(12-26-2015, 03:23 AM)Explorer487 Wrote: Okay is this actually possible. So basically my steam HDD has decided to do the dying swan. It's spinning up/spinning down constantly and i can't seem to access anything on it for more than 30 seconds before crashing the PC/BSODing the PC/Freezing the PC completely.

We're talking 200-250GB of Steam Library which you might just think "Re download it, it's easier..." Well....no. No it isn't. I have a 56k connection, and it's taken me four years of good luck thus far to accumulate all that. Now i actually moved my library to a separate and dedicated Western Digital Blue (500 GB) thinking it's a new HDD and less likely to blow up. And supposing windows went pop i could reinstall windows and not lose my stuff. Only for some reason my luck has decided the 4 month old drive would go bang and on Christmas day, no less. So here i am and i'm at my wits end with this now.

The drive just seems to spin up/spin down repeatedly for 30 seconds before spinning down and staying like that. Then it'll sometimes spin up and act normal for like 5 minutes before going back to it's random spinning problem. Obviously accessing data in this state is impossible since i can't predict when it'll happen again and as a result any data transfers to my functional HDDs fail by default when the thing spins down. I don't really want to keep trying this as it might corrupt the data or cook the drive completely.

Is there a way to recover all of this or better still fix the drive? any suggestions at all would make this less of a crisis considering a large margin of all my games (49 to be exact) are in steam's Library. Only a handful have DVD's which were activated through steam. Downloading 200+ GB is just not happening. Like i've mentioned, the drive is only 4 months old and the PC hasn't been physically moved eliminating any knocks or bumps damaging it. There are also have been no previous symptoms considering i was playing a game on that HDD earlier today and it seemed perfectly okay, this is sudden and a strange coincidence with this Steam hacker stuff. I find it very hard to believe a 4 month old WD HDD is dead, never, ever had one fail but...*Sighs*

Cheers for any suggestions folks, i appreciate it

(12-26-2015, 07:31 PM)Explorer487 Wrote: You people just saved my sanity. I managed to get SMART to work and it was saying the HDD was basically toast in various sectors, so i put it in the freezer as described, took it out say 9 hours later. ran back up the stairs and shoved it into a desktop HDD dock i dug out and managed to transfer my steam library and most of my downloaded files before it died again, i reckon i only lost a couple backed up drivers (I keep these saved as downloading them is time consuming on my snail net, plus i already burned some of them to DVD being critical supposing i ever had a windows failure)

Anyway i'm looking into ordering a new HDD, any suggested manufacturers? i'm a little skeptical about Western Digital at the minute considering my HDDs are kept below 30C at all times with my cooling (Roughly 22-28C) and it's barely lasted 4 months which unfortunately means the warranty ran out. It's not even like it's done any huge amount of work either since it mostly just sat idle whenever i wasn't using steam or it would go into Eco mode and spin down entirely. Thanks again and any suggestions about a new HDD i'd greatly appreciate it!