How does one recover from an internal Hard Drive I/O error?

Solution 1:

"Knowing the drive as I do" You don't. an I/O error is typically PRETTY bad.

Just for the heck of it, I'd suggest reseating or replacing your cable. That's about the only thing short of gradual drive failure that would do this.

Also take a look at the event logs to see if there's any errors there. As ramhound pointed out, smart isn't infallible It only tells you what the drive detects, and there's some failure modes it misses.

Bad news? I think your drive is dying. Lucky there's no data to lose. Lets make sure though.

Lets talk to the drive. Luckily, unlike data recovery, this isn't highly skilled rocket surgery.

Unfortunately (or is that fortunately?) I no longer have any semi functional faulty drives to simulate an error. I can only walk you through the process.

gsmartcontrol is my favoured way of doing smart tests. Install it, run it, and doubleclick on the drive you want to check. If this won't run at all, your drive's likely dead. This runs at a lower level than volumes and 'drives'

This is a happy disk... as far as we know... or is it?

lets go to the error log first. Happily this will show you the exact error and you can look it up.

But maybe I haven't checked it in a while...

But its in lifetime hours. Luckily, you can check in the same place where you'd find most of the useful stuff about a disk - the attributes tab

About a thousand hours ago? Ok... Nothing here's red highlighted or anything, so as far as we know, the disk is still happy.

Lets check again. Lets go to the "Perform Tests" Tab

Run the short test. If anything fails, you need a new drive. If anything dosen't, run the long test. If anything fails, you need a new drive.