Surface Scan - Is my HDD bad?

[jkoch]

Hi,

I've been having a ton of problems with my PC where I'll install Windows, it will work for anywhere between a week and a couple of months, then somehow the Windows install will get corrupter, can't be fixed, then I'll have to reinstall and start over.

I suspect it's a bad HDD, so I bought and installed HD Sentinel to see if I can confirm the problem. I ran a surface test and ended up with 2 damaged and 5 bad sectors. The test hung for a long time on block 9765 and I got these error messages:

1/1/2024 11:07:14 AM ! Error: 23 Data error (cyclic redundancy check)., Sector: 1953524745, Block: 9765
1/1/2024 11:07:14 AM ! Error: Unrecoverable Error Block: 9765

(The top one was repeated many times with different sector numbers.)

Is this bad enough to be corrupting my Windows install? When I start HD Sentinel, it says my HD health is 96%.

Just for background, here's an example of what happens when Windows gets corrupted:

Error Code 0xc0000098
Yesterday my son was using our gaming PC and all of the sudden the screen started flashing intermittently with only the date and time on the screen. I can see and move the mouse pointer on the screen but nothing else seems to be responding. It will occasionally freeze for a few seconds and then start flashing again.

I am able to get into the BIOS and verify that the SSD is detected.

When I power down 3 times to try to boot into safe mode, first I get an error code 0xc0000001 saying that the OS failed to turn off properly and needs to be repaired. When I try to go to the recovery environment I get the error code in the subject, saying the BCD doesn't contain valid information for an OS.

I've of course Googled how to fix this error code, but all of the solutions seem to involve being able to get to a command prompt, which I can't do.

It's a Blaze 3.0 gaming PC from Skytech. AMD Ryzen 5 3600. Windows 11 Home.

Thanks

[hdsentinel]

To answer short, yes, your hard disk can cause the troubles.

> The test hung for a long time on block 9765 and I got these error messages:

The test attempted to read/recover the sectors. It is not "hung" in any ways, exactly the opposite: it was processing the sector and was waiting for the drive to respond. As you can see, when the drive is "stuck" on a such sector, anything which may access the drive seems waiting, blocked.
Not sure, but probably this happened with your Windows installation too - and when Windows receives no response from the drive, similar weird errors / BSODs can happen.

> 1/1/2024 11:07:14 AM ! Error: 23 Data error (cyclic redundancy check)., Sector: 1953524745, Block: 9765
> 1/1/2024 11:07:14 AM ! Error: Unrecoverable Error Block: 9765

"Unrecoverable Error" happens when the affected block has high amount of problems (as you wrote, you noticed other sector numbers listed too) so probably the test revealed even further problems at the end of the drive. Probably the Health went down as more and more such problems detected, revealed.

This is not rare, such problems can remain hidden for very long time (even for years) until the drive is completely filled. A similar situation explained at
https://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_case_bad_sectors.php

So there is good chance that problems started when the drive reached the problematic area.

I'd perform a complete backup and start Disk menu -> Surface test -> Reinitialise Disk Surface test on the disk drive as it would attempt to stabilize the sectors and ideally the drive can perform better.
If no backup possible, you may try Disk menu -> Surface test -> Disk Repair as it will try to fix the sectors specifically.

If you use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, it is possible to check the complete status of the drive, verify what may happened and if there is anything else to improve the situation.