle myself.

I have since learnt that this (pagefile on G disk) is an outdated
practice, and unsuitable because of the location of a G drive (which
would be less easy to read and write from.) Right?

If I buy a new hard drive I'd be tempted to have a mega large C drive
with everything. But it is so clunky, and what if I need to reformat?

Jo
..

 

[Rod Speed]

Great response - it is all clear to me now. Thanks Rod!

I have scheduled a disk check for the next reboot (got a zillion apps
open and don't want to reboot until I've finished what I am doing).
I will find the Maxtor disk check software that you mention and run it.

If I find anything at all that's not 100% healthy I'll take that as a
sign that I must get the 500GB HD that I wanted for a while...
Bit-torrent, me?, no never ;-)

I upgraded my PC only this summer, but didn't upgrade the hard disk
because it didn't seem strictly necessary as I have plenty of storage
on an external disk.

As for the page-file: As I suspected!

The reason for the setup is that a guy who I managed in a previous job
helped me install everything when I ordered my previous PC. He swore
the G:disk setup was the best practice despite my scepticism. I had
hired him myself for supposedly being a really good tech allrounder
to fix stuff, so I decided to take his word for it. I was also very
touched and grateful that he wanted to help me out - I didn't feel
very comfortable putting together a Shuttle myself.

I have since learnt that this (pagefile on G disk) is an outdated
practice, and unsuitable because of the location of a G drive (which would be less easy to read
and write from.) Right?

Yeah, it involves more head moves doing it like that.

It can be sort of justified if its on a different physical drive,
but even then, its a lot better to add enough physical ram
so the page file isnt used except at boot time, thats always
much faster than actually using the page file, wherever it is.

If I buy a new hard drive I'd be tempted to have a mega large C drive with everything.

Yeah, that's generally the best approach now.

But it is so clunky,

Its actually less clunky, basically because free space doesnt
get scattered amoungst the partitions. Its also hard to work
out what the partitions sizes should be and risky to resize them
with data in them unless you have a full image of the physical drive.

and what if I need to reformat?

You dont need to do that much with XP and there isnt any real
need to format the partition if you want to do a clean install anyway.

 

[DaveW]

Your harddrive is about to fail for permanently. Get a new one and transfer
the contents while you still can.

 

[Ed Medlin]

Earlier today I heard a the noise of the hard-drive repeatedly trying to
access something but failing.
A message popped up saying something a long the line of "The D drive is
not responding".

D is a a 50 GB partition on a 60GB Maxtor 7200 rpm drive that is approx 3
years old. Most of my program installations are on D and it is 75% full.
The other partitions are C where the OS and some small apps reside, and G
where my pagefile is.

The D drive suddenly appeared in Task manager (to my surprise - never seen
a drive there before!) as a non-responding program.
I was not able to kill the explorer.exe and rebooted the machine.
This solved the problem.

I am puzzled though: I have never seen this behaviour before and have no
experience of a hard-drive dying.
What was it that happened? Is the hard drive in trouble or was this just a
freak thing?

I just recently the whole machine for viruses and I really don't think
it's a virus, but I am scanning again just to be safe.

If the hardware is on its way to computer heaven, I'd like to transfer my
data and get a new internal hard drive sooner rather than later. I would
be very grateful for your advice!

Johanna

Your symptoms are classic for HDD failure. I assume that you have only one
drive and 3 partitions, so the very first thing I would do would be to make
backups of all your really important info to CD or DVDs. Remember to backup
your pictures, music and other info that are important to you. (I would
suppose you do that regularly anyway) After that, get a new drive. Your
present drive may not endure a Ghost or other Image process, but you can try
that if you want. Install the new drive as master and the old as slave and
use the boot disk of whatever program you use to copy the old drive to the
new. That way, the new drive will come up as C: and your old as D, E and
H.....maybe....... A fresh Windows install wouldn't be a really bad idea
either. I wouldn't put if off very long as there is no way of telling if
your current drive will work on your next boot. Good luck.

Ed

 

[Johanna]

Hi Dave, thanks for responding.
Yes, I am getting a new hard drive. I 'll get the Samsung Spinpoint 300
GB which got great reviews for being fast, quiet and cheap.

I thought I'd get some more RAM at the same time, so I posted a question
about that.
Jo

 

[JAD]

Hi Dave, thanks for responding.
Yes, I am getting a new hard drive. I 'll get the Samsung Spinpoint 300
GB which got great reviews for being fast, quiet and cheap.

was this the criteria used when you bought the maxtor?

 

[Johanna]

was this the criteria used when you bought the maxtor?

- actually it was a Seagate Barracuda, I was mistaken.

I have forgotten what my criteria where back when I specced that system.
I might not even have had any particular criteria. I just needed a new
nice machine pronto.
I asked the advice of a friend what to get, and as far as I remember I
followed his advice.