Need advice on possible Hard Drive failure.

[Black Panther]

Computer's not mine.
Also note that the HDD is not new - it's been in this computer for around 4 years now.
(I'm not a computer repair professional, I only build and repair pc's for myself, friends and family for free because I like doing it)

The owner asked me to have a look because he was getting no display on the monitor i.e. totally different problem.

I cleaned the pc and re-inserted the (clean) graphics card, and the problem was solved.

However, Windows wouldn't load due to some missing files (forgot to take note exactly).

To be honest, I imagined the pc's owner switching the tower on and off in frustration at getting no display and guessed probably he corrupted windows.
A windows repair fixed the issue.

Now this computer has 2 hard drives.
While rebooting, a check-disk alert came up and I let it run.
The check disk found no problem with the HDD containing the OS, but when it started checking the secondary HDD it came up with stuff I never seen before:

Wanting to see what's gonna happen, I found out that sometimes this hard drive appears normally in My Computer, in Disk Management and also in the BIOS whereas at other times it vanished, as if disconnected. It was also strangely empty... whereas it had almost been full before.

And the more times I rebooted the pc, the less it appeared till it wouldn't come up anymore not even in disk management and not even in the bios.

Anyway, I noticed the cables were quite stiff so I replaced the SATA cable and the PSU cable powering that HDD. Still nothing.

Am I safe to say this HDD is dead or am I missing out something?

Thanks guys.

 

[DRDNA]

Reparse points are sometimes used to implement mounted folders, maybe the access to the the original source has been corrupted or is missing all together....It may have been mounting from the C drive tho.

EDIT I wonder tho if the repair process is able to complete if you are back in windows maybe just maybe you'll have a good restore point that would fix it...but I dunno about that for sure. Normally the Reparse points are not actually needed from what I have read.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365503(VS.85).aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365733(v=vs.85).aspx

EDIT 2 When the drive is working is it making any noises that are NOT normal?
EDIT 3 Actually I bet the Check disk sorts it all out because I don't think they are absolutely necessary .
Edit 4 Find out from the owner what that drive was used for in his system. I'm thinking maybe back ups.

 

[Jetster]

Let it finish with chkdsk then plug it into another PC and check the smart data

 

[Black Panther]

Honestly I never heard of reparse points before, lol even chrome is underlining 'reparse' as bad spelling

Though I'm sure the reparse thing wasn't on drive C ie the one containing the OS. Drive C passed the diskcheck with 'only' 3 corrupted entries (which is why I'm suspecting the owner mis-treated the tower's power button!) but that was it and it worked fine:

There are no restore points on this computer whatsoever.

The info on the disk isn't valuable - it only contained a ton of installed games which can be reinstalled. So I don't need to recover anything thankfully!
Just looking for opinions on whether I can safely use this HDD as a paper-weight or not (and save my relative the expense of buying another 2TB HDD).

@Jetster that's what I didn't do.

I did let the chkdsk finish but when the computer 'didn't find' the HDD anymore not even in the BIOS I thought I had exhausted all options by changing both PSU and SATA cables and even plugging the SATA one in a different sockets on the motherboard.

 

[Flow]

I had this with a brand new drive last year. Slowly corrupted and getting worse after each reboot. To the point where the system didn't see it anymore, after that the bios detected it for the last time, and then it was totally gone.
After alot of fiddling with various commands and reviving software I managed to get it at "raw" status but remained unavailable. Sended it back for warranty and got it replaced.

 

[Jetster]

Well if it inadvertently doesn't show up, try another PC if it does the same thing its done

 

[Komshija]

Let it finish. If the problem persists, use the original windows DVD or bootable USB, select "repair your PC", run cmd and type
sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows (note: you might have to assign different letter than "c:", depending on your OS host drive). That should solve many issues, but not dying HDD.

 

[RejZoR]

Show me the Crystal Disk Info screenshot... Insert it into other PC to do this if necessary...