Bad Sectors

Arno wrote:

I found both Kafka and Hesse to be exceedingly boring and often
obvious. Quite a waste of time. Did not try Sartre.

Hesse is considered one of the greatest existential writers ever so
disagree with your comment greatly. I have read almost all of his books.
If you find it boring then it is because you don't have the intellect
for it.

What it takes is intelligence to recognize it is actually a
difficult problem (which is rather hard for many people, obviously)
and experience to give intelligence something to work with.
Knowledge does not really come into it besides that. otherwise
you could just read up oh how to do it.

And anyone can read up on how to decipher the SMART data. Doesn't take a
rocket scientist to do that.

to irritate you?

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"Arno" wrote in message
...
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage David B. wrote:
you don't say

What is the point of your postings so far?

Arno


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"Arno" wrote in message
...
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage David B. wrote:
Don't really need it, by the time a PC hits my bench the drive is
usually
to
the point where even the geek squad could tell it's bad.

Well, there is "bad" and "bad". Not all storege failures
are due to a bad drive. It can also be interface errors, bad
mounting, a marginal PSU. And the drive can have bad secotrs,
seek problems, can have died from heat, etc.

Arno

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"Arno" wrote in message
...
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage David B. wrote:
A smart report is useless, more often than not when I find a bad hard
drive.
smart believes there is no problem with the drive, it's unreliable at
best.

Nobody said to look at the "smart status", which is pretty useless.
Hovever the concrete values of the individual SMART attributes are
not. Seems you are not using 99% of what SMART offers.

Arno




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"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
Gary wrote:
What does it usually mean when I run a disk scan for bad sectors on
c
drive and the result is "Windows was unable to complete the disk
scan"

The symptom is a blue screen saying that there is most likely a bad
piece
of hardware.

Download the free Everest utilities, from the following website:

http://www.lavalys.com/

Run the Storage - SMART report on the appropriate hard drive, and
post
the results to your reply.

Yousuf Khan


--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:

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----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans


--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:

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338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans


--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:

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----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Cronos wrote:
Arno wrote:

I found both Kafka and Hesse to be exceedingly boring and often
obvious. Quite a waste of time. Did not try Sartre.

Hesse is considered one of the greatest existential writers ever so
disagree with your comment greatly. I have read almost all of his books.
If you find it boring then it is because you don't have the intellect
for it.

Not really. My problem is that I don't like the style and
that the ideas were not new to me. So no entertainment value
and no insight value, hence boring and a waste of time for me.
This is not to imply his writing generally is, just for me it
was. Should have qualified that, sorry.

What it takes is intelligence to recognize it is actually a
difficult problem (which is rather hard for many people, obviously)
and experience to give intelligence something to work with.
Knowledge does not really come into it besides that. otherwise
you could just read up oh how to do it.

And anyone can read up on how to decipher the SMART data. Doesn't take a
rocket scientist to do that.

Actually you cannot read it up. Well, you can, but mostly in
the archives of this group, as the actual meaning differs by
drive and environmental conditions. The part that takes
intelligence is to find out whether the meaning for a similar
drive is duplicated or not and how a specific drive behaves.


Arno
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Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
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Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

Cronos

The version you are referring to is 4, whereas an earlier version still
available is Freeware.


--


Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Cronos wrote:
Gerry wrote:
Cronos

You were saying -"HDTune is no longer free"?
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4130.html



I just checked the author's site and it says "free trial" so is still
free but there is a pay for pro version too with advanced features.
Calling it a "trial" threw me off because that implies it is just a
time limited version but in fact it is not and is free forever. He
should change it to read 'Free Version'.

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

On 21 Jan 2010 18:30:49 GMT, Arno put finger to
keyboard and composed:

Indeed. And so far the only pice of software I know that is halfway
competent in this area. The rest just gives you plain data
without interpretation.

IME, some of the worst SMART tools are the ones where the author has
offered his own, often incorrect, interpretation without supplying the
actual raw data so that we can make our own judgments.

For example, the author of HD Tune doesn't appear to understand that
raw attribute values are 48-bit numbers rather than 32-bit. HD Tune
will therefore sometimes report negative decimal numbers for the "LBAs
Read and Written" attributes.

PCWizard's author only quotes the lowest 20 bits, and has no idea how
Seagate's Seek Error Rate and Raw Read Error Rate numbers are encoded.
Therefore a score of 60 for the Seek Error Rate is given a low health
assessment whereas in reality it usually reflects error-free
performance.

Some attribute values make no sense in decimal format. Their true
meaning is often only visible when expressed in hexadecimal.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Franc Zabkar wrote:
On 21 Jan 2010 18:30:49 GMT, Arno put finger to
keyboard and composed:

Indeed. And so far the only pice of software I know that is halfway
competent in this area. The rest just gives you plain data
without interpretation.

IME, some of the worst SMART tools are the ones where the author has
offered his own, often incorrect, interpretation without supplying the
actual raw data so that we can make our own judgments.

True, of course. Wrong interpretations are worse than none at all.

For example, the author of HD Tune doesn't appear to understand that
raw attribute values are 48-bit numbers rather than 32-bit. HD Tune
will therefore sometimes report negative decimal numbers for the "LBAs
Read and Written" attributes.

Urgh!

PCWizard's author only quotes the lowest 20 bits, and has no idea how
Seagate's Seek Error Rate and Raw Read Error Rate numbers are encoded.
Therefore a score of 60 for the Seek Error Rate is given a low health
assessment whereas in reality it usually reflects error-free
performance.

Well, I think I still do not undertsand the seek error rate attribute,
but at least I know that I do not understand it. This will likely
cause poeple to toss complety healthy disks. Not good.

Some attribute values make no sense in decimal format. Their true
meaning is often only visible when expressed in hexadecimal.

Indeed.

Arno

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Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
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Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

On 22 Jan 2010 09:43:07 GMT, Arno put finger to
keyboard and composed:

Well, I think I still do not undertsand the seek error rate attribute,

Here are two examples for two Seagate ST3500630AS drives:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED
WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE

7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 035 024 030 Pre-fail
Always In_the_past 54443054162961

7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 059 048 030 Pre-fail
Always - 1507770244954


Convert the raw decimal attribute values to hex:

54443054162961 = 0x318402e76411 (drive A)
1507770244954 = 0x015f0e1c1f5a (drive B)

AIUI, the number of seek errors is stored in the uppermost 16 bits of
the 48-bit attribute value, and the total number of seeks is stored in
the lower 32 bits.

So for drive A,

# seek errors = 0x3184
# total seeks = 0x02e76411

The normalised attribute value is logarithmic and appears to be
calculated as follows:

Normalised value = -10 log (seek errors/total seeks)

If the number of seek errors is 0, then use a value of 1.

For drive A, this works out as ...

-10 x log(0x3184 / 0x02e76411) = 35.8471493

For drive B it is ...

-10 x log(0x015f / 0x0e1c1f5a) = 58.2893528

Not exactly right, but very close ...

The worst case value of 24 corresponds to an error rate of ...

-10 ^ 2.4 = 1/251

.... ie one error in every 250 seeks.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:39:03 +1100, Franc Zabkar
put finger to keyboard and composed:

The worst case value of 24 corresponds to an error rate of ...

-10 ^ 2.4 = 1/251

Sorry, that should be ...

10 ^ (-2.4)

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Franc Zabkar wrote:
On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:39:03 +1100, Franc Zabkar
put finger to keyboard and composed:

The worst case value of 24 corresponds to an error rate of ...

-10 ^ 2.4 = 1/251

Sorry, that should be ...

10 ^ (-2.4)

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Thanks, noted and archived in my doc collocetion.

Arno

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Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
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Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans