Hard drive errors (chkdsk hanging...)

Question

Hello, I haven't used the "how it works" forum to ask a question myself for a while, but I'm at my wits' end: I need your help. :)

Summary of the situation: my brother tells me that his PC won't start, that he has a virus or something. In fact, when he turns on his PC, he gets a black screen instead of the Windows boot (the BIOS works, by the way ^^). Without further ado, I tell him that it's not a big deal and that I would reinstall Windows for him. When I got to the file extraction stage, the installation crashed with an error message saying that the configuration could not be saved or something like that.
From there, I rebooted from the installation DVD and went to the menu to access the command prompt. I then ran a classic "chkdsk /f" to check, but it kindly told me: "unable to lock the current drive. Windows cannot run a check [...] 50" (I'm not sure about the end, but I do know it gets stuck at step 2/3).

I then burned the Knoopix live CD, a Linux distribution that serves, among other things, for this (file backup + error repair...), I launched it and in the GParted utility, I see a nice "Warning /!\\" icon, so I checked the information and the software clearly indicates that some "sectors" are corrupted and that I needed to boot into Windows and then use "chkdsk". Out of curiosity, I started formatting (in NTFS) the hard drive and there: no more error icon.

I celebrated victory a little too soon because once I went back to do my "chkdsk /f /r": it got stuck again.
I thought I had won again by installing Windows because the file extraction got stuck at... 83%.

I don't really know what to try anymore, any ideas?

Thanks in advance ;)

Laurent.

jojodu03 · Accepted Answer

If you see this message: "unable to lock the current drive" when running chkdsk, it may also be because you launched the command prompt from a CD or DVD, so you are trying to run chkdsk on that CD if you forget to specify the drive letter:

chkdsk /f/r

will yield nothing
while

chkdsk c: /f/r

will work perfectly...

And yes, it happens even to the best!!!...

JwTdd · Answer

Hello, if the sectors are physically defective, you cannot recover them. Try to find out what % of the disk has defective sectors using chkdsk, then create partitions that do not contain those sectors.

Charles · Answer

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem as you, were you able to solve it?
So far, I've removed the hard drive from my laptop because I couldn't access the command prompt after I formatted my PC, and using a cable, I connected the hard drive to my roommate's PC, then I started the CHKDSK command, even though I don't really see the point.

After 4 hours, I'm only at 6% of the process. Do you think the problem will be resolved after this, or should I do something else...

Thank you in advance,
Charles

l123456 · Answer

Fortunately, the email reply notifications are automatically activated; I had forgotten to respond...

So I managed to "recover" almost all of the hard drive, except for the first 20 gigabytes, it seems.

First, I downloaded the latest version of Knoppix (an ISO) which I burned onto a DVD (or a CD, I think it fits on there).

(In gParted, each action is executed only if you click on the green "V" - check - at the top right)

I started by completely formatting the hard drive (in NTFS) with gParted present on the live CD of Knoppix. (I had nothing to recover, but it's possible to recover some things via the file explorer) and deleted the partitions.

Then, I - still with gParted - created a partition of about 20GB in the first 3/4 of the hard drive (it's intuitive; you can move the corresponding rectangle left or right and reduce it - change the allocated space) which I formatted (in NTFS).
To see if the location you chose is good, you right-click on the partition
and click "Check for errors"; if no errors are detected, it's good; otherwise, you move the partition to a different location (you relocate it).

From there, I launched the installation via the Windows DVD and then installed Windows on the partition I had just created. Do not pay attention to the "warnings" like "Warning, your hard drive is going to fail..."

Once Windows was installed, I installed the software HDD Regenerator (paid, but it's easy to obtain it for free. By the way, if you don't have the paid version, you won't be able to do anything, so it's either you pay, or you pirate it...)

Thanks to this software, I could see the errors present on the hard drive, but mainly see where they were located (it took me about 10 hours). The red "B"s indicate ~10GB of corruption.
It can also repair them, but I was at 2.5% after 18 hours, so I stopped... I was lucky; the errors were at the beginning.

I had 2, so if my approximation is correct: 2*10 = 20GB at the beginning unusable.

There, it was time for round two: back to the Knoppix CD > gParted > delete the partition then create a partition that takes up the entire hard drive, except for the first 20 gigabytes at the start. We format it (in NTFS).

Round three (:P), we boot from the Windows installation DVD and install it on the partition we created.

Everything should work normally ;)

Best regards,

Hard drive errors (chkdsk hanging...)

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