I have a mess going

[Menno Hershberger]

Last June a lady brought me an HP Pavilion Slimline s3707cPC that was
producing strange random errors and I determined the 500Gb drive was
defective. The original OS was Vista. I was fortunate enough that I got
it cloned to a new drive before it gave out altogether. She had already
had the foresight to back up all her important documents to an external
terabyte drive. At this time she decided to upgrade to Windows 7. So she
bought a retail Windows 7 DVD and we totally wiped the Vista partition
and installed Windows 7. I need to point out that the cloned Vista
recovery partition remained intact. At the time her DVD drive would not
read the Windows 7 installation DVD so I installed a new DVD drive at the
same time. She was happy and loves Windows 7. On January 25th it starting
acting flaky again so she made a backup vhd file to the external hard
drive. This is something that she did within Windows 7. Then, of course,
she claims that her grandchildren had gotten on it and trashed it.
So THEN she discovers that the F11 restore function still worked and
restored the damn thing back to the original Vista installation.
Meanwhile her grandkids install all kinds of free antiviruses and fix-it
utilities plus all the junk weather crap, every kind of messenger
available, webcams, etc. and had it crippled again.
So she finally brought it back to me. It would still boot but it was a
mess. I was able to uninstall the biggest share of the antivirus stuff.
My first thought was to see if I could restore the "vhd" image from her
external drive. So I studied up on that and it appears that you have to
do that from within Windows 7. So now I decided to clone this drive to a
spare I have here just for safety purposes. But Acronis will not clone
it. "Clone Disk Failed." I tried more than once. So next I decide to run
scandisk on her drive from my shop computer. I started that last night
and it was up to about 60% of phase 1 and it started "File record segment
3723 is unreadable". This morning at 6:20 AM it is up to segment 10570.
Now if there are THAT many unreadable segments I don't know how it was
running at all. My original plan after I had it cloned was to go back and
put Windows 7 back on the drive and then try to restore her vhd backup
from the external drive. I have an idea chkdsk is in the process of
totalling out the hard drive. I am afraid to stop it at segment (now
10671) for fear that not letting it run its normal course will ruin it.
I'm running chkdsk under a command prompt on my shop computer (XP).
Any suggestions are welcome. I'd like to see her just buy a new computer.
But if she does that, will we be able to restore her vhd backup? If it
restores everything back to the way it was, then won't all the drivers be
messed up?
Further reasoning to talk her into a new one is that this one has always
run hot. Never hot enough to shut down, but the case is almost too hot to
touch. There's one fan on the processor and one in the power supply. Both
running quietly. The inside of the case is discolored (brownish black) in
places.
I have posted this rant in the Windows 7 group since that's the OS she
has the backup VHD for and what she wants back on it.
For anyone that made it this far, thanks for listening!
(up to 10866 now)

 

[Dave-UK]

She was happy and loves Windows 7. On January 25th it starting
acting flaky again so she made a backup vhd file to the external hard
drive. This is something that she did within Windows 7.

Why don't you boot the machine with a Win7 repair disk and restore the vhd image?

 

[Wolf K]

Last June a lady brought me an HP Pavilion Slimline s3707cPC that was
producing strange random errors and I determined the 500Gb drive was
defective. [snip tale of woe]

I'm confused: does the vhd backup contain data she hasn't yet backed up?
If so, I believe the only way to get it back is to install W7 on her
current machine using the original install DVD, and then restore the vhd
back up. The W7 installation is tied to the current hardware and so
AFAIK is the vhd backup. If reinstall is possible, I would immediately
back up all the new data onto the external drive.

But if the must-keep data is on the external drive, I'd agree with you:
buy a new computer. IMO there's real risk of fire there on the old
machine. In any case, it's running too hot.

If she wants a desktop again, I'd recommend a blank machine, and using
MS's friendly (?) customer support "migrate" the W7 install to the new
hardware. I haven't had to do this, so I don't know whether you should
keep the old machine until the migration has been OKed and done. You
can install it on a new system without MS's OK, but you won't be able to
update it, or so I've been told - I haven't migrated a Windows OS since
Win 2000.

OTOH, neat and powerful laptops are now available at a fraction of the
price she paid for her old machine.

A couple other points:
a) install a backup utility that will make incremental backups in the
background or at regular intervals.
b) Set up two accounts on W7: hers, which should be password protected;
and a Family account with limited privileges: eg, no installs of any new
software. If the grandkids want to play a new game, they'll have to make
a case, and then Gran can install it for them. And if they complain,
let them save their allowances until they have to buy their own
computer(s). Gran should under no circumstances give her password to the
grandchildren, of course. They will have good intentions, but good
intentions aren't enough to prevent stupidity.

Do I sound hard-nosed? Yup. Them's the rules on our machines when the
grandkids come to visit. My grand-daughter did save her pennies, and
bought my old Mac Powerbook (for a bargain price, of course).

HTH,
Wolf K.

 

[Rob]

Last June a lady brought me an HP Pavilion Slimline s3707cPC that was
producing strange random errors and I determined the 500Gb drive was
defective. [snip tale of woe]

I'm confused: does the vhd backup contain data she hasn't yet backed up?
If so, I believe the only way to get it back is to install W7 on her
current machine using the original install DVD, and then restore the vhd
back up. The W7 installation is tied to the current hardware and so
AFAIK is the vhd backup. If reinstall is possible, I would immediately
back up all the new data onto the external drive.

But if the must-keep data is on the external drive, I'd agree with you:
buy a new computer. IMO there's real risk of fire there on the old
machine. In any case, it's running too hot.

If she wants a desktop again, I'd recommend a blank machine, and using
MS's friendly (?) customer support "migrate" the W7 install to the new
hardware. I haven't had to do this, so I don't know whether you should
keep the old machine until the migration has been OKed and done. You can
install it on a new system without MS's OK, but you won't be able to
update it, or so I've been told - I haven't migrated a Windows OS since
Win 2000.

OTOH, neat and powerful laptops are now available at a fraction of the
price she paid for her old machine.

A couple other points:
a) install a backup utility that will make incremental backups in the
background or at regular intervals.
b) Set up two accounts on W7: hers, which should be password protected;
and a Family account with limited privileges: eg, no installs of any new
software. If the grandkids want to play a new game, they'll have to make
a case, and then Gran can install it for them. And if they complain, let
them save their allowances until they have to buy their own computer(s).
Gran should under no circumstances give her password to the
grandchildren, of course. They will have good intentions, but good
intentions aren't enough to prevent stupidity.

Do I sound hard-nosed? Yup. Them's the rules on our machines when the
grandkids come to visit. My grand-daughter did save her pennies, and
bought my old Mac Powerbook (for a bargain price, of course).

HTH,
Wolf K.

+1
Fix the cause not the symptom!

 

[Paul]

Last June a lady brought me an HP Pavilion Slimline s3707cPC that was
producing strange random errors and I determined the 500Gb drive was
defective. The original OS was Vista. I was fortunate enough that I got
it cloned to a new drive before it gave out altogether.

She had already had the foresight to back up all her important documents
to an external terabyte drive.

At this time she decided to upgrade to Windows 7. So she
bought a retail Windows 7 DVD and we totally wiped the Vista partition
and installed Windows 7. I need to point out that the cloned Vista
recovery partition remained intact. At the time her DVD drive would not
read the Windows 7 installation DVD so I installed a new DVD drive at the
same time. She was happy and loves Windows 7.

On January 25th it starting acting flaky again so she made a
backup vhd file to the external hard drive. This is something that
she did within Windows 7. Then, of course, she claims that her grandchildren
had gotten on it and trashed it.

So THEN she discovers that the F11 restore function still worked and
restored the damn thing back to the original Vista installation.

Meanwhile her grandkids install all kinds of free antiviruses and fix-it
utilities plus all the junk weather crap, every kind of messenger
available, webcams, etc. and had it crippled again.

So she finally brought it back to me. It would still boot but it was a
mess. I was able to uninstall the biggest share of the antivirus stuff.

My first thought was to see if I could restore the "vhd" image from her
external drive. So I studied up on that and it appears that you have to
do that from within Windows 7.

So now I decided to clone this drive to a
spare I have here just for safety purposes. But Acronis will not clone
it. "Clone Disk Failed." I tried more than once. So next I decide to run
scandisk on her drive from my shop computer.

I started that last night and it was up to about 60% of phase 1 and it
started "File record segment 3723 is unreadable". This morning at 6:20 AM
it is up to segment 10570. Now if there are THAT many unreadable segments
I don't know how it was running at all.

My original plan after I had it cloned was to go back and put Windows 7
back on the drive and then try to restore her vhd backup
from the external drive. I have an idea chkdsk is in the process of
totalling out the hard drive. I am afraid to stop it at segment (now
10671) for fear that not letting it run its normal course will ruin it.
I'm running chkdsk under a command prompt on my shop computer (XP).
Any suggestions are welcome. I'd like to see her just buy a new computer.
But if she does that, will we be able to restore her vhd backup? If it
restores everything back to the way it was, then won't all the drivers be
messed up?

Further reasoning to talk her into a new one is that this one has always
run hot. Never hot enough to shut down, but the case is almost too hot to
touch. There's one fan on the processor and one in the power supply. Both
running quietly. The inside of the case is discolored (brownish black) in
places.

I have posted this rant in the Windows 7 group since that's the OS she
has the backup VHD for and what she wants back on it.
For anyone that made it this far, thanks for listening!
(up to 10866 now)

Slimline s3707cPC
Original Vista.

cloned Vista recovery partition remained intact

Retail Windows 7 DVD, clean install

Backup Windows 7 to .vhd

Restored via F11 to Vista

Trashed by grandkids

Current effort

Clone existing system state, then restore Windows 7
Clone attempt with Acronis, fail at 60%. Oh Oh.
Run chkdsk (mistake)

*******

The step you missed, was backing up sector by sector, before running
chkdsk. Chkdsk can trash a badly damaged system, so if you knew
the file system was damaged, you'd copy anything of importance first,
then sector by sector to your shop disk. Then, if you want to run
chkdsk, and it runs amok, you can copy back the sector by sector
image. You could also use a file scavenger, to sweep the disk, but
if the disk is in bad shape, excessive seek operations could finish
it off and kill it. By comparison, a sector by sector copy for
safety purposes, is a sequential copy. The drive will still get warm,
but won't be shaken to death. This article, gives a free suggestion
for a damaged disk. Using this approach, gives some control of the
tradeoff of copy time versus completion. (Yes, this is a Linux
method - I don't know if there is a port available for Windows or not.)

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 dicy areas as possible:
./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

That method is two pass. First, it copies the easy to read sectors.
Then, it tried to get the ones that failed, with a certain retry level.
It uses a log to keep track of progress (I presume you can read the
log with a text editor, to see what it couldn't get). This captures
what info is available. Then, later, if you wanted, you could put a
new hard drive in the computer, and sector-by-sector it back, and
*then* run chkdsk, knowing that at least chkdsk repair attempts will
not be compromised by further written errors.

*******

Clues:

"System runs hot - computer case is hot to touch"

What will that do ? Fry the hard drive. Drive the lubricant out of
the FDB hard drive motor. Shorten drive life. Replacing the drive,
without solving the thermal problem, would be a waste of money.
The drive will only be tortured again.

First step, would be to run HDTune, and check the SMART stats.
If Reallocated Sector Count or Current Pending Sector Count are
non-zero in the Data columm, then you know you're already in trouble.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe (free version, good for diags)

HDTune will also display the current hard drive temperature (that
is, if the drive was still inside the customer machine). Mine is
22C (room temp) right now, due to direct room air cooling method.
Not all drives have a thermistor inside (like my 11 year old 4GB drive
won't have it), but any recent system hard drive will have it.

If the listed drive temp is hitting 60C, then you have a good idea
why the drive is dying. Hint - it's not the fault of the drive
manufacturer. Some computer cases have bad cooling to begin with.
The hard drive is in a "dead zone" inside the case. I've seen some
miserable designs in that respect. I added forced air to the
drive bays on my current machine, which is why the drives list
so cool.

*******

If the machine is that hot, you have to identify the source of the heat.
If the heat is around the power supply area, the supply could have a
problem. A new, 80%+ efficient power supply, will immediately reduce the
heat output. You could also bring out your shop AC/DC ammeter, and proceed
to make measurements, to make sure the cause of the heating is not
a partial short circuit somewhere. You can buy AC/DC clamp-on ammeters,
which don't require cutting any wires to make measurements. They work
off the magnetic field around the wire. As long as the main power cable
is not fully sheathed, you can stick the jaws around sets of wires and
make current measurements. You gather the wires together in common
colored sets (like, grab all the red wires on the main cable) and
put them inside the jaws of the meter, and the meter will "sum" the
DC current. There are AC only and AC/DC versions of these, and you want
one with DC capability for computer usage. In two minutes, I can
completely characterize the machine, and get a feeling for it.
If the cable sheathing prevents me from getting at the wires,
I'm screwed. If the sheath can be moved, I can get at the wires.

(My AC/DC ammeter, non-contact device)
http://www.mitchellinstrument.com/m...319eda06f020e43594a9c230972d/3/8/380947_1.jpg

(Making a current flow measurement - you can't check an AC cord, without
gaining access to the individual wires, as the magnetic fields cancel out
around the whole cord. I have a home-made cheater cord, for AC measurements,
where the wires are already separated.)

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z-KfZvbjyBY/0.jpg

(Gather five +5V wires, measure current. Gather four 3.3V wires, measure current.
Gather two +12V wires, measure current with clamp-on ammeter.)

http://leotardi.no-ip.com/html/atx/Short24pin.jpg

You can check the total computer power loading, with a Kill-A-Watt
meter. Such a meter, will separate real from imaginary component
(power factor phase angle), and indicate the amount of real, billable
AC power being used. They're relatively cheap. If it said the
computer was using 400W, then you'd know the case has to dissipate
that much heat (which would be difficult without screaming fans).
Modern non-gaming machines, shouldn't use anywhere near that amount
of power. My very best machine here, uses 60W at rest. My oldest P3,
is probably around 150W!

http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-CE.html

If the power supply itself is highly inefficient or faulty, your
measurements of motherboard loading would appear normal, and perhaps
total machine power drain would be abnormal. Or, if the motherboard
is drawing more than you would expect, then you'd consider with the
customer, what to do next, and so on. At least a power supply change,
isn't a reason to trash the whole machine, if it appears the power
supply is at fault.

There is a general formula for case cooling. For a well cooled case
(minimal temperature rise with respect to the room air), we set the
last term there to 7C (equals 10F) degrees. In other words, if the room was
25C, the inside of the case would be 32C to be considered to be "well
cooled". If you loosen up the spec a bit, and run the case hotter,
you can use a lower capacity fan. For this example, I cheated a bit,
allowed the case to get a bit warmer, and fudged the answer so it works
out to "one standard case cooling fan". 35CFM would not be an
overly loud fan. I own one 110CFM fan, and you can't sit in the
room with that, and 110CFM would allow me to cool a 450W PC.
There are all sorts of other rules, and my attempt here is not
to turn you into a thermal engineer. Merely demonstrate that for
the case to remain cool, there are "laws of physics" to deal with.
To deal with a given number of watts, and a desired temp rise, you
need enough CFM (cubic feet per minute). Otherwise, the case is
going to get hot.

CFM = 3.16 * Watts / Delta_T_degrees_F
= 3.16 * 150W/13F = 36.5CFM

OK, since in your original description, you list "Slimline", that
probably explains why it runs hot. The thing has a 160W supply,
so automatically, it can't be drawing more than that. And replacing
that 160W, probably isn't going to be that easy. The mechanical
dimensions might make it hard to find a replacement. Still, the
same rules apply - current and power measurements, is anything amiss,
is the puny fan on that thing, going to remove the amount of heat
I just measured, and so on... Maybe it's just a bad design.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...54&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&product=3882331

*******

Last topic - .vhd files

The .vhd file can be "mounted" in Vista or Windows 7. I'm not
going to go looking for *all* the ways you do this, so this
is a "teaser". It looks like I have a copy of VHDMount here,
but in my experiments, it won't mount a FAT32 inside a .vhd
(which is allowed - a VHD is allowed to hold FAT32 or NTFS).
But for a Vista/Win7 NTFS backup to .vhd, this method should work fine.
(My source file was PCW_CAB_VS2005.cab). I expect you can do this,
within Windows 7, without this tool, and there is probably
a recipe around for that as well. Try a search term like "mount vhd".

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708295(v=WS.10).aspx

On my current WinXP machine, I run a copy of Virtual PC 2007. The
native format for that, is .vhd. Currently, I keep a backup copy
of my Windows 7 laptop, on the WinXP machine. (I keep the 26GB
..vhd file, on a local disk on the WinXP machine.) I can add that .vhd
file, as the second "disk" in a virtual machine, which allows
me to examine the Windows 7 C: drive, without sitting in front
of the laptop. In this example, the booting OS is Ubuntu, while
the second disk is a copy of my Windows 7 C: drive. I can then
look at any part of the laptop file system from here (including
the System Volume Information folder). Or perhaps, even set up
file sharing from inside the virtual machine. There are always ways
to get the files, out of this virtual environment, even if you have
to FTP them out

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5213/vpcvhd.gif

Paul

 

[Char Jackson]

Clues:

"System runs hot - computer case is hot to touch"

What will that do ? Fry the hard drive. Drive the lubricant out of
the FDB hard drive motor. Shorten drive life. Replacing the drive,
without solving the thermal problem, would be a waste of money.
The drive will only be tortured again.

First step, would be to run HDTune, and check the SMART stats.
If Reallocated Sector Count or Current Pending Sector Count are
non-zero in the Data columm, then you know you're already in trouble.

Do you have any experience with drives that have a relatively high
number of bad sectors, either reallocated or pending, and doing a low
level format to resurrect the drive?

I have a drive with 12 reallocated sectors and 18 more pending. Google
said that a low level format would set things straight, so I did that
and I'm now running a surface scan. Before the format, all of the
errors were in the first 2% of the drive surface. The current scan is
at 49% with no errors, so at first glance the low level format did
indeed improve the situation, but I'm not completely sure it's a
permanent fix.

This particular drive is a Samsung HD204UI so I'm using Samsung's
ESTool to do the low level format. Samsung drives are now owned by
Seagate, and SeaTools was able to confirm the bad sectors, but
SeaTools wasn't able to do anything further.

 

[choro]

?Oh boy, why post an unfinished tome to this group? Write a few hundred
pages more so we will know exactly what your problem is.
-- choro

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Further reasoning to talk her into a new one is that this one has always
run hot. Never hot enough to shut down, but the case is almost too hot to
touch. There's one fan on the processor and one in the power supply. Both
running quietly. The inside of the case is discolored (brownish black) in
places.

(It would have been a lot easier to read your post if you had broken up
that giant paragraph a bit - with even a blank line between paragraphs.
Just sayin'.)

Does this person smoke heavily? What you said reminds me of tobacco
smoke residue.

It may be possible that the residue would mess up some components by
blocking heat transfer, or by getting inside mechanical things, such as
disk drives.

I agree with other posters that her computer should be set up with
password protection on her account and on the real Administrator
account, and that her troublemakers ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h
grandchildren should only have standard user accounts.

 

[Char Jackson]

I agree with other posters that her computer should be set up with
password protection on her account and on the real Administrator
account, and that her troublemakers ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h
grandchildren should only have standard user accounts.

Or get a second computer, if possible, that's dedicated to the kids.
Make a backup image so that it can be restored whenever things get too
far out of whack.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:23:51 -0800, Gene E. Bloch

Or get a second computer, if possible, that's dedicated to the kids.
Make a backup image so that it can be restored whenever things get too
far out of whack.

Pass the hat, we'll take up a collection

For a moment of (almost) seriousness: she would still have to protect
her own computer against the invaders.

And no one should *ever* tell the kids about the possibility of a live
Linux CD...

 

[Paul]

Do you have any experience with drives that have a relatively high
number of bad sectors, either reallocated or pending, and doing a low
level format to resurrect the drive?

I have a drive with 12 reallocated sectors and 18 more pending. Google
said that a low level format would set things straight, so I did that
and I'm now running a surface scan. Before the format, all of the
errors were in the first 2% of the drive surface. The current scan is
at 49% with no errors, so at first glance the low level format did
indeed improve the situation, but I'm not completely sure it's a
permanent fix.

This particular drive is a Samsung HD204UI so I'm using Samsung's
ESTool to do the low level format. Samsung drives are now owned by
Seagate, and SeaTools was able to confirm the bad sectors, but
SeaTools wasn't able to do anything further.

One of the reasons I've never had a chance to work on half-dead drives
here, is they just seem to die on me completely. I don't have anything
here at the moment, that would match the condition your drive is in.
At least one of the drives I've had fail here, looked like a firmware
bug (which wiped out information critical to drive operation). The
identity of the hard drive, changed while the OS was running! And
on the next reboot, it was gone.

Some people swear by a program called SpinRite, but I don't see
a theoretical reason to believe it'll fix anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinrite

I do have experience with SCSI drives, just a little bit. SCSI has
a "factory defect list" and a "grown defect list", and SCSI allows
some user interaction with automatic fault correction. I was able to
tell the drive in that case, that no sectors are defective, then
format it. And then, see how many of the sectors, in subsequent
days, get picked up as defective again. As far as I know,
that capability doesn't exist for IDE (unless, you have access
to the three pin TTL serial interface on the drive, and know a cryptic
command to feed it - I doubt the command set is documented).

What we used to do, with those SCSI drives, is print off the defect
list, and tape it inside the computer housing. If a repair tech in
future days opened the case, they'd have a record of the original
defects. And you can tell from that, that the drives in question
had relatively low capacities, and the defect list wasn't very long.
Modern drives leave the factory now with hundreds of thousands of defects,
from day one. The stack of paper to print the defect list in such a
case, would be a whole wad

If I were to see a drive with 12 reallocated sectors and 18 more pending,
I'd just bin it. The rate that those numbers change (the "velocity" if you
will), is also an indicator of how long the drive will last. If tomorrow
you saw 100 pending, then there'd not be much time left. If it sat
at 12 and 18 for the last six months (and was spinning all that time),
perhaps I'd be tempted to reuse it.

If you "partition around" the defective area, yes, you might get some
more life from it. But it's my personal believe, that when surface areas
become defective, it means material is physically coming off the
surface. Some drives, when you open them up, the filter pack inside is
filthy, which is a testament to how much the drive put up with, before
it died. The filter pack should stay clean, because after all, the
environment inside the drive is supposed to be "Class 10 or Class 100
clean". The drive has an internal airflow pattern, where the air is
swirled by the rotating platter, and filter packs are strategically
placed, to remove debris from the internal air stream. (There is
no "vacuum" inside the drive. It's at atmospheric pressure, and the
drive "breather hole", is intended to keep it that way, equalized.)

On some old drives I worked on, they had the idea of moving the
head while the drive was idle, such that the head would "sweep" the
surface of the platter. The idea was, to "push" any debris in a
preferred direction. But with modern drive clearances being what
they are, you couldn't do that on a modern drive. The concept
is silly now. But might have made sense back in the removable
disk pack era.

Paul

 

[Paul]

Pass the hat, we'll take up a collection

For a moment of (almost) seriousness: she would still have to protect
her own computer against the invaders.

And no one should *ever* tell the kids about the possibility of a live
Linux CD...

No password is going to stop kids...

The smart kid at school, will tell them what to do, and
the machine will be broken into, in no time. If they have
physical access, they "own" it.

This will change, when the next generation FDE (full
disk encryption) equipped computers come out. Not something
I'd be particularly looking forward to (too many "user shoots
self in foot, news at 11" type events). All part of our
new "walled garden" "locked up universe" "TPM based" computing
environment. Of course, the government will still be
snooping your IP connection That's what our
Canadian government plans on doing in this session
of our Parliament. Huxley was right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_new_world

Paul

 

[Char Jackson]

One of the reasons I've never had a chance to work on half-dead drives
here, is they just seem to die on me completely. I don't have anything
here at the moment, that would match the condition your drive is in.
At least one of the drives I've had fail here, looked like a firmware
bug (which wiped out information critical to drive operation). The
identity of the hard drive, changed while the OS was running! And
on the next reboot, it was gone.

Nearly always, when I lose a drive, it announces itself pretty far in
advance, so perhaps I've been fortunate in that regard. I can't
remember the last time a drive just died without warning.

Some people swear by a program called SpinRite, but I don't see
a theoretical reason to believe it'll fix anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinrite

I've had Spinrite on hand for quite a few years, but for unknown
reasons it has never become one the tools I reach for when I have a
problem. I'm not sure why, since it gets glowing reviews.

If I were to see a drive with 12 reallocated sectors and 18 more pending,
I'd just bin it.

I've binned smaller, older, drives that had similar problems, but this
is a nearly new 2TB drive, and with prices like they are, I'm inclined
to rescue it or apply for a warranty RMA before giving up.

The rate that those numbers change (the "velocity" if you
will), is also an indicator of how long the drive will last. If tomorrow
you saw 100 pending, then there'd not be much time left. If it sat
at 12 and 18 for the last six months (and was spinning all that time),
perhaps I'd be tempted to reuse it.

The Samsung ESTool says it's back to 100% health, so I'm going to put
it back into service and keep an eye on it. I won't trust it with
critical data for awhile. It'll have to earn that trust over time.

If you "partition around" the defective area, yes, you might get some
more life from it.

All of the defects were at the 'beginning' of the drive, so
partitioning could work around that without much loss in capacity, but
I'm going to go for a single full partition again and see what happens
over time.

But it's my personal believe, that when surface areas
become defective, it means material is physically coming off the
surface. Some drives, when you open them up, the filter pack inside is
filthy, which is a testament to how much the drive put up with, before
it died. The filter pack should stay clean, because after all, the
environment inside the drive is supposed to be "Class 10 or Class 100
clean". The drive has an internal airflow pattern, where the air is
swirled by the rotating platter, and filter packs are strategically
placed, to remove debris from the internal air stream. (There is
no "vacuum" inside the drive. It's at atmospheric pressure, and the
drive "breather hole", is intended to keep it that way, equalized.)

Most of the drives I've taken apart have had clean filters, but a few
have had enough material on them to make me wonder how the drive
worked at all.

 

[Menno Hershberger]

Last June a lady brought me an HP Pavilion Slimline s3707cPC that was
producing strange random errors and I determined the 500Gb drive was
defective. [snip tale of woe]

I'm confused: does the vhd backup contain data she hasn't yet backed up?

I'm not sure. And I don't think she is either.

If so, I believe the only way to get it back is to install W7 on her
current machine using the original install DVD, and then restore the vhd
back up. The W7 installation is tied to the current hardware and so
AFAIK is the vhd backup. If reinstall is possible, I would immediately
back up all the new data onto the external drive.

I think everything is on the external drive in some shape or form. But it
is a trotal mess. There's empty picture folders all over the place. Then
there's so-called zip file folders buried way deep in folders like
M:\Users\Jill's Computer\AppData\Local\Temp\Temp1_Backup files 219.zip\C
\Users\Jill\Documents\from Picasa backup\My Pictures\Shaynes wood.
That's all cut and pasted with only the "Jill" changed. And there's a
string of those Temp?_Backup files xxx.zip folders about 3 feet long on
Explorer. (Sorry, I'm not going to count them)

But if the must-keep data is on the external drive, I'd agree with you:
buy a new computer. IMO there's real risk of fire there on the old
machine. In any case, it's running too hot.

If she wants a desktop again, I'd recommend a blank machine, and using
MS's friendly (?) customer support "migrate" the W7 install to the new
hardware. I haven't had to do this, so I don't know whether you should
keep the old machine until the migration has been OKed and done. You
can install it on a new system without MS's OK, but you won't be able to
update it, or so I've been told - I haven't migrated a Windows OS since
Win 2000.

OTOH, neat and powerful laptops are now available at a fraction of the
price she paid for her old machine.

A couple other points:
a) install a backup utility that will make incremental backups in the
background or at regular intervals.
b) Set up two accounts on W7: hers, which should be password protected;
and a Family account with limited privileges: eg, no installs of any new
software. If the grandkids want to play a new game, they'll have to make
a case, and then Gran can install it for them. And if they complain,
let them save their allowances until they have to buy their own
computer(s). Gran should under no circumstances give her password to the
grandchildren, of course. They will have good intentions, but good
intentions aren't enough to prevent stupidity.

Do I sound hard-nosed? Yup. Them's the rules on our machines when the
grandkids come to visit. My grand-daughter did save her pennies, and
bought my old Mac Powerbook (for a bargain price, of course).

She claims that she'll never allow them on her computer again.
She has spotted a computer at WalMart she's going to buy and I'll no doubt
have to help her get her stuff on it. Meanwhile, I'm playing with the old
one. I found a spare harddrive and have installed Windows 7 on it. That's
as far as I've gotten so far, but my next step will be to try and restore
that vhd file on it. I'm just curious if it can be done and how much of her
stuff is actually stored in it. It might come in handy later.

Thanks for your input. I'm doing as you suggested just to see if I can make
it work!

 

[Paul]

Last June a lady brought me an HP Pavilion Slimline s3707cPC that was
producing strange random errors and I determined the 500Gb drive was
defective. [snip tale of woe]

I'm confused: does the vhd backup contain data she hasn't yet backed up?

I'm not sure. And I don't think she is either.

If so, I believe the only way to get it back is to install W7 on her
current machine using the original install DVD, and then restore the vhd
back up. The W7 installation is tied to the current hardware and so
AFAIK is the vhd backup. If reinstall is possible, I would immediately
back up all the new data onto the external drive.

I think everything is on the external drive in some shape or form. But it
is a trotal mess. There's empty picture folders all over the place. Then
there's so-called zip file folders buried way deep in folders like
M:\Users\Jill's Computer\AppData\Local\Temp\Temp1_Backup files 219.zip\C
\Users\Jill\Documents\from Picasa backup\My Pictures\Shaynes wood.
That's all cut and pasted with only the "Jill" changed. And there's a
string of those Temp?_Backup files xxx.zip folders about 3 feet long on
Explorer. (Sorry, I'm not going to count them)

But if the must-keep data is on the external drive, I'd agree with you:
buy a new computer. IMO there's real risk of fire there on the old
machine. In any case, it's running too hot.

If she wants a desktop again, I'd recommend a blank machine, and using
MS's friendly (?) customer support "migrate" the W7 install to the new
hardware. I haven't had to do this, so I don't know whether you should
keep the old machine until the migration has been OKed and done. You
can install it on a new system without MS's OK, but you won't be able to
update it, or so I've been told - I haven't migrated a Windows OS since
Win 2000.

OTOH, neat and powerful laptops are now available at a fraction of the
price she paid for her old machine.

A couple other points:
a) install a backup utility that will make incremental backups in the
background or at regular intervals.
b) Set up two accounts on W7: hers, which should be password protected;
and a Family account with limited privileges: eg, no installs of any new
software. If the grandkids want to play a new game, they'll have to make
a case, and then Gran can install it for them. And if they complain,
let them save their allowances until they have to buy their own
computer(s). Gran should under no circumstances give her password to the
grandchildren, of course. They will have good intentions, but good
intentions aren't enough to prevent stupidity.

Do I sound hard-nosed? Yup. Them's the rules on our machines when the
grandkids come to visit. My grand-daughter did save her pennies, and
bought my old Mac Powerbook (for a bargain price, of course).

She claims that she'll never allow them on her computer again.
She has spotted a computer at WalMart she's going to buy and I'll no doubt
have to help her get her stuff on it. Meanwhile, I'm playing with the old
one. I found a spare harddrive and have installed Windows 7 on it. That's
as far as I've gotten so far, but my next step will be to try and restore
that vhd file on it. I'm just curious if it can be done and how much of her
stuff is actually stored in it. It might come in handy later.

Thanks for your input. I'm doing as you suggested just to see if I can make
it work!

You can mount the VHD this way. If you have Windows 7 installed on
one disk, find the VHD file on the other disk and try this.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/566-virtual-hard-disk-create-attach-vhd.html

Paul

 

[Menno Hershberger]

Slimline s3707cPC
Original Vista.

cloned Vista recovery partition remained intact

Retail Windows 7 DVD, clean install

Backup Windows 7 to .vhd

Restored via F11 to Vista

Trashed by grandkids

Current effort

Clone existing system state, then restore Windows 7
Clone attempt with Acronis, fail at 60%. Oh Oh.
Run chkdsk (mistake)

*******

The step you missed, was backing up sector by sector, before running
chkdsk. Chkdsk can trash a badly damaged system, so if you knew
the file system was damaged, you'd copy anything of importance first,
then sector by sector to your shop disk. Then, if you want to run
chkdsk, and it runs amok, you can copy back the sector by sector
image. You could also use a file scavenger, to sweep the disk, but
if the disk is in bad shape, excessive seek operations could finish
it off and kill it. By comparison, a sector by sector copy for
safety purposes, is a sequential copy. The drive will still get warm,
but won't be shaken to death. This article, gives a free suggestion
for a damaged disk. Using this approach, gives some control of the
tradeoff of copy time versus completion. (Yes, this is a Linux
method - I don't know if there is a port available for Windows or
not.)

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 dicy areas as possible:
./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

That method is two pass. First, it copies the easy to read sectors.
Then, it tried to get the ones that failed, with a certain retry
level. It uses a log to keep track of progress (I presume you can read
the log with a text editor, to see what it couldn't get). This
captures what info is available. Then, later, if you wanted, you could
put a new hard drive in the computer, and sector-by-sector it back,
and *then* run chkdsk, knowing that at least chkdsk repair attempts
will not be compromised by further written errors.

*******

Clues:

"System runs hot - computer case is hot to touch"

What will that do ? Fry the hard drive. Drive the lubricant out of
the FDB hard drive motor. Shorten drive life. Replacing the drive,
without solving the thermal problem, would be a waste of money.
The drive will only be tortured again.

First step, would be to run HDTune, and check the SMART stats.
If Reallocated Sector Count or Current Pending Sector Count are
non-zero in the Data columm, then you know you're already in trouble.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe (free version, good for
diags)

HDTune will also display the current hard drive temperature (that
is, if the drive was still inside the customer machine). Mine is
22C (room temp) right now, due to direct room air cooling method.
Not all drives have a thermistor inside (like my 11 year old 4GB drive
won't have it), but any recent system hard drive will have it.

If the listed drive temp is hitting 60C, then you have a good idea
why the drive is dying. Hint - it's not the fault of the drive
manufacturer. Some computer cases have bad cooling to begin with.
The hard drive is in a "dead zone" inside the case. I've seen some
miserable designs in that respect. I added forced air to the
drive bays on my current machine, which is why the drives list
so cool.

*******

If the machine is that hot, you have to identify the source of the
heat. If the heat is around the power supply area, the supply could
have a problem. A new, 80%+ efficient power supply, will immediately
reduce the heat output. You could also bring out your shop AC/DC
ammeter, and proceed to make measurements, to make sure the cause of
the heating is not a partial short circuit somewhere. You can buy
AC/DC clamp-on ammeters, which don't require cutting any wires to make
measurements. They work off the magnetic field around the wire. As
long as the main power cable is not fully sheathed, you can stick the
jaws around sets of wires and make current measurements. You gather
the wires together in common colored sets (like, grab all the red
wires on the main cable) and put them inside the jaws of the meter,
and the meter will "sum" the DC current. There are AC only and AC/DC
versions of these, and you want one with DC capability for computer
usage. In two minutes, I can completely characterize the machine, and
get a feeling for it. If the cable sheathing prevents me from getting
at the wires, I'm screwed. If the sheath can be moved, I can get at
the wires.

(My AC/DC ammeter, non-contact device)
http://www.mitchellinstrument.com/media/catalog/product/cache/8/image/5
e06319eda06f020e43594a9c230972d/3/8/380947_1.jpg

(Making a current flow measurement - you can't check an AC cord,
without gaining access to the individual wires, as the magnetic fields
cancel out around the whole cord. I have a home-made cheater cord, for
AC measurements, where the wires are already separated.)

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z-KfZvbjyBY/0.jpg

(Gather five +5V wires, measure current. Gather four 3.3V wires,
measure current.
Gather two +12V wires, measure current with clamp-on ammeter.)

http://leotardi.no-ip.com/html/atx/Short24pin.jpg

You can check the total computer power loading, with a Kill-A-Watt
meter. Such a meter, will separate real from imaginary component
(power factor phase angle), and indicate the amount of real, billable
AC power being used. They're relatively cheap. If it said the
computer was using 400W, then you'd know the case has to dissipate
that much heat (which would be difficult without screaming fans).
Modern non-gaming machines, shouldn't use anywhere near that amount
of power. My very best machine here, uses 60W at rest. My oldest P3,
is probably around 150W!

http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-CE.html

If the power supply itself is highly inefficient or faulty, your
measurements of motherboard loading would appear normal, and perhaps
total machine power drain would be abnormal. Or, if the motherboard
is drawing more than you would expect, then you'd consider with the
customer, what to do next, and so on. At least a power supply change,
isn't a reason to trash the whole machine, if it appears the power
supply is at fault.

There is a general formula for case cooling. For a well cooled case
(minimal temperature rise with respect to the room air), we set the
last term there to 7C (equals 10F) degrees. In other words, if the
room was 25C, the inside of the case would be 32C to be considered to
be "well cooled". If you loosen up the spec a bit, and run the case
hotter, you can use a lower capacity fan. For this example, I cheated
a bit, allowed the case to get a bit warmer, and fudged the answer so
it works out to "one standard case cooling fan". 35CFM would not be an
overly loud fan. I own one 110CFM fan, and you can't sit in the
room with that, and 110CFM would allow me to cool a 450W PC.
There are all sorts of other rules, and my attempt here is not
to turn you into a thermal engineer. Merely demonstrate that for
the case to remain cool, there are "laws of physics" to deal with.
To deal with a given number of watts, and a desired temp rise, you
need enough CFM (cubic feet per minute). Otherwise, the case is
going to get hot.

CFM = 3.16 * Watts / Delta_T_degrees_F
= 3.16 * 150W/13F = 36.5CFM

OK, since in your original description, you list "Slimline", that
probably explains why it runs hot. The thing has a 160W supply,
so automatically, it can't be drawing more than that. And replacing
that 160W, probably isn't going to be that easy. The mechanical
dimensions might make it hard to find a replacement. Still, the
same rules apply - current and power measurements, is anything amiss,
is the puny fan on that thing, going to remove the amount of heat
I just measured, and so on... Maybe it's just a bad design.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01629354&lc=en&dlc
=en&cc=us&lang=en&product=3882331

*******

Last topic - .vhd files

The .vhd file can be "mounted" in Vista or Windows 7. I'm not
going to go looking for *all* the ways you do this, so this
is a "teaser". It looks like I have a copy of VHDMount here,
but in my experiments, it won't mount a FAT32 inside a .vhd
(which is allowed - a VHD is allowed to hold FAT32 or NTFS).
But for a Vista/Win7 NTFS backup to .vhd, this method should work
fine. (My source file was PCW_CAB_VS2005.cab). I expect you can do
this, within Windows 7, without this tool, and there is probably
a recipe around for that as well. Try a search term like "mount vhd".

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708295(v=WS.10).aspx

On my current WinXP machine, I run a copy of Virtual PC 2007. The
native format for that, is .vhd. Currently, I keep a backup copy
of my Windows 7 laptop, on the WinXP machine. (I keep the 26GB
.vhd file, on a local disk on the WinXP machine.) I can add that .vhd
file, as the second "disk" in a virtual machine, which allows
me to examine the Windows 7 C: drive, without sitting in front
of the laptop. In this example, the booting OS is Ubuntu, while
the second disk is a copy of my Windows 7 C: drive. I can then
look at any part of the laptop file system from here (including
the System Volume Information folder). Or perhaps, even set up
file sharing from inside the virtual machine. There are always ways
to get the files, out of this virtual environment, even if you have
to FTP them out

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5213/vpcvhd.gif

Thanks For all that Paul. But for the price of a new computer, it's really
not feasible to go through all that. I've got a pretty good idea that most
of her stuff can be found on the external drive. As I replied to WolfK,
she's getting a new computer and I'm playing around with the old one. The
drive didn't survive the chkdsk ordeal at all and even my shop computer
hangs up with it connected now. I have a WD diagnostic utility but it
doesn't even see the drive as being there. It has been trashed and I'm just
playing around with a spare drive I had sitting around. Unfortunately I
have too many other important things I need to get done!

 

[Menno Hershberger]

No password is going to stop kids...

The smart kid at school, will tell them what to do, and
the machine will be broken into, in no time. If they have
physical access, they "own" it.

This will change, when the next generation FDE (full
disk encryption) equipped computers come out. Not something
I'd be particularly looking forward to (too many "user shoots
self in foot, news at 11" type events). All part of our
new "walled garden" "locked up universe" "TPM based" computing
environment. Of course, the government will still be
snooping your IP connection That's what our
Canadian government plans on doing in this session
of our Parliament. Huxley was right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_new_world

Oh great. Now I'll have to take time out to read "Brave New World "
It does look like a good read!

 

[Wolf K]

On 22/02/2012 7:40 AM, Menno Hershberger wrote:
Last June a lady brought me an HP Pavilion Slimline s3707cPC that was
producing strange random errors and I determined the 500Gb drive was
defective. [snip tale of woe]

I'm confused: does the vhd backup contain data she hasn't yet backed up?

I'm not sure. And I don't think she is either.
I think everything is on the external drive in some shape or form. But it
is a trotal mess. There's empty picture folders all over the place. Then
there's so-called zip file folders buried way deep in folders like
M:\Users\Jill's Computer\AppData\Local\Temp\Temp1_Backup files 219.zip\C
\Users\Jill\Documents\from Picasa backup\My Pictures\Shaynes wood.
That's all cut and pasted with only the "Jill" changed. And there's a
string of those Temp?_Backup files xxx.zip folders about 3 feet long on
Explorer. (Sorry, I'm not going to count them)
[...]

You can get rid of all the temporary files, temporary back-up files,
etc. Windows Disk Clean-up will do a decent job, but I prefer CCleaner.
It will safely delete most of the unneeded files, empty the caches,
etc. To delete the empty folders, I'd try sorting the files by size in
the Details view. The empty folders should be at the top or bottom of
the list, so you can easily highlight and delete the lot. Doing this
would simplify transfer of useful files, there would be a lot fewer
filenames to wade through.

You might consider buying a nice little external drive for your own use,
and "test" it by copying your friend's files onto it for transfer to her
new computer. I found a couple of neat 500GB drives on sale last year,
they are about the size of a pack of cards. Black for my wife, red for
me. ;-)

HTH,
Wolf K.

 

[Philip Herlihy]

Some people swear by a program called SpinRite, but I don't see
a theoretical reason to believe it'll fix anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinrite

I do have experience with SCSI drives, just a little bit. SCSI has

I use Spinrite, and it's an essential tool (bootable CD or memory stick)
in my kit. It really has two major components. The data recovery
facility is obsessive, and can take many hours on a troubled big drive,
doing things like approaching a troubled sector from different angles in
the hope of picking up a little more. (It's only a couple of hours or
so if the drive is reasonably healthy.) Its maintenance mode does the
recovery scan and also reads, inverts, writes, reads, re-inverts and re-
writes every block (often takes 18 hours or more) after which you can be
pretty sure what state your disk is in - underperforming blocks are
flagged, of course.

If a disk doesn't appear to have less than a day's life left I use
Spinrite on it then run chkdsk (omitting the disk scan, which has been
taken care of by Spinrite). It's surprising how many unbootable
machines I've rescued this way, and at the end I get Smart data (most
times) out of Spinrite so I can advise on whether the disk should be
replaced.

For disks which are very close to the end I've had recommendations for
the "Unstoppable copier" from Roadkil.net, although I've never had
occasion to use it.

For recovering deleted files and partitions I use TestDisk/Photorec, but
recently used Recuva for the first time and was really impressed.

Before I hand a machine back I like to install Acronis Drive Monitor
(free) on it (disabling backup checks if True Image is not installed).
That pops up (configurable) warnings for temperature and breaches of
SMART thresholds (which are being sensibly interpreted by the software)
and I've found it has saved a lot of customer systems which otherwise
would surely have become difficult recovery situations.

Worth adding I usually boot the problem machine from a Memtest86+ CD and
run a memory test before using that machine's internals to mess about
with a customer's precious data!

 

[Wolf K]

I use Spinrite, and it's an essential tool (bootable CD or memory stick)
in my kit. [snip]

Thanks for several items of new-to-me information,

Wolf K.