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I formatted that bad drive



 
 
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  #1  
Old December 10th 17, 05:06 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
No_Name
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 177
Default I formatted that bad drive

I'm speaking about that bad drive (partition) that caused me to lose a
lot of data and could not be repaired. I finally re-downloaded as much
of the data as I could after saving what was salvagable from the drive.
I have now recreated the original drive, minus around 15 or 20 files
that can not be replaced. Since I no longer needed to read that
partition, and it contained a few folders that would not allow me to
delete them, I decided to format it, before I toss it in the garbage.

I did a FULL format on it, and it formatted just fine, said there were
no errors or bad segments. I ran Scandisk on it (win98), and that too
said "no problems". (I only used the quick scandisk, not the one that
takes around 12 hours).

After all that trouble, I cant believe this drive checks out good. But I
wont trust it, so I am going to just trash it. But I did want to see
what a Format would do to it anyhow. I never expected it to work, in
fact I was waiting for the format to fail mid stream.....

Ads
  #2  
Old December 10th 17, 06:19 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default I formatted that bad drive

wrote:
I'm speaking about that bad drive (partition) that caused me to lose a
lot of data and could not be repaired. I finally re-downloaded as much
of the data as I could after saving what was salvagable from the drive.
I have now recreated the original drive, minus around 15 or 20 files
that can not be replaced. Since I no longer needed to read that
partition, and it contained a few folders that would not allow me to
delete them, I decided to format it, before I toss it in the garbage.

I did a FULL format on it, and it formatted just fine, said there were
no errors or bad segments. I ran Scandisk on it (win98), and that too
said "no problems". (I only used the quick scandisk, not the one that
takes around 12 hours).

After all that trouble, I cant believe this drive checks out good. But I
wont trust it, so I am going to just trash it. But I did want to see
what a Format would do to it anyhow. I never expected it to work, in
fact I was waiting for the format to fail mid stream.....


Both Seagate and Western Digital have a utility for
carrying out the "short" and "long" drive test. You
can use that for testing a drive. They should also
mark the test cases according to whether they're
data safe or not. A read-only test does not affect
your data. There are also some write tests they carry out,
and you'd want the drive data stored elsewhere when
taking any chances.

In addition to active tests like that, a utility
that reads out S.M.A.R.T statistics will give some
idea of expected drive life. The Reallocated Sector Count,
is the one I use. A Data value of 0 means there are
no problems that the drive chooses to tell you about yet.
Once that value goes non-zero, the more writes you do,
the more chances for making the indicator worse.
If you see the value there changing rapidly in the
wrong direction, then that's a hint you should get
your data off the drive immediately.

S.M.A.R.T is not perfect - if disk trouble involves
a "bad patch", the health indicators will all be green.
(I had this happen once, and that's how I know.)
It's when the errors involves are smeared over the
disk, that the health turning yellow or red on a
key indicator, is a good indication of trouble.
Some brand new hard drives, have a couple yellow
entries already, but this is caused by mis-interpretation
of the data values coming from the drive. Once you understand
which indicators are "reliable", SMART makes a convenient
check.

But doing actual tests provides feedback too, and you
can try that if you have any questions about a drive.
The drive test utilities are available for both DOS
and Windows, but I'm seeing problems with the DOS version
not being able to boot on modern computers. The Windows
version is then the one I rely on.

Paul
  #3  
Old December 10th 17, 07:30 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
mike[_10_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,073
Default I formatted that bad drive

On 12/10/2017 9:19 AM, Paul wrote:
wrote:
I'm speaking about that bad drive (partition) that caused me to lose a
lot of data and could not be repaired. I finally re-downloaded as much
of the data as I could after saving what was salvagable from the drive.
I have now recreated the original drive, minus around 15 or 20 files
that can not be replaced. Since I no longer needed to read that
partition, and it contained a few folders that would not allow me to
delete them, I decided to format it, before I toss it in the garbage.
I did a FULL format on it, and it formatted just fine, said there were
no errors or bad segments. I ran Scandisk on it (win98), and that too
said "no problems". (I only used the quick scandisk, not the one that
takes around 12 hours).
After all that trouble, I cant believe this drive checks out good. But I
wont trust it, so I am going to just trash it. But I did want to see
what a Format would do to it anyhow. I never expected it to work, in
fact I was waiting for the format to fail mid stream.....


Both Seagate and Western Digital have a utility for
carrying out the "short" and "long" drive test. You
can use that for testing a drive. They should also
mark the test cases according to whether they're
data safe or not. A read-only test does not affect
your data. There are also some write tests they carry out,
and you'd want the drive data stored elsewhere when
taking any chances.

In addition to active tests like that, a utility
that reads out S.M.A.R.T statistics will give some
idea of expected drive life. The Reallocated Sector Count,
is the one I use. A Data value of 0 means there are
no problems that the drive chooses to tell you about yet.
Once that value goes non-zero, the more writes you do,
the more chances for making the indicator worse.
If you see the value there changing rapidly in the
wrong direction, then that's a hint you should get
your data off the drive immediately.

S.M.A.R.T is not perfect - if disk trouble involves
a "bad patch", the health indicators will all be green.
(I had this happen once, and that's how I know.)
It's when the errors involves are smeared over the
disk, that the health turning yellow or red on a
key indicator, is a good indication of trouble.
Some brand new hard drives, have a couple yellow
entries already, but this is caused by mis-interpretation
of the data values coming from the drive. Once you understand
which indicators are "reliable", SMART makes a convenient
check.

But doing actual tests provides feedback too, and you
can try that if you have any questions about a drive.
The drive test utilities are available for both DOS
and Windows, but I'm seeing problems with the DOS version
not being able to boot on modern computers. The Windows
version is then the one I rely on.

Paul

I'm partial to HDDscan.
Gives a graph of speed vs address.
I've got drives that chkdsk says are clean, but HDDscan shows
a bunch of places where the response time is very slow, presumably
due to multiple reads of nearly bad sectors.
  #4  
Old December 11th 17, 04:49 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,679
Default I formatted that bad drive

In message , mike
writes:
On 12/10/2017 9:19 AM, Paul wrote:
wrote:
I'm speaking about that bad drive (partition) that caused me to lose a
lot of data and could not be repaired. I finally re-downloaded as much
of the data as I could after saving what was salvagable from the drive.


Thanks for keeping us informed. Glad you finally reached an endpoint.

I have now recreated the original drive, minus around 15 or 20 files
that can not be replaced. Since I no longer needed to read that
partition, and it contained a few folders that would not allow me to
delete them, I decided to format it, before I toss it in the garbage.


I think I would have too, just out of curiosity.

I did a FULL format on it, and it formatted just fine, said there were
no errors or bad segments. I ran Scandisk on it (win98), and that too
said "no problems". (I only used the quick scandisk, not the one that
takes around 12 hours).


Perhaps do that one, overnight or something?

After all that trouble, I cant believe this drive checks out good. But I
wont trust it, so I am going to just trash it. But I did want to see
what a Format would do to it anyhow. I never expected it to work, in
fact I was waiting for the format to fail mid stream.....

Paul and others: can you think of what might have been the reason for
James' experiences? I'd been thinking he definitely has a physical bad
patch; the fact that it was confined to one partition, with the other
two continuing to work fine, supported that. But (with reservations
depending on the outcome of the "long" Scandisk if he does it) it looks
like it might not be that after all. _Could_ it have been just some
weird form of data corruption?
[]
Paul

I'm partial to HDDscan.
Gives a graph of speed vs address.
I've got drives that chkdsk says are clean, but HDDscan shows
a bunch of places where the response time is very slow, presumably
due to multiple reads of nearly bad sectors.


Or, I think Paul has said, to where the drive's internal firmware has
"swapped in" a good sector for one that's been detected as bad; the
increase in response time being because extra head movements are
required to access those sectors, compared to the minimal amount needed
to just go through the drive in sequence as HDDscan does. And it's
usually points where the speed drop has a width and a flat bottom, and
obviously where it remains the same over successive runs; because of the
nature of the Windows OS, there are times during a run where Windows
decides to go off and do its own thing, but those should produce
downward spikes in the speed graph that are narrow, and not in the same
place on successive runs.

(Just out of interest - I've followed these discussions, but never
actually run it - how long does a scan take to produce one of these
graphs? [I presume it doesn't vary _that_ much with capacity, as bigger
drives tend to be faster - or?])
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Bread is lovely, don't get me wrong. But it's not cake. Or it's rubbish cake.
I always thought that bread needed more sugar and some icing. - Sarah Millican
(Radio Times 11-17 May 2013)
  #5  
Old December 11th 17, 10:28 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
mike[_10_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,073
Default I formatted that bad drive

On 12/10/2017 7:49 PM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , mike writes:
On 12/10/2017 9:19 AM, Paul wrote:
wrote:
I'm speaking about that bad drive (partition) that caused me to lose a
lot of data and could not be repaired. I finally re-downloaded as much
of the data as I could after saving what was salvagable from the drive.


Thanks for keeping us informed. Glad you finally reached an endpoint.

I have now recreated the original drive, minus around 15 or 20 files
that can not be replaced. Since I no longer needed to read that
partition, and it contained a few folders that would not allow me to
delete them, I decided to format it, before I toss it in the garbage.


I think I would have too, just out of curiosity.

I did a FULL format on it, and it formatted just fine, said there were
no errors or bad segments. I ran Scandisk on it (win98), and that too
said "no problems". (I only used the quick scandisk, not the one that
takes around 12 hours).


Perhaps do that one, overnight or something?

After all that trouble, I cant believe this drive checks out good.
But I
wont trust it, so I am going to just trash it. But I did want to see
what a Format would do to it anyhow. I never expected it to work, in
fact I was waiting for the format to fail mid stream.....

Paul and others: can you think of what might have been the reason for
James' experiences? I'd been thinking he definitely has a physical bad
patch; the fact that it was confined to one partition, with the other
two continuing to work fine, supported that. But (with reservations
depending on the outcome of the "long" Scandisk if he does it) it looks
like it might not be that after all. _Could_ it have been just some
weird form of data corruption?
[]
Paul

I'm partial to HDDscan.
Gives a graph of speed vs address.
I've got drives that chkdsk says are clean, but HDDscan shows
a bunch of places where the response time is very slow, presumably
due to multiple reads of nearly bad sectors.


Or, I think Paul has said, to where the drive's internal firmware has
"swapped in" a good sector for one that's been detected as bad; the
increase in response time being because extra head movements are
required to access those sectors, compared to the minimal amount needed
to just go through the drive in sequence as HDDscan does. And it's
usually points where the speed drop has a width and a flat bottom, and
obviously where it remains the same over successive runs; because of the
nature of the Windows OS, there are times during a run where Windows
decides to go off and do its own thing, but those should produce
downward spikes in the speed graph that are narrow, and not in the same
place on successive runs.

I'm talking about access times over a second.
Unlikely that those are seek times
to replaced sectors.

(Just out of interest - I've followed these discussions, but never
actually run it - how long does a scan take to produce one of these
graphs? [I presume it doesn't vary _that_ much with capacity, as bigger
drives tend to be faster - or?])

I never worried about it. Just turn it on and take a nap. It's only one
drive. Doesn't matter how long it takes.
  #6  
Old December 11th 17, 01:52 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Shadow
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,638
Default I formatted that bad drive

On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 03:49:43 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

(Just out of interest - I've followed these discussions, but never
actually run it - how long does a scan take to produce one of these
graphs? [I presume it doesn't vary _that_ much with capacity, as bigger
drives tend to be faster - or?])


4 1/2 hours for a 1GB drive (last time I did it)... but it
depends on hardware specs so take that with a pinch of salt.
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012
  #7  
Old December 11th 17, 10:17 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
No_Name
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 177
Default I formatted that bad drive

On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 03:49:43 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , mike
writes:
On 12/10/2017 9:19 AM, Paul wrote:
wrote:
I'm speaking about that bad drive (partition) that caused me to lose a
lot of data and could not be repaired. I finally re-downloaded as much
of the data as I could after saving what was salvagable from the drive.


Thanks for keeping us informed. Glad you finally reached an endpoint.


Yep, all I have to do now is copy my rebuilt partition to the computer
it belongs on. Because of Win98 not accessing many of these large
external hard drives, and that computer only having USB 1.1, I did the
whole rebuild on a portable drive. Now I'll plug the new drive and the
portable one into my XP machine to transfer everything over.

I have now recreated the original drive, minus around 15 or 20 files
that can not be replaced. Since I no longer needed to read that
partition, and it contained a few folders that would not allow me to
delete them, I decided to format it, before I toss it in the garbage.


I think I would have too, just out of curiosity.


I planned to do that, just for the heck of it.


I did a FULL format on it, and it formatted just fine, said there were
no errors or bad segments. I ran Scandisk on it (win98), and that too
said "no problems". (I only used the quick scandisk, not the one that
takes around 12 hours).


Perhaps do that one, overnight or something?


I thought of plugging it into a spare computer to run it. I cant use
this one meaning cant use the internet with that thing running, it slows
down the computer so much it's not usable. But if I run the tests on an
XP machine, I cant run scandisk, I have to use Chkdsk, or I could run
Norton Disk Doctor (if that program works on XP.... I never tried it).

Or, I suppose I could just install Win98 on a spare machine, thats easy
enough to do, and I have 5 or 6 small HDDS to install it on.

But this all seems senseless since I am going to trash that drive
anyhow. I just cant see myself trusting it again....


After all that trouble, I cant believe this drive checks out good. But I
wont trust it, so I am going to just trash it. But I did want to see
what a Format would do to it anyhow. I never expected it to work, in
fact I was waiting for the format to fail mid stream.....

Paul and others: can you think of what might have been the reason for
James' experiences? I'd been thinking he definitely has a physical bad
patch; the fact that it was confined to one partition, with the other
two continuing to work fine, supported that. But (with reservations
depending on the outcome of the "long" Scandisk if he does it) it looks
like it might not be that after all. _Could_ it have been just some
weird form of data corruption?


I really think Scandisk screwed it up more than anything. Scandisk seems
to be helpful "Most of the time", but I am sure it can screw up too.

However, I also question my IDE data cable. I initially replaced that
HDD with a 160gb drive, but that was before I learned that Win98 can not
support a drive larger than 120gb. (Actually 132gb). That drive
repeatedly kept running scandisk, and there was very little data on it
yet. I was only using it to save downloads at that point. I ordered some
of the 80 wire IDE cables from ebay, just to upgrade the cables, and
when I changed that cable, the problems seemed to stop/ However I also
got my 120gb drive in the mail about that same time and changed to that
drive instead. So, it's hard to know if the problem was the cable, or
having a drive too big for the OS.

[]
Paul

I'm partial to HDDscan.
Gives a graph of speed vs address.
I've got drives that chkdsk says are clean, but HDDscan shows
a bunch of places where the response time is very slow, presumably
due to multiple reads of nearly bad sectors.


Or, I think Paul has said, to where the drive's internal firmware has
"swapped in" a good sector for one that's been detected as bad; the
increase in response time being because extra head movements are
required to access those sectors, compared to the minimal amount needed
to just go through the drive in sequence as HDDscan does. And it's
usually points where the speed drop has a width and a flat bottom, and
obviously where it remains the same over successive runs; because of the
nature of the Windows OS, there are times during a run where Windows
decides to go off and do its own thing, but those should produce
downward spikes in the speed graph that are narrow, and not in the same
place on successive runs.

(Just out of interest - I've followed these discussions, but never
actually run it - how long does a scan take to produce one of these
graphs? [I presume it doesn't vary _that_ much with capacity, as bigger
drives tend to be faster - or?])


I've never run across that HDD SCAN program, I may give it a try, but
probably not on that bad drive. I think that drive and also that old
data cable earned a place in my garbage.I like to salvage old stuff, but
not something that caused me this much trouble...

By the way, I mentioned losing the 2011 NEC (Electric code book). I did
find that again, it's on archive.org.


  #8  
Old December 11th 17, 10:27 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
No_Name
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 177
Default I formatted that bad drive

On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 01:28:11 -0800, mike wrote:

(Just out of interest - I've followed these discussions, but never
actually run it - how long does a scan take to produce one of these
graphs? [I presume it doesn't vary _that_ much with capacity, as bigger
drives tend to be faster - or?])


I never worried about it. Just turn it on and take a nap. It's only one
drive. Doesn't matter how long it takes.


That's a long nap.... Running scandisk recently on a different 40gb
partition took 12 to 13 hours. In the meantime I could not use the
computer for much anything, because it ran so slow. But since I have
other computers, there is no reason to run it on the computer I use.
This is the only computer that will connect to the internet properly,
since I can only get a good connection with Win98. All my other
computers run XP. (But I have a few computers in the closet that I dont
use at all, and installing Win98 is quite easy).

I always wonder why it takes so frikkin long to run those tests???

Of course when Win98 was created, the largest HDDs were something like 6
ot 8 gb, from what I can recall.

  #10  
Old December 12th 17, 09:07 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default I formatted that bad drive

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message ,
writes:
On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 01:28:11 -0800, mike wrote:

(Just out of interest - I've followed these discussions, but never
actually run it - how long does a scan take to produce one of these
graphs? [I presume it doesn't vary _that_ much with capacity, as bigger
drives tend to be faster - or?])


I never worried about it. Just turn it on and take a nap. It's only
one
drive. Doesn't matter how long it takes.


That's a long nap.... Running scandisk recently on a different 40gb
partition took 12 to 13 hours. In the meantime I could not use the

[]
I always wonder why it takes so frikkin long to run those tests???

[]
Well, accessing every sector on a disc - doing some actual tests on it -
is going to take a while, and you can't get round it with tricks like
compression and so on.


"Verifying" a disk, doesn't even rely on checking the data.

The disk drive itself, has a Fire polynomial it uses for
error correction (a CRC check over each sector individually).
And that polynomial can tell the engine in there, that a
sector is unreadable. The response is, the disk tries *thousands*
of times, to read the sector, until the CRC value (Fire)
gives a correct result. If thousands of attempts never give
a good value, then up burbles a CRC error, for your
utility to consider.

If you wade through a bad patch, your read rate is one
sector every 15 seconds. Doing a little math will show
the process finished at t=infinity.

On a healthy disk, say the sustained read rate is 100MB/sec.
Well, the CRC check is nothing out of the ordinary, and
the disk can still read at 100MB/sec for the purposes of
surface verification. Again, a little math will show that
using the sustained rate, your little verification application
should have finished *long* ago.

What other things could a verification application be doing ?
You got me there. Maybe they're mining Ethereum with your
processor or something. CHKDSK verifies structure. And
there isn't much sense mixing file system structure
verification, with physical layer verification. So
it's probably not something like that.

If you have some strange utility like this, it should
be tested on a *healthy* disk, to establish a baseline
for overhead. Does it work at the sustained read rate
on a healthy disk ? Then, when you try it on a duff
disk, and the rate works out to 1MB/sec, you know
you've got some bad spots it's beating the **** outta.

Paul
 




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