Spinrite running for 50 mins, says over 4500 hrs remaining

[Hollow Man]

Hi everyone,

My Win11 hard drive crashed last night after a Windows update, so at the suggestion of a colleague, I'm trying Spinrite. When it started it said it had issues reading and writing from the drive, but I figured I had nothing to lose, so told it to go ahead and do a level 2 workout anyway. Currently it has 3 minor troubles, 4 dynastat recovery, 34 command aborted, 10 not recoverable, and 17 defective sectors. The time it says it has left is skyrocketing. I suspect all these values will increase as the minutes go by/

Should I continue to let this go, or is it a lost cause? I stupidly don't have a backup, so am willing to try anything in the hopes I can it booted so I can get some data off it.

It's a Samsung SSD 870 EVO 2 TB, only 3 years or so old.

Thanks!

 

[Hollow Man]

And I just got an error saying it couldn't write the log file, so this is continuing to look very bad.

 

[AlanD]

The log file is written to the device that you booted from, typically a USB stick. Given that you have had a lot of errors on the disk, it may be that the logfile has run out of space if the USB is fairly small. Check the /SRLOGS folder on your SR boot device.

 

[PHolder]

Sorry to heard your bad luck. Since it is a Samsung device, and since they've been known to have some issues with firmware and whatnot, I would have started by running their Samsung Magician software. In any case, if you can abort SpinRite and resume it from where you stopped it, so you could stop and see if anything has improved, and if so, try to grab anything you can.

 

[Hollow Man]

Thanks for the thoughts. I stopped it for now, and was able to make and see the drive using the Porteus Linux distribution. I've ordered an external drive, so am going to wait until that arrives, copy the data off, then decide the best way forward.

It's worth noting that in my stress of wondering what was going on, I forgot there are two drives in the system: a small nvme one for boot, and this larger ssd. I'll blame the stress for not noticing this in Spinrite, especially since it begs the question, why is it finding errors with the ssd, when the boot nvme drive is likely the culprit?

Questions to ponder once I get my data saved off...

 

[ColbyBouma]

It's a Samsung SSD 870 EVO 2 TB

Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!

Certain 870 EVO 4TB and 2TB drives are affected by early failures where they develop uncorrectable errors and some data just cannot be read from them anymore. This seems to primarily affect drives produced in January/February 2021. For example, i have three 870 EVO 4TB, only one is affected (so...

www.techpowerup.com

I forgot there are two drives in the system: a small nvme one for boot, and this larger ssd.

SpinRite 6.1 doesn't have native support for NVMe. Some BIOSes cooperate with SpinRite and allow it to see them as BIOS drives, but others like yours don't.

 

[Hollow Man]

Oh, so I wonder if the errors SpinRite is finding with the Samsung 870 are just icing on the cake, and the real issue, which caused my PC to not boot after the Windows update (and it wouldn't even load the Win11 start USB stick I created with their Boot Creator), is with the nvme, which SpinRite can't fix. Ugh!

 

[DanR]

@Hollow Man Have you done any BIOS switching between UEFI and CSM modes?

Windows 11 requires UEFI booting which is NOT compatible with SpinRite booting and running. I believe the Win 11 USB stick also requires this.

SpinRite requires a BIOS (CSM) boot to run. That is working, obviously. Win 11 can not/will not boot in CSM mode - the BIOS must be switched back to UEFI for Windows 11 to boot.

 

[Hollow Man]

Yes, I had to switch to csm to get SpinRite to work.

However, before that, it was in uefi, and it would not boot from the usb drive I made with the win11 media creator tool. It would try to, showing the windows logo and the spinning circle, but go to black instead of showing the "install" (and repair) screen.

This USB works fine on other pcs.

I wonder if the windows update (which I think was the upgrade to 24h2) did something really odd to the two drives that the thwarts the win11 usb keychain boot, but not the porteus usb.

 

[DanR]

I understand that Win 11 24H2 is problematic for many users and is best avoided - i.e. the Win experts recommend staying with 23H2 which is solid.

So, Win 11 24H2 could very well be the source of some of your troubles.

 

[Hollow Man]

Yeah the PC was super solid prior. It installed this update without me telling it to. I'm not 100% sure if it was 24H2 (although it warned it was significant and would take time to update, and I haven't done any major updates in a while, so that's my guess!). If I had known it might cause this...

 

[DanR]

It looks like it might be possible to revert back to Win 11 23h2?

Can Win 11 24h2 be reverted to Win 11 23h2 at DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo. Privacy, Simplified.

duckduckgo.com

I have not looked at any of these results to see of your not booting issue is a showstopper.

 

[Hollow Man]

The problem is I can't even boot into recovery. It's beyond unusual! And I don't see a windows.old folder when looking at the drive via the Linux boot disk.

 

[DanR]

It looks like you are hosed.

Maybe put the drive in another machine to get any importation data off of it. Then reformat and reinstall Windows.

Win 11 23H2? And use GRC's free InControl utility to lock it down and hold 24H2 at bay?

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

 

[Hollow Man]

Thanks for everyone's replies! Right now I'm slowly copying the data off via Porteus portable Linux and no issues.

I've seen some people say a BIOS update may fix the issue. I'll feel better about trying things like that after I get a copy of my data off the disks.