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Pyrolistical
Asked: 2009-05-29 09:27:37 +0800 CST

Tips and tricks for identifying the dying hard drive

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I have a raid 1 that has failed partially. The controller tells me the raid is degraded, but does not tell me which drive is failing.

When I look in My Computer, I see that the controller split my raid 1 two the separate drives, so now I have two of the same partitions. I can read data from both them just fine. The SMART status is being dumb and says no errors.

One drive is making a clicking sound, but I can't tell which one. Can I amplify the sound some how to locate it?

What are some tricks/tips I can do to figure out which drive is failing without taking the computer down and swapping drives? I am trying to minimize down time.

hardware hard-drive raid mirror

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Poor man's stethoscope: Long'ish screwdriver. Tip on the drive, handle on your ear. Listen to each drive. If either clicks you should be able to quickly isolate it.

    (Works great with valve-covers on your old cars when listening for valve noise too ;-) )

    Of course, this assumes clearance and common sense about where on the drive you touch...

    • 11

  2. An old back-woods mechanic trick can come in handy for this kind of thing. I once saw an old mechanic old a long straight stick hard against the palm of his hand and then press his knuckle up against his ear. He placed the other end of the stick on parts of the engine and could hear which cylinder was not firing correctly. Wood conducts sound well if it has no gap air gap to jump. If your old enough you might remember in movies a cowboy putting his ear to the train track to tell if a train is coming or the Indian listening to the ground to hear the buffalo. The same principle applies here. As crazy as this sounds you can use it to track down the clicking sound, give it a try.

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  3. Looking in the event log, you should have an event from the disk source:

    Log: System
Source: disk
Event ID: 7
Message: The device, \Device\Harddisk4\DR3, has a bad block.

    alt text

    And then to identify DR3, you find Disk 3 in Disk Management:

    enter image description here

    • 5

  4. HDTune is a great tool. You can run an error scan and find the over all health of your disks. Go to www.hdtune.com and download the free version.

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  5. If you can get at the drives, and the clicking sound is quite regular you can place your hand on top of the drive and often feel when the click occurs in one drive or the other.

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  6. If you can physically touch the drives, you should be able to determine which one is clicking, since the click is (I believe?) caused by the motor moving the head to the end of the platter repeatedly.

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  7. Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) may give an indication.

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