Member Avatar for Gonbe

Hello Daniweb community,

Recently I bought a new harddrive. Below is a link to the manufacturer's website and the model:

&locale=en-US

I connected the drive according to the instructions and then booted up my computer. The drive got detected in the BIOS so i booted up Windows. I then went to the following section: (rough translation as I run a non-english version of windows)

Control Panel -> Computer administration -> disk administration

There I partitioned the disk as a primary disk and formatted it. The partition received the full capacity of the drive (1397,26GB) and I selected "quick format".

At first sight, the drive seemed to work well. However, I soon found out that when I deleted a file from this disk it didn't really get removed while the computer was on. When I delete a file it looks deleted. But when I leave the directory and come back later it's back again. When i try to delete the file once more I now receive the following error message (translated):

Cannot delete <filename>. Access denied.

Check if the disk is full or protected against writing and that the file is not currently in use.

When I reboot my computer the file does not get shown anymore and appears deleted as it should be when i deleted it the first time.

I thought it might have been because i selected a quick format instead of a regular one so i formatted the drive again and this time choose for a regular format.

I selected the following settings:

Filesystem: NTFS.
Clustersize: Standard.
Quickformat: No.
Enable file- and directorycompression: No.

My system runs Windows XP professional with Service Pack 3 installed.
The question is: Did I do something wrong when installing the disk, or is the disk defect?

Thanks in advance,

Gonbe

-edit-
I forgot to mention: This does not seem to happen for every file I try to delete from the drive.

Edited by Gonbe because: n/a
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Dani AI

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Good troubleshooting so far, — and good prompt from about file type. The fact that the symptom stopped after you updated the nForce chipset drivers strongly suggests a storage-driver / write-cache interaction or a handle-locking issue rather than an outright hardware failure. When the OS or driver fails to flush metadata (or when some process keeps the file/directory open) deletes can appear to “stick” until the next reboot.

Quick practical checklist (priority order)

  • Temporarily disable write caching for that disk (Device Manager → Disk drives → Properties → Policies) and retest. This reduces risk and will reveal whether caching was the culprit.
  • Use a handle/hotlock viewer (Sysinternals Process Explorer or Handle.exe) to search for the filename and see which process holds it.
  • Run chkdsk on the volume to repair NTFS metadata: 
    chkdsk X: /f

    (replace X: with the drive letter). Schedule on reboot for system volumes.

  • Run the vendor’s bootable diagnostics (SeaTools bootable ISO) to exercise the drive outside Windows; that rules out SMART/reporting problems caused by drivers.
  • Check Event Viewer for disk/NTFS errors and temporarily suspend antivirus, backup, or indexing software while testing.

If tests show persistent SMART failures or long-test errors, back up critical data immediately and consider replacing the drive. If all diagnostics pass but the problem is gone after the driver update, keep the chipset/storage drivers current and monitor the drive for a few days. If the issue ever recurs, test the drive in a different machine or in a USB/SATA adapter to isolate controller vs. drive behavior.

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Member Avatar for Hangfire

What sort of file are you deleting?

Member Avatar for Gonbe

What sort of file are you deleting?

The issue occured on video files (.AVI) from what I have tested.
(ranging from 200MB to ~4GB) I have not tested other files yet, except very small files like txt files.

I've also checked the seagate website for new firmware, but there does not appear to be any. On the website I also found their HD tool called SeaTool. I've ran that partially and the 3 short tests showed the following to me:

SMART: Fail.
Short DST (Drive Self Test): Pass.
Short Generic: Pass.

However, my other harddrive (which i have for about 3 years now and never had anu issues with, also from seagate) also seems to fail that SMART test.

The application advices to download the DOS version of SeaTool and boot my computer with it. This is something I will be trying soon.

Another thing I suppose I can try is updating the chipset drivers for my motherboard.

A little more info about the drive:

Model Number: ST31500341AS.
Firmware revision: CC1H.
Edited by Gonbe because: n/a
Member Avatar for Gonbe

I have just installed the latest nforce chipset drivers, and the issue appears to be gone now. I can't say for sure because it does not happen on all files, but it hasn't occured since the update yet.

Will update this post if the problem persists. Thanks!

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