Bad Hard Drive?

[DonNagual]

I get an error message in my event viewer saying IO_ERR_BAD_BLOCK on a disk error (event ID 7) at around the same time every day, and it coincides with when my computer is running a virus scan.

Seems to be looking like my hard drive is dying since it happens every day, anyone else have something else I should check before replacing?

 

[woody1191]

You say it coincides with the virus scan try to remove that and use another, AVG is a good free one.
Also I checked for that error it means a bad sector or unreadable data on the Hard Drive try running Check Disk to see if it can fix it or recover it, otherwise you will have to replace your HDD as you said.

 

[SNGX1275]

Well that doesn't sound good, because as we all know bad blocks aren't good. But it must be some pretty non crucial file or you'd be seeing that happen more often (I think).

I'd do something like a full chkdsk, where you right click on the drive and go to properties, then tools, then check disk or whatever and tick those 2 boxes that indicate a more thourough scan (doing this from what I can remember). Then you need to reboot, and it takes forever to scan everything. But I believe in theory that scans all parts of your disk and marks bad areas as unusable to Windows. So that Windows doesn't attempt to write there.

I'm sure you knew all this.

Anyway thats what I'd do, and I'd probably start making backups just incase something real bad is about to happen.

There is a program called HDDRegenerator or HDDRegen.exe that can actually fix bad sectors if you are lucky and actually don't have a failing hd. In fact, if you can get ahold of that, it might be better to run that first rather than the full chkdsk.