On Thursday I was using my PC like normal, bit of work, bit of gaming, no performance issues. About 7PM I went to load a game I'd played earlier in the day and it wouldn't load. I tried a couple of other programs and they wouldn't load either. It was really hot on Wednesday and my PC worked through it seemingly fine, nothing seemed especially hot in HWMonitor but I wasn't monitoring it the WHOLE time so it might have peaked past safe at some point. I tried rebooting and my PC just kept getting slower and slower.
I noticed that my 2nd hard drive (non-boot, has most of my big games on it) was constantly running at 100% (last happened after a bum, Windows update, haven't done a windows update since because I couldn't work out which of the ~50 updates had caused it and had to roll them all back to fix it) and as I was trying to diagnose the problem my PC stopped booting altogether. I pulled the drive that I thought was the problem to look at and see if it was preventing booting (PC still wouldn't boot with it removed). Turns out I'd pulled HDD 1 rather than HDD 2 (as listed below). I decided to check it with chkdsk anyway seeing as I'd already gone to the trouble and to my surprise I found that it was reporting a failure of the downloads partition. The other 2 partitions so far seem perfectly OK but I'm rushing to back them up as I type this (just to make sure I have another copy, most of it's already backed up).
I also pulled the main SSD to see if that was broken and as far as I can tell it's fine. I have yet to test the drive I thought was the culprit but I'm starting to think it'll be fine and was only running 100% because it was being accessed at boot.
My question(s) is(are). 1.Is the drive dying or has the downloads partition just got really messed up somehow (Windows Disk Management reports that partition as RAW)? 2. I'm thinking that the boot record somehow ended up on HDD 1 rather than the SSD when I installed Win 8, I don't remember doing it on purpose but I might have. If that's the case is there some way of writing a new boot record for Windows so I can at least get my PC up and running again? Currently if I try to select the SSD to boot from in the boot menu my PC just sits at a blank screen for a while then goes back to the boot menu.
Additionally, the drive doesn't sound broken, there's no ticking, just the occasional spin down noise if I leave it idle for a couple of minutes. Layout SSD - Win 8 || fast access data HDD 1 - Small programs || data || downloads (3 partitions) HDD 2 - Old data (original copy of what's on the data drive from HDD 1) and large games HDD 3 - New, not much on it
Specs: i7 4770k, G.Skill 32GB Ripjaws X, Asus Z87-A, MSi GTX 770 OC, 250GB Samsung 840, Seagate ST3000DM001 (HDD 1, HDD 2), Seagate ST4000DM000 (I don't know how much this'll help but there it is)
Thanks in advance
Update post-TestDisk scan:
The actual partition structure should be:
Partition 1 - 200GB
Partition 2 - 1300.48GB
Partition 3 - 1272.99GB (broken)
Partition 4 - 997MB (old Linux Swap)
Partition 5 - 95MB - EFI partition, I think this is the partition that's on the wrong drive preventing my PC from booting without this drive in it)
Partition 6 - 20GB - Old Linux installation
The only partition I recognise at all in the image 3 list is the first 200GB, the rest all seem to be the wrong size:
MS Data - NTFS, blocksize=4096, 214GB / 200GiB
Mac HFS - HFS blocksize=1024, 16MB / 16MiB - Unsupported
Linux Swap - SWAP2 version 0, pagesize=8192, 8192B - Unsupported
MS Data - ext4 blocksize=4096 Large_file Sparse_SB, 20GB / 19GiB - Empty, might be damaged
MS Data - ext4 blocksize=4096 Large_file Sparse_SB Recover, 20GB / 19GiB - Seems to be the Linux Mint windows installation partition
Linux Swap - SWAP2 version 0, pagesize=8192, 8192B - Unsupported
Mac HFS - HFS blocksize=2048, 33MB / 32MiB - Unsupported
MS Data - FAT12, blocksize=512, 1474KB / 1440KiB - Empty, might be damaged
MS Data - FAT12, blocksize=512, 1474KB / 1440KiB - Empty, might be damaged
Update 2:
I managed to get my PC back into a bootable state by writing a new EFI partition to the SSD but it appears my initial diagnosis was correct, HDD 2 is completely dead. It spins but nothing recognises it at all (not the BIOS/EFI of my desktop nor the external SATA dock). It sounds a little rough and it's a fair bit warmer to the touch than the other hard drive. Seems like the ST3000DM001 model wasn't great at surviving a little heat if both of them failed on me on the same day.
