HELP ASAP! HDD Dieing, is alive but need help with back up!
 

So, ill try and make this short
-over a month started making some high pitch sound after warming up
-got louder this week or possibly just today
-the pitch went from soild to soild then stopping and repeating this hour, then shortly after started making variable pitch noises, then utorrent said ther was an i/o error on one of my torrents and then with in seconds i got a blue screen, i then shut it off, then booted it up after 10seconds, now its not making any sounds and seems to be running fine. LIKE I TRUST THAT!

where my problem lies is in which of my 2 hdd's is doing it, since they sound the same as far as i can tell now i dont know which one i should back up on to which.

both hdds are seagates, one is a 250gb the other a 500gb
i have 2 hdd with 3 partitions an xp disk, and a windows7 partition that shares the disk with a data partiton(torrents)

any scans i can do? tests? please help ASAP this back up window wont last long.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.

thanks, i know, i am already running it, tho i dont exactly know which tests to run.

Just the "Short Test" should tell you which drive is failing.

Worst case, go pick up a 1TB external drive for like $125, and back up EVERYTHING.

Also recommend Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier for pulling stuff off a flaky drive - any errors, it will retry indefinitely (or as many times as you tell it to).

You shoulda started backing up the minute your hdd started making sounds. I agree with Soundy. Get a new 1tb drive and copy everything.

the sound i first thought was one of my fans going so yeah... and YEAH i want to back every thing up now i just dont know which hdd too back up right now and space is limmited.

This is why you should never buy Seagate.

Stick with Western Digital.

indeed (at the time i was still under the impression that seagate was still good, then i found out they bought maxtor...

BUT HOW DO I FIND OUT WHICH HDD IS DIEING?

I've had seagate, maxter, samsung and western digital hds. No problems with the seagate or western digital. The maxtor and samsung ones died though :(

Run the test on each hard drive and see whats wrong??
or that out the one that does not have the OS on it and see if you still here noises.

i ran the tests on both, they both tell me nothing, and i cant trigger sounds...

Run the extended test? If a drive is failing, it should produce an error code of some kind.

Or, again... get a big external drive and just backup EVERYTHING.

where do i find the extended test, i do not see it in seatools, i have run the short, long,self drive tests, the short, long Geniric tests, the s.m.a.r.t.
i am backing up everything, but i need to cut out the cancer so i can still make use of one of my good hard drives never the less.

"Extended" test = "long" test.

I suppose one could look at the full SMART readout and see what flags have been triggered to try to determine which drive was making noise, even if it's not showing a problem now.

heres the thing, if it is a bearing that is going on one of them, would that even show up in a test?

i have run all the tests once or twice, every time they pass, i am trying to hear a sound diference in the two of them when performthing the tests so far i think that maybe one sounds a little more rattley then the other, but its hard to tell that from normal sounds.

QUESTION: if when i got the blue screen:
it was the data drive that wasnt being used that crashed, could it still cause the blue screen?

Question: if right before the blue screen i got an i/o read error from utorrent saying it couldn't read from that hdd would that tell me that it is that hdd that crashed?

both the operating system and the torrents are on the same hdd

PROBABLY. Among other things, the SMART system monitors the spinup and spindown times, then logs and averages them. If there's a sudden significant change - say, it's normally between 80 and 120ms, averaging 100ms, and then one day it's 160ms - it will flag that, and a SMART monitor will show that flag as having been tripped. It may only do it once, but that's enough for the system to mark is as "something anomalous". A failing bearing COULD affect spinup time, and thus COULD trigger a smart flag... although there's no guarantee that it will affect things enough to be noticed by the system.

No likely. A BSOD is usually a sign of a pretty significant hardware problem. It could easily be triggered by something critical getting corrupted on the system partition... say, the pagefile.

That would be a good indication of some kind of problem with that drive, yet.
both the operating system and the torrents are on the same hdd[/QUOTE]

interesting and helpful, this back up has been riddled with problems with even the most simplest of steps. every time i run the smart scan it "passes" i can not find where a detailed log of the scan is, only logs of what scans were done and when, can you hint as to were i would look for it?

Which hard drive was it when utorrent gave you the I/O error? You must have saved a torrent to that drive and the drive was failing, that is why it gave you that error.

First, which version of Seagate is it? Is it the Barracuda 7200.11? If so, there are a couple of drives with a specific firmware failing after starting up from a complete shutdown. But according to your problem, it doesn't sound like this one.

Either way, if it is the 7200.11, I suggest you upgrade your firmware otherwise the whole drive will lock out on you after (if by any chance) a restart from a complete shutdown. Your computer will not find the drive as if it doesn't exist but your files will still be intacted. You will have to look up on google about this issue. The 7200.11 have defected firmware and Seagate recommends everyone to upgrade their firmware because if the problem occurs, upgrading firmware will be too late because the drive wil l no longer exist. If you never shutdown your computer, you will never run into this problem, but if you ever get a power outtage or for whatever reason shutdown your PC, when you turn it back on, you may never see that drive again.

How do you have your HDD set up? Are the 250GB and 500GB slaves/storages?

My advice to your problem though is, if they are slaves and storages, unplug the cable (SATA/IDE) for now until you get a 1TB for backup. Then plug it back in and back up everything.

If you still can't diagnose which HDD it is, I'd suggest after backing up your files, plug the 250GB and 500GB back in and save random torrents on it until whichever one fails. Usually when it fails, your torrent will give you error saying that the designated drive cannot be found or something like that. Drives will eventually fail so that doesn't mean you should stop using these two drive. Just keep backing up your files whenever you remember to. The high pitch noise may just be a one moment thing and the drives are still useable for now. By replacing these two drives does not guarantee you that your next two will be better and safer. Back up your files on another drive and stash that drive somewhere until your current one fails, rinse and repeat.

A high pitch noise usually means that the pin is out of place. An easy fix for this is that if the drive ever fails, you can stick the HDD in a ziploc bag and put it in the freezer for 24 hours. Take it out and let it sit for about 3 - 4 hours so the moist dries. This will usually fix it, but only do this if you have nothing important in the drive.

the 500gb drive had a win7 partition and a data storage parition the 250gb was a WinXP partition. the 500gb at the time was in win7 mode and had active torrents on the data half partition when i got the crash.

I am not sure of my firmware any more, nore do i care since i am using the drives for parts basically.

both drives i have used for a long time now the 250 for around say 2 years and the 500 for about a year and half, maybe firmware is an issuse but due to the face that first it was making sounds then it was very different louder sounds(that a hdd never should make) right before it crashed makes me believe its hardware failure like a bearing, which also makes sence since none of the seatool scans pick up on any thing.

i decided to sang my PVR's Western Digital Black 750gb instead of waiting for the 1tb version, and use the 1tb for added storage when it comes, until then since i am fairly confident i backed up everything i wanted to back up, i am going to use the 500gb as my new pvr hdd and if it fails soon after no big loss, and i will have found out which one was dead.

Pin out of place huh? well what if its not making any sounds now any ways?

since they both "seem" to sounds normal, tho i some times i think i hear an odd spin up sound every random few hours, and since i backed up every thing im on to my next issue that i posted:
while trying to back everything up on to the pvr hdd and installed win 7 on it, it was still running it the esata case i put it in, then when i took it out of the case, and put where the old hdd was and on regular sata port, i would not boot passed the win log screen, and the more i tryed to fix it the worse it got. i had to trick it. its all in my other post if you have any ideas as to what went wrong.

THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HELP.

I'm not aware of a way to view complete SMART logs, although I'm sure the drive manufacturers have software do it. All the apps I've seen simply show whether various error flags have been tripped, what the threshold is for tripping them, and what the extreme readings are... like this screenshot from Western Digital Data Lifeguard:

http://www2.moltenimage.com/photos/revscene/smart1.jpg