Raptor 150 thought I had a problem ? Opinions?

[Sneak]

Have a Raptor 150 that all of a sudden popped up with corrupt data. I had copied a bunch of photos from my camera to it to burn to a CD which I did. Left the pics on the drive. Got the little windows corrupt files error and it wanted me to run check disk. I did! It found errors and cleaned it out and most of my pictures when bye bye. No trouble as I had them on CD. I did not put the pictures back on the drive. Well after that constantly I had the corrupt file warning come up on this drive, chkdsk would run on bootup for this drive sometimes. And I would have games not run because of corrupt files and on and on. Well OK, thought my drive was going bad. All of the Smart Data showed no errors. Defragged, ran some diagnostic progs and Western Digitals disk diag program on it, No Errors. So I removed it from one system and put it in a new build to make sure I did not have some other trouble with my comp. FYI, both builds were running Windows XP SP2. Same thing happened, corrupt files and data. Smart data and the drive checked out with all diagnostics. But even running my virus scanner on the drive would make the thing give me a corrupt data warning from windows.

So I removed a bunch of files from it that I did not really need. And I went through all the defrag, smart check, diagnostics etc again. Some thing, constantly had the corrupt file error. Mind you during all of this I did have some games and progs that I could run on it with no problem. But even running Western Digitals Diagnostic program I could not get so much as 1 bad sector.

Weird, called WD. The tech asked me to run the diagnostic one more time and call him back with the data. Said if the drive was bad they would get a new one out to me.

Ran it again, not one error, not one bad sector, nothing. Checked out completely.

So I tried something. I copied everything off of the Raptor 150 drive onto another drive. Then I did a low level format of the drive in windows. Then I copied everything back onto the drive.

The drive came back up the same size it was. If there was a wad of bad sectors or anything it did not show up and the size is the same. It is 139 something gigs of formatted size which is what it was.

It works flawlessly now. Has been 2 weeks and I have installed bunches of games and pics to it, not a twitch. Perfect.

What was wrong with this drive that a low level format fixed it. I have no idea. Opinions?

 

[freonchill]

well about half way through your post i wondered if you were overclocking and perhaps your ram was causing errors on the drive.
but you said you tossed it into another machine and that would have fixed that problem - unless both were overclocked...

then i was gonna say use spinrite to do a non-destructive low-level format
but you said that you copied all your stuff over and did a low level format

so really - i would have to say that it was a cascading bad sector error
the drive didnt detect that something was bad - but windows was telling you that a file was corrupt. you would move the data and run chkdsk and that would fix it for a minute.

really - i dont have an answer for you and i probably have wasted your time w/ getting you to read this reply

but next time this happens (if it does) try using spinrite or maybe just another sata cable

best of luck

 

[Sneak]

Thanks for the reply. Your reply was not a waste of time. There was no overclocking when this was going on. And when I moved the drive to the new build I had it on a new SATA cable.

Never heard the term cascading bad sector error but what you describe there makes sense. I will remember that term. Maybe it was just a corrupt file(s). The windows error did not direct me to it though which might have saved me a lot of time and hassle.

I am glad that my drive seems OK now though.