Help - HD issue...
in [Hardware]
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From: Uncle Vinnie on 11 Aug 2010 15:58 Thanks for your reply. Here are the 2 things, details, not in my initial inquiry: It is an Inspiron 1525, the drive is WD3200BEVT (Scorpio Blue). Western Digitals software came back with a pass for SMART. However, it failed running a quick test, and hung doing the in depth test. They do have a clone utility, do you think it would accurately clone this drive, 4 partitions, running Vista? It's apparant I need to focus on getting the drive replaced. VanguardLH wrote: > Uncle Vinnie wrote: > >> Re: Dell Inspiron laptop running Vista.... >> >> Seagate BlackArmor came across an error, unable to read a particular >> sector. I ran Check Disk, it cleaned up a few bad sectors (orphan, >> cluster problems), nothing out the usual.... > > One period will suffice to end a sentence. > >> However phase 5 of 5, it stopped at 74%, at one particular >> sector..... Shutdown, restart Checkdisk, this time no problems along >> the way until phase 5 of 5... 74%, same sector.... Are there any >> other utilities I can try to fix this sector or am I looking at a new >> drive??? > > The only good long-time hard disk savior utility that I know of which > consistently works for repair is SpinRite. By the time you pay for > SpinRite ($89), you could've bought another new replacement hard disk; > however, you'd have SpinRite to use again later. > > I had SpinRite about a decade ago when it came handy to repair a hard > disk to make it usable but I still replaced the hard drive since the > device wasn't trustworthy anymore (they symptom was an ever growing > lineal seperation of plated media away from the substrate). I didn't > bother upgrading to later version of SpinRite because I'd just go buy > another hard disk for [nearly] the same price. SpinRite makes sense > as a utility in your toolbox when you have many hosts to maintain. > > Some hard disk manufactures provide a free diagnostic utility you can > download from their web site. You identified a brand for your > computer (and the huge Inspiron family of products instead of a > particular model), NOT the hard disk manufacturer, so your "details" > were missing. Seagate has their Seagate SeaTools. Maxtor had their > diagnostic utility but got gobbled up by Seagate. > > http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/ -- Thanks & B'rgds, Uncle Vinnie
From: VanguardLH on 11 Aug 2010 16:49 Uncle Vinnie wrote: > Here are the 2 things, details, not in my initial inquiry: It is an > Inspiron 1525, the drive is WD3200BEVT (Scorpio Blue). Western Digitals > software came back with a pass for SMART. However, it failed running a quick > test, and hung doing the in depth test. Did you run the utility from a bootable floppy, CD, or USB drive? If you ran it within Windows then you don't know if there is some software or malware causing the problem with the diagnostic tool. You want to use the diagnostics own bootable OS to run under that rather than under the suspect OS. I don't know how fully WD supports the S.M.A.R.T. specification to know if it will reliably indicate every possible failure for a hard disk. In fact, I've seen users note SMART warnings which were bogus and they were using their hard disks for another 2-3 years, or longer. Not all SMART events are critical. SMART tries to predict failure based on some measurable statistics but that doesn't mean prediction is absolutely perfect or that all measurements can detect all types of drive failures. On of the uses of SpinRite is to realign the sectors on the platters to reduce errors reading them. This happens with all magnetic media where positioning is magnetically encoded. As drives warm and cool and get shocked or over time, the heads may not be exactly in the best position to read the data. Also, all magnetism has a term of retentivity. That is, the dipoles used to record the magnetic flux are under stress and what to realign. Data that has not been accessed for a long time will wane in its strength and eventually become unreadable. That's why floppies or other magnetic media, including hard disks, that have been storage for years might no longer be readable. Magnetic storage is not everlasting storage. By reading the bytes, clearing the sector, and rewriting them you force a new alignment of the dipoles for increased strenth and more reliable reading. That is, you need to refresh the data. Often there are files left on a hard disk which don't get accessed (and written over) for such a long time that the recording becomes weak. SpinRite helps with that by refreshing the data. There are a lots of problems on hard disks that SpinRite will detect (and fix) that SMART will not predict. But SpinRite costs money to acquire so if cloning to a new hard disk works then it is probably your best immediate fix. Of course, it's possible that SpinRite fixes that ailing old hard disk to make it new again and you could use it for many more years or decades. Your choice. You could replace a circuit board or you could buy a soldering iron to repair the cold solder joints. One fixes now but only once. Once probably fixes now and is reusable later. It's not like you have to blindly buy SpinRite and hope it helps fix your ailing hard disk. They have a money-back guarantee; see: http://www.grc.com/cs/licenseinfo.htm If it doesn't help, get a refund and move on to buying a replacement hard disk and cloning. > They do have a clone utility, do you think it would accurately clone this > drive, 4 partitions, running Vista? It's apparant I need to focus on > getting the drive replaced. You can but try. When you get the replacement hard disk, see if their cloning program works. Regardless of whose cloner you use, if it doesn't work means that you cannot clone the drive successfully (which means you're stuck paying $1500 to have a lab recover the files if they really are that important to you). From WD's download pages, they give you a stripped version of Acronis TrueImage. I use that and it's very good; however, I use it for image backups and have not used it to clone a hard disk. I've not had any problems restoring from the images so I suspect their cloning function should work well. If the cloning fails, you'll probably have to get SpinRite or toss the old drive and start with a fresh install of the OS on a new hard disk and hope you can retrieve your data files from other sources.
From: Paul on 11 Aug 2010 18:27
Uncle Vinnie wrote: > Thanks for your reply. > Here are the 2 things, details, not in my initial inquiry: It is an > Inspiron 1525, the drive is WD3200BEVT (Scorpio Blue). Western Digitals > software came back with a pass for SMART. However, it failed running a quick > test, and hung doing the in depth test. > > They do have a clone utility, do you think it would accurately clone this > drive, 4 partitions, running Vista? It's apparant I need to focus on > getting the drive replaced. > Vanguard seems to like the idea of playing with it. I say replace it and move on. It costs $50 to put a new drive in there. Your drive is currently showing bad spots. The failing quick test is warning enough. And if you don't hurry and finish this, the next thing you know, the drive will no longer be responding. Cloning utilities work on the premise that the source device is in perfect condition. They don't necessarily deal well with errors. The thing is, the hard drive also plays a part in this. The firmware in the drive, has a very long timeout constant (to the point of being technically absurd), for an attempt to read a sector. It might go anywhere from five to fifteen seconds, before declaring it cannot read the sector. If you have hundreds of thousands of bad sectors, a normal backup or cloning operation will never finish. It would take too long, for all those timeouts to occur. This article discusses some approaches, when the drive is in serious trouble. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk "The best method: Antonio Diaz's GNU 'ddrescue' " # first, grab most of the error-free areas in a hurry: ./ddrescue -n /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log # then try to recover as much of the dicey areas as possible: ./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log "dd" is a sector by sector approach. It copies the disk, without regard to whether the file system is readable or not. Other cloning approaches, are file-by-file, which requires a fully functional file system, if you expect to get all the files. With the "dd" approach, the idea is to physically copy as much as possible, such that you can attempt recovery at your leisure later. When a process like that is finished, the file system is still by definition "damaged". Any sector which could not be read, and was replaced by a sector full of zeros, is potentially a problem. If that falls in precisely the wrong place, a whole directory on the file system could disappear, as an example. But when you're in serious trouble, you take what you can get. If you're reasonably confident that a normal backup is getting all of what is important on the drive, then you don't need to read that web page. If you think major portions are missing, then you'd better get hopping, before the drive is dead. I had a drive once, where I got a warning late at night. I knew I needed to backup immediately, but I was tired, so I switched off and went to bed. Next day, the drive was dead. Don't let that happen to you! You can connect the new hard drive, to your computer, with either a USB to SATA/IDE adapter cable kit, or use an external hard drive enclosure with USB interface. Either of those will allow you to transfer data off the drive, onto the new hard drive. My procedure would be slightly different than that. I would make two copies of the data, like this. bad_drive --> first_copy (two passes ddrescue if necessary) first_copy --> second_copy (using perhaps a second computer if you want) chkdsk(first_copy) (CHKDSK could make a huge mess. If it does, your next step is second_copy --> first_copy) The emphasis there, is to do as good a job as possible, getting the data off the drive. Then make sure you have two copies. Use repair tools, such as CHKDSK, on one copy only. If it is obvious it can't be repaired that way, at least you have enough copies of the original data, to continue doing recovery work. But if the original dies, then you're stuck with $$$ data recovery services. Paul |