Re: Hard drive error One more follow up

On 5/23/2022 9:00 PM, philo wrote:
> On 5/19/22 3:47 PM, philo wrote:
>> I'm working on a Win10 machine that occasionally crashes on startup with the message: Windows has encountered an error.
>>
>> If I run CHKDSK /F I see that CHKDSK on
>> Win10 givers no annunciation as it did with previous Windows versions...all it does is say that the drive was repaired, then in reboots, but it did not actually fix anything.
>>
>>
>> As a precaution I ran both a memory test and the mfg's full HD
> 
> 
> <snip>
> 
> 
> Popped the drive into another machine and the performance is terrible...so I'm not going to put it back into service.
> 
> 
> Also: it was from a Lenovo laptop and the disk label said Windows SSD even though it was a mechanical drive. My opinion of Lenovo is a bit diminished now

My experience is, an HDTune abnormal read benchmark may make
an appearance, before the Reallocated raw data field goes off 0.

Things like SmartMonTools rely on the SMART for their determination
of "Healthy". And you as the user, can use things like HDTune
to determine "it is not Healthy".

In my case, it was a drive with an obvious 50GB-wide "bad spot" on
the disk, which was likely wear-related. (An OS used to sit there.)
HDTune would measure 5MB/sec to 10MB/sec or so, through that
region. The rest of the disk formed part of a more normal-looking
curve.

It's especially hard to get a "noise-free" environment for HDTune.
Win2K was my favorite for "noise-free" benching. It didn't have a
lot of scanning going on, in the background.

Gnome-disks can do a read-bench as an option, but you have to be
careful to not select the "write" option by accident. And the results
don't appear to be "smoothed" quite like HDTune. The thing is, the
caching on Linux is pretty hard to defeat, and there have been
programs that claim to defeat the cache while measuring, where
the cache schemes were still evident in the results.

If you want, you can use the Command Prompt in the Troubleshooting
section of a Windows installer DVD, and call HDTune from there.
As long as it's sitting on some storage you have access to. Typically,
32-bit installer DVDs have 32-bit install environments and are good
for running a 32-bit application like HDTune 255. Not every thing
you would like to run, works that way. But a few things do. And the
32-bit DVD is the place to test them. Since Windows 11 has no 32-bit
option, you won't be using a Windows 11 DVD for this purpose. But
earlier versions would be fine.

The theory being, a WinPE environment is less likely to have
background noise while it is running. The OS is loaded into X:
and X: is a RAMDrive provided by Microsoft. This also implies
the DVD can be popped out, once the Command Prompt window is open
(in theory at least, YMMV...).

    Paul