It seems one of my hard drives has developed a bad sector, and if I try and read that sector, then the hard drives stops working until I perform a hard reboot. I've tried copying the affected file to back it up and running chkdsk /f, both are affected in the same way (they just pause when the reach the bad sector). The hard drive makes a click noise and then the activity light goes out.

Speedfan's smart reporting gives me:

Quote :

NOTE : your hard disk has 1 pending sectors. Those are sectors that couldn't be properly read and that the hard disk logic is waiting for a write operation to try to remap to a spare sector (if available). According to the Reallocated Sector Count attribute, your hard disk seems to have available spare sectors. A simple disk surface scan won't be enough to force the remap operation. You need a read/write surface scan to remap the sector. The best option should be a tool that knows about what should be read from that sector so that it has some option to apply the best fix to the missing data.

Now does this mean that if I were to delete the file and then fill the drive back up with data, this sector would be remapped and all is solved? Trouble is I'd like to not lose this file, if possible.

If I were to get some fancy software that will do this read/write surface scan, would it actually help if the drive (apparently) stops working at this point anyway?

if you run a linux livecd, you could try...

"dd if=/dev/brokendrive of=/dev/null"

that should read the entire hard drive... if it bails out with IO errors, the drive is definitely busted. if not, then you could try copying disk-to-disk, formatting the drive and then copying the data back... but you'll need another drive to do the whole process.

try chdsk /r, instead of chkdsk /f
I usually get better results that way.

chkdsk /r ran for about a couple of hours until it reached 83%, then the activity light went out and my system stalled so I had to hardware reboot. Although it's not my boot drive, it's the same physical hard drive as my swap file partition so presumably without being able to access the swap file (I'm assuming here the hard drive is locking itself from access for some reason), I can't actually do anything despite the fact that my system doesn't actually crash or hang.

HDD Regenerator. It can do wonders to hard drives with bad sectors on them.

*wink* *wink*

Thanks, I'm downloading the demo now.

Did the trick! I was able to copy the file without the hard drive going bonkers, but presumably the data was already lost, as I get a few frames of corruption in the video (at the point where it would normally freeze). Still, better than not being able to play it at all.