True Image Home 11 DriveCleanser verification errors
I have a 500-gigabyte PATA hard drive inside an external enclosure (Acomdata Samba series). Recently it was inside a SanMax PATA enclosure, and up until the last few weeks before I switched external enclosures, I didn't notice any problems, before or after I switched motherboards on my machine, and almost every weekend I ran a disk check, and I hardly came up with any issues that made me suspicious of the functionality of the drive.
But over the last 2 weeks, I started noticing problems that were related to moving files from my internal drive to this external drive. I can't say whether it was virus-related or not, because the last antivirus program I had in this machine has expired, I'm about to get an entirely new machine.
In running my routine disk checks, I didn't notice any problems, and the disk check ran without any trouble. For the last several weeks, though, I always got error messages (specifically, "Windows Explorer stopped working") that would result in my Windows Explorer shutting down or restarting; and this usually happened whenever I transferred files (especially graphics and video files, mostly JPEG and MPEG) from my internal drive to my external drive.
Then I noticed my Windows disk check program recovering and fixing more and more folders and files on my internal (main) drive, and shortly thereafter it was recovering and fixing folders and files on my external drive.
Last week, when I ran my Windows disk check program, the program began to stop prematurely, and the window that displayed the green-line progress disappeared before the line got to the other end. The usual report that displayed when the disk check was finished did not display anymore, even if I ran a full check for bad sectors.
I suspected that I had a corrupted drive, maybe even a damaged drive, because some of my JPEG images on the drive either disappeared or were showing up corrupted, discolored or disfigured.
I decided to remove all of my files from the drive, put them on another drive, then erase the corrupted drive and wipe the entire drive back to its uninitialized state. I used Acronis True Image Home, Version 11, which contained the program known as DriveCleanser. I had every byte of the drive overwritten with zeroes (00), followed by a verification process.
But in the verification process, I kept getting the following error message, over and over again: "Failed to verify data on the hard disk X in the sector Y", where X is my external drive and Y is the sector in question. Each time I pressed "Retry", the error would appear to be corrected, and the verification would stop at the next sector that was in error.
A 500-gigabyte hard drive has 976,773,168 sectors. I kept getting errors until the verification process reached the 50,000,000th sector. By that time, I pressed "Retry" 1,533 times. I decided to press "Ignore All" and let the verification process run its course without any more interruptions like this.
I just recently re-initialized the drive and performed a long format using Windows' disk management system. Needless to say, it took 5 hours to format the drive. The first time I tried this, the format operation would not finish, and probably because I turned on my other external drive while my machine was formatting the first external drive.
The format operation completed without any problems, and the disk check that followed also completed in full and returned a report, showing no problems. But I still wonder if I should trust this hard drive or replace it, not knowing if it will be functional when I test it on a new machine. Could it have been a virus that corrupted the drive, or is my drive about to die? And does the verification process always come up with those errors even on a perfectly operational drive?
