I'm 17 but not completely noob to the computer world but i'm a little confused and need some assistance.
About 2-3 months ago my slave drive (secondary HDD) basically failed. I can remember playing Skyrim or something and the game went buggy so I closed and restarted the PC. When it turned back on the whole PC seemed quite slow and unresponsive. The HDD is about 2 years old. My OS is Windows XP.
I ran a chkdsk test at the time and can remember seeing thousands of errors, for example: 34012 error, 34013 error, 34014 error etc.
So because it had so many errors i just cancelled it and disabled the HDD. 2-3 months later (present) i have been getting close to running out of space on both my main HDD and the portable HDD i have been using. I did a bit more research and came across terms like S.M.A.R.T so i installed a program called 'HD Tune 2.55'. I enabled my failed HDD and found it seemed to be faster the browse then previously. the health status said OK. i ran an error scan, first using the quick scan which retrieved no red blocks. The real scan is still running at the moment. It's nearly halfway completed with
Is my HDD doomed?
About an hour ago I pasted a 5gb file into the HDD and it transferred at regular speed (about 5 minutes or so). This made me think that perhaps certain sectors are broken while others are fine, as the HD Tune also showed those 14 red blocks but most being green.
Basically when i tested the HDD out about an hour earlier it seemed back to normal, but now many folders are slow to browse and take a while to load. when i click 'my computer' it takes a while to display the Drives and doesn't respond sometimes. And at one point it told me the HDD wasn't formatted which i know it is, leading to even more confusion. Which made me think that perhaps the format has been 'messed with' and needs reformatting, but i didn't want to test it because i don't want to lose files if it isn't completely necessary.
So the summarise: I'm quite confused about this problem but see it as a good learning opportunity, i need to know if my HDD is fixable or if i need to fish out some $ to buy a new one.
If you need more information to help me just ask.
Thanks for all the troubles, Link