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Need help troubleshooting hard drive problem

Posted: Sat Jan 07, 2017 1:43 pm
by John Guastella
I need some help troubleshooting a hard drive problem in my Windows 7 computer.

While using Lightroom, my computer crashed. Upon rebooting I relaunched Lightroom, but it could not load the catalog, claiming it was corrupt. Lightroom offered to repair the catalog, so I let it try, but it failed. I then switched to a backup catalog and Lightroom was able to load it, but could not locate the photos. 

I exited Lightroom and in Windows Explorer inspected the hard drive (Drive D) containing the photos. Drive D is an internal 1GB drive that has been in the computer since I built it in 2012; it has not exhibited any problems at all prior to today. I can see all of the directories on Drive D and can drill down through the subdirectories in each parent directory until I get to the bottom subdirectory. At that point the system hangs and then displays the message: “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error”.

I tried to run checkdisk on Drive D (right clicked and then selected “Tools”), but checkdisk will not run (and doesn’t give an error message).

All of the other drives on the system (including another internal drive, Drive F) seem to be working fine. Moreover, checkdisk runs successfully on Drive F, with no reported problems.

At this point I assumed that Drive D or the files on it were irrevocably damaged. But here’s the part I don’t understand: when I boot the computer in safe mode, I can access Drive D and its files without any problem!

So my question is: should I just go ahead and replace Drive D (seems like the simplest approach) or are there some additional troubleshooting steps I should run first?

Thanks,

John 

Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 5:53 pm
by ronzie
For trial, in safe mode, can you copy the files to another designated drive and see if lightroom can rebuild its index from that drive?

Any interference from a virus checker?

Can you go in carefully as an admin and get better results?

Safe mode only allows basic input/output to run so advanced drivers are not running.

If you go in as admin you can get into the Windows event viewer and examine error logs. Clear the event list and then run the application and immediately view the error logs before the list gets too long.

It could be that the file index in Windows fast find is corrupted. In properties for the drive you can turn that indexing off to see if that helps.

Re: Need help troubleshooting hard drive problem

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 5:21 pm
by John Guastella
Thanks for those excellent suggestions. But while doing some more troubleshooting I discovered that the computer's problems comprised more than just a possibly failing hard drive: the system became unstable and would not boot reliably to the the desktop (and in one case gave me a "Windows encountered a critical error" message). So, I decided to take a scorched earth approach and reinstalled Windows 7 on a new (larger) SSD and replaced the faulty HD.

Thanks again for your help.

John