Hi, I’m having a serious problem with one of my HDDs and I’m trying to understand whether the drive itself is failing or if the problem could be related to the SATA cable, power, motherboard/controller, etc.

My PC has 3 internal drives:

• Disk 0: Crucial CT250MX200SSD1 — 250 GB SSD
• Disk 1: Samsung SSD 860 EVO — 500 GB SSD
• Disk 2: OOS1000G — 1 TB HDD
• E: is the partition on Disk 2

The problem started with files on E:. I could access the drive normally, but some files/programs on E: suddenly stopped working. For example, running an .exe from E: gave errors saying that the program could not be executed / was not a valid application.

I then tried copying an executable from E: to C::

Copy-Item "E:\Téléchargements\ChatGPT Installer.exe" "C:\ChatGPTTest.exe"

This returned:

>“The specified device does not exist.”

The file was not copied.

I also tried:

chkdsk E: /scan

but Windows couldn't even execute CHKDSK properly and returned:

>“Access is denied.”

Interestingly, chkdsk.exe itself exists and works from C:, and notepad.exe launches normally from C:.

Windows still reports the HDD as healthy:

Disk 2 — Online — Healthy
E: — NTFS — Healthy — OK

I also checked the physical disk:

Get-PhysicalDisk

and it reports the HDD as Healthy / OK.

However, when I checked the Windows System Event Log, I found many repeated Event ID 7 errors from Disk:

>“The device \Device\Harddisk2\DR2 has a bad block.”

These errors occurred repeatedly over several minutes.

At the same time, an NTFS event reported that the E: volume was healthy and that no action was required.

I also checked the Storage Reliability Counter. There weren't obvious read/write error counters reported, although the maximum read/write/flush latency values were quite high.

The important part

I had a very similar problem with another disk before.

That's why I'm not sure whether I should immediately assume that this 1 TB HDD is dying.

Could this instead be caused by something common to the PC, such as:

• SATA data cable
• SATA power connection
• motherboard SATA port/controller
• PSU/power delivery
• another hardware/controller issue

Or do the repeated Event ID 7 “bad block” errors strongly indicate that the HDD itself is failing?

I have not deleted or formatted the files. I’m mainly concerned about preserving the data now.

What would be the safest next step? Should I avoid chkdsk /f and other repair operations until the data is backed up/cloned?

Any advice would be appreciated.