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Old October 31st 17, 02:41 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-8
Mayayana
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Posts: 6,438
Default Asus X550J laptop

"philo" wrote

| I was able to test RAM. That checked out. I ended
| up installing it into a Win7 box and running Hiren's
| boot disk. The WD diagnostic came out with error 7
| and quit. BootIt sees all the partitions, but the data
| on them seems to be limited. Chckdsk retrieved all sorts
| of things on the Windows partition but couldn't access
| any of the others.
| At this point I'm thinking there must be a problem
| with the hard disk.
|
| Yes, indeed it does sound like a HD issue

On 2 separate runs from a boot disk the WD utility
came up with error 7 and then while doing a "media
scan", in preparation for a thorough check, it stopped
with error 225. Their error page says that means,
"Too many errors to continue" and advises getting
a new disk.

Meanwhile various tools said that it passed a
SMART scan.

This whole thing has got me to check out SMART for
perhaps the third time, and I've come away with the
same impressions I've had in the past: It seems to be
of little value and I've yet to find a clear explanation
of how to interpret it. People recommend a Wikipedia
page, but that's not very helpful. Even the categories
reported vary between tools.

" the research showed that a large proportion (56%)
of the failed drives failed without recording any count
in the "four strong S.M.A.R.T. warnings" identified as
scan errors"
"36% of drives failed without recording any S.M.A.R.T.
error at all, except the temperature, meaning that
S.M.A.R.T. data alone was of limited usefulness in
anticipating failures."

I'm still very curious about how the disk could die in
3 years, but statistically that's not unheard of. And
I don't know how it was used. I guess the only thing
I can do is to reinstall and try to minimize unnecessary
background junk when I do the setup. That's the one
aspect that's got me suspicious. When I search for
links about hard disk trouble I seem to find a lot of
complaints from people about ceaseless activity, which
they eventually trace to some unnecessary 3rd-party
applet.


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