CRC errors on .rockbox folder. Drive dying or something else amiss?

[whatboutbob]

Folks,

Just had an interesting experience I thought might be worth sharing.

My rockboxed h140 with a 60gb hdd starting acting up recently.  It was taking ~ 3 minutes to load rockbox.  A song would stutter mid-way through playing, then resume.

I assumed my year-old drive was dying but just for giggles I tried to unzip the latest version of rockbox to the drive.  Strangely I was told that a bunch of the .cfg files were password-protected...?!

Anyways, I tried running chkdsk on the drive, but it wouldn't get past 0% of verifying folders/files before freezing.

I could delete everything on the drive, and copy new stuff on no problems, *except* the .rockbox folder - which displayed an error reading something like: 'data error: cyclic redundancy check'.

As a result I could not delete that directory.

I tried quick-formatting, using SwissKnife, which reportedly worked, but according to windows explorer, the directory was still there afterwards?!

I formatted the drive, and all now appears to be well.  I re-installed rockbox (by-the-by, apparently the bootloader was out of date, because I was getting -1 errors and booting to original fw). I chkdsked the drive and all seems fine. I've filled the disk 3 times now and have not had any further errors.

Any thoughts on the matter?

Is my assumption that the drive is on its way out fair?  I use this to record live music, so I'd hate for it to die mid-show.

Is there a tool I should use to better check the health of the hdd (I'm using windows XP)?

[Llorean]

It's very, very, very likely that you're right and the drive is on the way out.

[petur]

Might also just have been a case of severe FAT corruption, who knows...

Doesn't scandisk have a surface test anymore these days? Otherwise maybe google for a disk utility that has a surface test (sometimes also called bad block scan)


good luck

[whatboutbob]

Thanks guys.

The WinXP drive scan is next to useless and Toshiba doesn't have any diagnostic tools, so I'll see if I can find something somewhere else.  I miss the old scandisk.

[dreamlayers]

chkdsk normally only reads the metadata.  (That's the data which shows what files are named, where they are located, and what space is free.)  In order to verify the entire disk (including files and free space), add the /r switch.  Also, a quick format is quick because it doesn't check the area being formatted and it just writes new metadata.  A normal format checks the entire area. 

If they find problems with some area, they're usually able to mark the area as bad ("bad sectors") so it is not used in the future.  This isn't supposed to happen because drives nowadays manage defects themselves, and a drive with bad sectors should be considered less reliable.   It's possible that marking those sectors as bad fixes the problem, but it's also possible that new bad sectors pop up soon.

[bluebrother]

be aware that you need to run chkdsk from the command line -- the tools offered from the context menu aren't of much worth. But the old command line tool is still the old one

[petur]

so the actual command will be

chkdsk <drive>: /F /R

replace <drive> with the driveletter of your player. Make sure it is not selected in windows explorer, as chkdsk needs exclusive access to it

[whatboutbob]

Guys, thanks for your further input, and I'm sorry for not including this in my original post but I actually ran chkdsk (including the /f  and /r switches) again successfully after the format. However it didn't report any issues - hence my confusion as to what could have gone wrong in the first place.  I would have thought bad sectors would have been reported...but no!?!