A bit suspicious

[ptonsparky]

My newest laptop is about 4 years old, IIRC. The mfg extended warranty recently ran out and I did not renew it, but danged if, now, the mfgs diagnostic software hasn't detected a problem with the hard drive. No other information is given. Just that alert. Real helpful. Seems a bit suspicious. What other test or utility can I run to confirm or deny a problem?

 

[Smart $]

You didn't give us a whole lot of info to go on... hmy:

https://www.google.com/search?q=har...1&sourceid=chrome&espvd=215&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

First priority though is to do a complete backup to an external drive (if you haven't already). Do not overwrite any previous backups just in case the data is corrupt.

Second, verify the hard drive is readily available and/or replaceable locally. If not, and if you're handy with this stuff, get a replacement on the way... that is, if you're not planning on getting another computer entirely any time soon

 

[ptonsparky]

You didn't give us a whole lot of info to go on... hmy:

https://www.google.com/search?q=har...1&sourceid=chrome&espvd=215&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

First priority though is to do a complete backup to an external drive (if you haven't already). Do not overwrite any previous backups just in case the data is corrupt.

Second, verify the hard drive is readily available and/or replaceable locally. If not, and if you're handy with this stuff, get a replacement on the way... that is, if you're not planning on getting another computer entirely any time soon

Replacement was not the plan.:weeping:

While doing some of the included checks/updates we locked up. Grrr.

 

[Sierrasparky]

I have to say that the industry claims that the useful life of a HDD is roughly 4 years.
I generally replace my drives on such a schedule. It's not worth the hastle.
A new drive costs around a 100 bucks for a lappy.

 

[cadpoint]

Norton will look at your HD for free.

 

[ptonsparky]

I have to say that the industry claims that the useful life of a HDD is roughly 4 years.
I generally replace my drives on such a schedule. It's not worth the hastle.
A new drive costs around a 100 bucks for a lappy.

Is there a way to mirror the old drive & just slap in the new? Is it better left to someone that would prefer doing that vs "a poke in the eye with a sharp stick"?

 

[Smart $]

Is there a way to mirror the old drive & just slap in the new? Is it better left to someone that would prefer doing that vs "a poke in the eye with a sharp stick"?

If the old drive failed, whether in part or completely, how do you propose to mirror it... successfully?

That's why I said earlier first priority is to do a complete backup...

PS: If you're a super techy, you can remove the discs and exchange them with a functioning drive... but most drives today aren't made to make this easy... if at all.

 

[ptonsparky]

If the old drive failed, whether in part or completely, how do you propose to mirror it... successfully?

That's why I said earlier first priority is to do a complete backup...

PS: If you're a super techy, you can remove the discs and exchange them with a functioning drive... but most drives today aren't made to make this easy... if at all.

It hasn't failed...yet. I have replaced/added drives on desktops. Laptop...nope. Call to my tech guru has been made.

 

[zbang]

Is there a way to mirror the old drive & just slap in the new? Is it better left to someone that would prefer doing that vs "a poke in the eye with a sharp stick"?

Yes and yes. There are various tools that will mirror/clone a drive, but.... I'm not aware of any that work (well) under windows, and a new drive will almost certainly be larger than the old one, so you may have to adjust a few things. Biggest problem is often connecting the new drive to the laptop such that you can actually make the copy. I've done this dance a few times, but take the drive out of the laptop, plug it and the new one into a handy linux desktop system, and clone from there.

A quick check revealed http://lifehacker.com/5839753/the-best-disk-cloning-app-for-windows and http://www.pcworld.com/article/2029832/backing-up-your-entire-drive-cloning-vs-imaging.html which both seem sensible.

 

[qcroanoke]

My newest laptop is about 4 years old, IIRC. The mfg extended warranty recently ran out and I did not renew it, but danged if, now, the mfgs diagnostic software hasn't detected a problem with the hard drive. No other information is given. Just that alert. Real helpful. Seems a bit suspicious. What other test or utility can I run to confirm or deny a problem?

I take mine to a professional.
He knows what he is looking for. I don't.

 

[Rick Christopherson]

It hasn't failed...yet. I have replaced/added drives on desktops. Laptop...nope. Call to my tech guru has been made.

They do make kits that will use a laptop internal drive and make it a standard USB external drive. If you do this, you might be able to recover the data and possibly even the drive, depending on what is wrong. (P.S. This also allows you to analyze the drive when it is NOT running your operating system.)

If I was in your position (and I have been with desktop drives), the very first thing I would do before even trying to analyze the drive is to get everything of value off of it first (using option above). "Move" the data files to a different drive. Don't use the Copy/Paste. By using the Move command, you will know what was successfully moved because it will only be removed from the old drive after it was successfully placed on the new drive. If you use Copy/Paste/Delete and the operation fails, you would have to manually compare old and new drives to see where the failure occurred and which files didn't make it.

When doing this move, take the files in reasonably small chunks. Do just one directory at a time unless it is a large directory. If it's large, take a dozen or two files at a time until the directory is empty. If you keep getting errors while moving a particular directory, then you might have to move one file at a time until you can identify which file was causing the actual failure.

After you have removed everything you can, then you can try to analyze or repair the drive. With fewer files on the drive there will be a better chance of getting it repaired unless it is a hardware failure. Keep in mind that some data problems can be so significant that they leave symptoms of being hardware failures.

Even if the drive does get fully repaired and appears to function, I would still be cautious of trusting it. Go ahead and use it as the main drive, but be prepared for it to fully fail in such a way that nothing can be recovered (i.e. keep backups of critical data).

 

[Rick Christopherson]

By the way, regarding cloning the drive, instead of getting some aftermarket software, go to the drive manufacturer's website. They probably have free software for all of the maintenance and cloning functions you need. It will also be a lot more reliable since it is coming from the experts themselves.

Western Digital has/had "Lifeguard" tools for download, and they are not limited to only WD drives. I used this software to recover a Seagate drive last year. It let me clone a failing 500Gb drive over to a new 2Tb drive without forcing me to use a partition on the new drive. I successfully transferred the operating system to the new 2Tb drive, and then it also successfully repaired the original 500Gb drive that was seriously failing. The 500Gb drive is still in service, but because I don't trust it, it is limited to a redundant backup (I have about 8Tb of drives in this box.)

 

[Besoeker]

Is there a way to mirror the old drive & just slap in the new? Is it better left to someone that would prefer doing that vs "a poke in the eye with a sharp stick"?

Earlier this year, yes still 2013, I got a new laptop. Took the hard disk out of the old one, slotted it into an external hard drive station, and copied it via USB on the the drive in the laptop.
It was a lot of data so it took a while. But it was relatively painless.

The new machine has more recent versions of the common applications so, in some cases I had to tell it to recognise older files.
Other than that, not too many issues.

 

[GoldDigger]

For you lucky people with Macs, Carbon Copy Cloner is a great program and it automatically takes care of the sometimes obscure Linux and OS X specific actions required to make an external drive or a separate internal partition bootable.

 

[Fulthrotl]

Is there a way to mirror the old drive & just slap in the new? Is it better left to someone that would prefer doing that vs "a poke in the eye with a sharp stick"?

if it's OSX, yes. effortless. carbon copy cloner, takes an hour for 300 gigs of data and OS.

if it's windows, well...... yes, bit it's a bit of a PITA.
the problem is the bootloader... i've not done a windows one in a long
time, so i'll not get into specifics, but if you google norton ghost
or cloning windows boot drive, you'll get some links to get you there.

 

[Smart $]

I fail to see why one would go through the cloning process if they have a complete Windows backup of the affected drive(s). Granted I've only had a catastrophic failure once in the past five years on this machine... because I run a 4-drive raid 10 configuration and just happened to lose two mirrored drives before I could get the first replaced and rebuilt (actually the second failed just as I was preparing to replace the first GRRRR). I replaced the two failed drives, partitioned, and restored via backup. Still running Vista on the original install. hmy:

PS: FWIW, I've had the Intel raid controller in my pooter report drives as failed and replaced them. Put them in an eSATA drive after replacing, run manufacturer (not Intel) diagnostics with a clean bill of health. Have even put them back into the raid configuration when another drive was reported as failed, and they worked without a hitch... until the next failure report. So it's not always the drive that fails. Sometimes it's the diagnostics.

 

[winnie]

The warning might have been generated by SMART monitoring software.

Hard drives make extensive use of error correcting codes. This means that redundant information is stored along with the desired data so that read errors can be detected, either leading to re-read attempts or error correction.

Many drives are capable of monitoring things such as the amount of error correction they have to do, the number of sectors that have been moved because of repeated errors, etc. This information can be used to detect impending failure prior to the loss of data.

The alert may have been generated by the monitoring software...and it might even be generating the alert based solely on the age of the drive, or it might be reporting real detected errors.

-Jon

 

[GoldDigger]

The warning might have been generated by SMART monitoring software.

Hard drives make extensive use of error correcting codes. This means that redundant information is stored along with the desired data so that read errors can be detected, either leading to re-read attempts or error correction.

Many drives are capable of monitoring things such as the amount of error correction they have to do, the number of sectors that have been moved because of repeated errors, etc. This information can be used to detect impending failure prior to the loss of data.

The alert may have been generated by the monitoring software...and it might even be generating the alert based solely on the age of the drive, or it might be reporting real detected errors.

-Jon

+1
And those errors may be intermittent enough that they do not show up on a one time test. (Actual bad sectors, containing bad data, are all that can be seen by a test suite that does not re-write already used sectors.)
And many of the errors detected by the SMART hardware in the drive are pre-failure indications. Not sure what the situation is now, but Windows used to retry to read or write a sector as many as 50 times without letting you know as long as the last try was successful.
So most likely the errors were ones that did not affect the actual data on the disk, just access to it, and the SMART data, stored in the drive, was not read until the next SMART diagnostic run.
BTW, I do not know of any SMART hardware that is accessible from a USB-connected drive. A big negative factor for using that kind of drive for anything but backup.

 

[ptonsparky]

I take mine to a professional.
He knows what he is looking for. I don't.

That is what I did. About the same sized SS drive, less than $500 installed with a bit more memory and upgraded to 64 bit. I had to reload my specialty software, but they transferred all the existing data. Takes me longer to type in the password than to boot up. Granted I will win no contests with my typing skills. Worth the $$.

 

[tshea]

I take mine to a professional.
He knows what he is looking for. I don't.

I had her install a SSD--Solid State Drive. Talk about almost instant start up!