Spinrite Hangs at 18% mark

[ashleyhedges1028]

i am running spinrite on a windows me machine.. and i have no problems in the past..but when i ran spinrite, for level 2 yesterday, at the 18% mark, it hung. The drive continued to run, but i could not access spinrite menu with space bar, or even esc key. Just continued to hang. Had to turn machine off.
What's going on?

Thanks.

 

[PHolder]

I'm not @Steve, but I would guess that it would be helpful to know if the same thing repeats. You can use the TAB button prior to starting SpinRite's activities to change the starting (and ending) position. Maybe start at 17.9% or so and see if the same or a similar thing happens the second time?

 

[jlee]

i am running spinrite on a windows me machine.. and i have no problems in the past..but when i ran spinrite, for level 2 yesterday, at the 18% mark, it hung. The drive continued to run, but i could not access spinrite menu with space bar, or even esc key. Just continued to hang. Had to turn machine off.

I assume this is SpinRite 6.1? When you say the drive continued to run, what do you mean? Merely that it was still spinning? That would not be unusual.

I don't know that a lot of testing was done with SpinRite 6.1 on PCs as old as those running Windows ME. Is the drive interface IDE or PATA (parallel cable)? How does the drive show up when you first bring up SpinRite and it displays the available drives? Is it accessed via BIOS or the ATA interface?

 

[cschuber]

I'd suspect that the drive, cable or controller are hanging. What is likely happening is that some hardware component is hanging the bus and the O/S, Spinrite in this case (it handles hardware as an O/S would), is unable to send commands to it.

I had a problem with a CDROM device on a Sun 2000 back in the day. It locked the SCSI bus disallowing any other device (any of the 16 disks) on the bus to communicate with the controller. I wouldn't rule out a scenario such as this. No software can recover from wedged hardware.

If this is the case the PCB on the backside of the disk is likely hosed. No amount of recovery will ever bring that data back.

If a person is desperate enough one could purchase another disk of the same make and model, install the good disk's PCB while swapping (keeping) the old firmware chip into the old drive, and see if that gains access to the data. I have heard this can work but this is a long shot though.

 

[DanR]

i am running spinrite on a windows me machine.. and i have no problems in the past..but when i ran spinrite, for level 2 yesterday, at the 18% mark, it hung. The drive continued to run, but i could not access spinrite menu with space bar, or even esc key. Just continued to hang. Had to turn machine off.

What version of SpinRite are you running? SpinRite 6.0 or SpinRite 6.1?

What type of drive? Internal, external? From your OP I would presume Internal HDD?

More information is needed!

 

[labradort]

I wouldn't describe this as "hang" if it is what I'm seeing as well.

Spinrite 6.1 was just purchased yesterday.

Somewhere after 12% done, the screen goes blank and it won't come back with space bar, ESC or anything. It has been repeatable 3 times.

Run 1: maintenance level 3 - walked away and noticed no picture after 30 minutes or so.
Run 2: maintenance level 3 - left it running 9 hours over night, no picture in the morning - had tried option of 'blanking 0'.
Run 3: maintenance level 2 - sat in front of screen refreshing it with space bar action, etc. Eventually monitor has no signal.

It's not the monitor going to sleep, because I have a KVM and I can switch back and forth to the other system on my KVM with double tap of Ctrl button. Returning to the spinrite system with another double tap of Ctrl the screen stays blank.

Detach video cable and attach again, monitor waits for a connection and then says no signal. Monitor is fine, but it is getting no signal from the box running spinrite.

On the 2nd run, I left it running all night with the no screen situation, and I felt the chassis to see if the hard drive is working. There was a pulse from head movement every 25 seconds or so. This is after running for 9 hours with a 4TB internal SATA hard drive. So I'm not sure if it was hung or just the monitor signal is gone.

Model of drive is WD4005FZBX
Model of motherboard is B660M Aorus Pro AX DDR4

I'm not trying to hijack the thread - I suspect it is the same bug. Maybe

ashleyhedges1028 can confirm if this is what they experienced.​

 

[DanR]

WD4005FZBX: This is a WD Black 4 TB CMR drive.

Are there any SRLOG files to indicate trouble spot location(s)?

At the "Before Beginning" screen, press Tab instead of Enter to go the the drive's "Set Drive's Starting and Finishing Locations" screen. Change the starting point from 0.0000 to say 0.1000 (10%) and watch it for awhile. The idea is to catch it in the act to see what displays on the screen before it goes blank. It may require some trial and error with different starting points to catch it in the act.

I suspect this drive may be toast.

 

[ColbyBouma]

Somewhere after 12% done, the screen goes blank and it won't come back with space bar, ESC or anything. It has been repeatable 3 times.

Try hitting Backspace 4 times in a row.

Keyboard Controls · Wiki · GRC Community / SpinRite 6.1 Wiki · GitLab

GitLab.com

gitlab.com

 

[labradort]

The drive works pretty good in Windows 11, but lately I have heard it doing some little glitchy click sound, maybe once a month or so. So I thought it could be a good candidate for maintenance from spinrite, as recently described by Dave's Garage Youtube channel.

So the idea would be to advance the range each run - say a run from 10 to 20% mark, and next time 20 to 30% percent, etc.?

 

[DanR]

So the idea would be to advance the range each run - say a run from 10 to 20% mark, and next time 20 to 30% percent, etc.?

That's the idea. If 10-20 has the issue but 20-30 is fine, then try smaller increments to eventually home in on the trouble spot.?

 

[labradort]

This was done with maintenance level 2.

I tried 10-20%. It completed. No errors nor fixes.
Then 20-30%. Went blank.
20-25% completed, no errors or fixes.
25 to 30%. Went blank.
25 to 27%. Completed with no errors or fixes
27 to 30%. Completed with no errors or fixes
(go figure)
30 to 40%. Went blank.

Also, I did try 4 backspaces several times when it went blank and it didn't bring the screen to life. The OP might be correct that it is hanging.

This drive has no issues from the Windows level with running error scan or runnng defrag.
I think the drive was purchased new in 2019. It's not really having a problem that most people would notice. I've been working with this stuff long enough I can hear the earliest whimper from a drive that will fail me in 6 months, and I prefer not to wait until then. After watching Dave's Garage on Youtube I had hopes this tool could extend the life beyond the typical results, but maybe not in this case.

Again, apologies to the OP. I can release this thread back to the original poster if they want to add some more details of their situation. I did message

ashleyhedges1028​

 

[ColbyBouma]

I recommend reaching out to GRC Support. Steve should be made aware of this issue.

https://www.grc.com/support.htm

 

[Steve]

@labradort wrote to Greg and included the link to his posting here, which Greg forward to me, so here I am.

SpinRite was tested (far beyond) extensively before its release — as at least three of the people in this thread (@PHolder, @DanR and @ColbyBouma) can attest, since they were present for the entire project. And it was tested across an astonishing range of machines. At no point during those three years of testing did we see the screen going black. I'm not saying that this is not a problem with SpinRite, but if it is, it's the first time.

SpinRite uses what should be a totally compatible and generic text mode for its screen. But I suppose that newer systems which may rarely, if ever, run in text mode could have trouble with text mode. But then we'd expect it not to work at all rather than to "go blank" after some length of time.

During our testing we did encounter an external display or two that seemed "funky".

My number one suggestion would be to try running SpinRite on another machine — any other machine — if that's possible. I cannot imagine that this behavior would occur anywhere else (since we've never seen it before).

 

[AlanD]

Have you looked in the logfile to see if there are any clues? The logs, if any, should be written to the /SRLOGS folder on your boot media.

 

[Fuzzball]

This reminded me of a Zimaboard issue I had where if I turned off the monitor for a while, I couldn't get the video to come back up. It was the reason that Steve added the 4 backspaces in succession to reinitialize SpinRite's video interface. Thread here in case it's of any use...

https://forums.grc.com/threads/turned-off-monitor-overnight-stays-blank-when-i-turn-it-back-on-next-morning.1418/

 

[Steve]

@Fuzzball : Exactly! Yours is the instance I was remembering. Thanks for the reminder.

 

[labradort]

It's not over...

I bought a new WD Black 6TB drive. Used Acronis tool to copy over files from the previous 4TB drive. The 4TB unit is now unpowered and detached. Ran a level 1 check on the new 6TB drive. It got somewhere past 28% before the screen goes blank. 0 bytes written to the log file on this run. I unplugged the VGA cable and plugged it in again. Monitor wakes and nothing on it. I tried spacebar, tried Esc, tried 4 backspaces. Nothing makes the video come back. I think the program is hanging. When this happens the numlock/caps lock lights still work.

I'll try it again sometime with ranges.

 

[DarkwinX]

It's not the monitor going to sleep, because I have a KVM and I can switch back and forth to the other system on my KVM with double tap of Ctrl button. Returning to the spinrite system with another double tap of Ctrl the screen stays blank.

Just checking, have you tried completely removing the KVM from the equation? I can see that your removed and re attached the monitor cable but I cannot see that you have removed the KVM and gone direct.