Aurora R10, trouble with CHKDSK

Question

I have an Aurora R10 with standard setup of NVME C: drive, and it came with a 2 TB Hard disk with standard RAID 0 for the SATA Controller. That is the way it came from Dell. I later added a 2TB Samsung 870 SSD which has worked fine for a couple of years. Recently when I tried to back up the Samsung drive with Acronis the backup aborted I got the error Event ID 7 "The device, \Device\Harddisk2\DR2, has a bad block". When I tried to manually copy the files I got several instances of "this file cannot be read, skip?" and eventually the copy function ground to a halt with no error message.

If I run the Windows 10 CHKDSK on the drive it finds no problems. If I run CHKDSK F: /R from the administrator CMD window it got to stage 4 quickly but then began to find bad clusters and it was able to move the data from them. Then after finding about 6 bad clusters and 25% done, it ground to a halt and after several hours of no CHKDSK activity my whole computer ground to a halt. Even accessing other drives with File Manager took about 5 minutes to load the files that normally pop up immediately. It was like some background process was slowing it to glacial speeds. I decided to restart and that also hung, and I eventually did a hard shut down with the power switch. Fortunately the then computer started up fine.

The Windows Event Viewer revealed hundreds of "The device, \Device\Harddisk2\DR2, has a bad block" errors recorded every second which seemed to correspond to the hung CHKDSK R function. The messages stopped after shut down and restarting.

Since I don't have ACHI enabled on the Samsung SSD, I cannot find out any more information on the state of the drive with the Proprietary Samsung software.

Does anyone know of what to do next to fix the drive? It has about 500GB of files and applications and they all seem to run fine when I launch the applications, so could it be I just have a few bad clusters and the rest of the disk is fine, but I cannot repair the bad clusters? Wouldn't the SSD automatically mark bad clusters? Why does Windows Chkdisk run by accessing the drive from File Explorer Properties say everything is OK?

Thanks

Vanadiel · Answer

Try opening a CMD prompt in administrator mode and use wmic diskdrive get status to get the SMART status of your drives.

If that does not work, switch the access method to AHCI under the BIOS settings. It should boot fine as long as you did not make any RAID partitions.

You should then be able to see the SMART data from the drive.

Greg100 · Answer

Thanks. I have never made any RAID partitions. RE:  'switch the access method to AHCI under the BIOS settings. It should boot fine' some threads here indicated that one must use an administrator level command to boot into Safe Mode, before changing the BIOS settings which then some folks could not get out of, and then use the  command to exit Safe Mode. I would prefer not to do that. I assume then that is not really necessary? Just enter the BIOS and make the changes and save, and it will reboot? The Samsung drive is not the C: Drive. For me I think that would be the best solution.

Greg100 · Answer

Using the command prompt to check the SMART status did work and it came back OK.

Vanadiel · Answer

@Greg100​ Then there should be no issues with excessive bad blocks. That being said SSD's will swap bad blocks for spare blocks, and sometimes the data cannot be recovered from the bad block resulting in file errors.

Greg100 · Answer

@Vanadiel​ Thanks, I had one last question as per above: 'RE:  'switch the access method to AHCI under the BIOS settings. It should boot fine' some threads here indicated that one must use an administrator level command to boot into Safe Mode, before changing the BIOS settings which then some folks could not get out of, and then use the  command to exit Safe Mode. I assume then that is not really necessary?'  I would like to avoid that if possible. Appreciate your help.

Vanadiel · Answer

@Greg100​ It should just boot like normal.

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Aurora R10, trouble with CHKDSK

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