Hard Drive Problems!!! Hurray!!

[Tavo]

Hurray! My Western Digital Hard Drive is failing AGAIN!! Oh what fun awaits me in the realm of eternal waiting and kicking metal cases!

Allright. So my Western Digital Hard Drive is causing me problems again so to refresh your memory here is some history: And also what is going on right now:
1. In 2002 I happily purchased a WD HD for my new computer, ignorant of the pain and agony it would cause me.
2. In 2003 the HD died. I got an RMA and sent it to Western Digital. I was left without a computer.
3. They took 2 months to send me a reburbished drive. Two long and agonizing months without any games, mp3s, movies, or internet. Two long months without my computer! Two... yes, TWO months.
4. The reburbished drive they sent me did not work very well, Windows crashed when using the internet. I went to Fry's, bought a Maxtor drive and put that as primary and the Western Digital one as secondary.
5. Up until a month ago, they where glory days. I was happy having 2 hard drives. BUT, happiness did not last long for the evil Western Digital company was bent on making me miserable.
6. I started having "Delayed Write Failed errors in Windows when moving/making/accessing files on the WD drive. Then every time I turned on my computer chkdsk would run. This is happening to this date. After that the errors became more frequent and I had a couple of files dissapear.

So, I went into the event viewer in the administrative tools section of the control panel and looked at the system errors, here are the errors I found:
They repeat quite often.

Error: Source NTFS, Event ID 55 The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume D:.

This next one only comes up after the first one.
Warning: Source Dhcp, Event ID 1007 Your computer has automatically configured the IP address for the Network Card with network address 000C761D7275. The IP address being used is XXXXXXXX

I also get a bunch of these:
Warning: Source ftdisk, Event ID 57 The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

And another bunch of these, although it might be unrelated:
Error: Source DCOM, Event ID 10003 Access denied attempting to launch a DCOM Server using DefaultLaunchPermssion. The server is:
{00020906-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
The user is Unavailable/Unavailable, SID=Unavailable.


So I went to the Microsoft help page and followed some instructions. I ran "cmd" from the "run" prompt in the start menu, then I typed chkntfs d: and it says it's dirty. So i schechuled it to check for bad sectors in the next restart. I restart, checking starts, but then it gets stuck at 2%. The HD stoped responding, Windows throws me into my desktop, and the HD isn't even in My Computer. I restart and the drive is there again.

So here are the questions:
1. Will a format fix the problem?
2. Should I send the drive back to Western Digital? it still has a warranty.
3. Should I get in contact with Western Digital first? If so, which part of this post (which I would send as an e-mail) should I NOT send them?
4. Any other coments?

And as always, thanx a lot for your help. :):

[Ojnod]

Well I dont know a whole lot about hard drive errors. What I do know is you live in mexico and it is summer. Maybe the heat is getting to your drive? Heat can make many computer parts do weird things.

[Tavo]

This has been going on for more than a month now. I know the HD are cool cuz they have the big fan just beside them. The big house fan I mean.

[Tavo]

Wonderful!!
The HD has finished dieing. It is no longer usable, it does not respond, the information is inaccessible, I/O errors every where. The Western Digital people will not be able to say "well, maybe it's windows" cuz I also tested it out on Linux.

YEY! HD on it's way for replacement!

[Mr. Natural]

Some folks know I'm not a fan of WD drives. I seem to recall a discussion on those drives a while back. :p: I've had more WD drives fail on me than any other brand. I think all brands though can have a bad model production. I normally prefer Maxtor drives. But I've had two of those die recently on a machine at work. The drives were identical make and only a little over a year old. They were 40 gig diamondmax 8 drives. I looked closely at the sticker on the drives and that particular model was actually produced by IBM! Can anyone say deathstar? IBM computer hardware (hard drives and pc's) are some of the worst stuff I've ever had to deal with.
I guess it depends on if you can spare the funds, but I wouldn't have bothered trying to get a replacement WD drive. If you get another identical make drive from WD I wouldn't put too much faith in it. Don't forget to do regular backups!

[Jagndeke]

You guys are scaring the bejeezus out of me. :scared: I just picked up a WD 80 GHD as a second drive! :eek: Knock on wood, cross all my fingers and toes and hope to hades I can avoid the "hell" of WD that Tavo is going through! :rolleyes:

[DanTheManPR]

I guess Tim would know. I've had one WD drive die on me, but I've only ever owned two of them.

[Tavo]

Well, this is the second time i've had the WD drive die on me. The first time I got this one as a replacement. It's an identical one. But I already had a Maxtor drive as a primary. So right now I'm only missing my slave drive which was filled with mp3s, movies and game backups. So it's not like I'm screwed right now.

[Ojnod]

Heh I guess I am lucky. After 2 and a half years my IBM 60GXP is still running strong (2ncd most fail prone hard drive in a long time, only behind the 75GXP). I have 2x 200GB WD drives with all my media on it, it would suck to lose it, but because all my friends copy from me at LAN parties, I could get it back in no time.