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When do I give up on this drive?

#1

D

dmot

I have ran a few drives through sr 6.1 (pre-release) and the first two drives ran on level 2 and completed. I am running the scan on a third drive and SR started to make a noise (from the built in computer speaker on the motherboard) as soon as it started scanning the drive on level 2. I restarted the scan and picked an arbitrary percentage for SR to start at and it was scanning fine, this tells me the very start of the drive is bad.

The time counter, until SR finishes completing the scan, continues to climb. Will SR fail at some point telling me the drive is too damaged for repair? Should I just let it continue running until I see SR tell me something different?

Thanks.


#2

P

PHolder

Are you attached to the value represented by that drive? If it's that bad, and there's no data on it you need, why ever would you want to keep it around, waiting for things to get even worse. e-cycle it now... your time is money!


#3

D

dmot

PHolder said:
Are you attached to the value represented by that drive? If it's that bad, and there's no data on it you need, why ever would you want to keep it around, waiting for things to get even worse. e-cycle it now... your time is money!
Click to expand...

I believe it was a failed drive out of a NAS. I don't need the drive, just curious if SR will tell me it is failed. I have a stack of drives ready to run through SR 6.1.


#4

Steve

Steve

dmot said:
I believe it was a failed drive out of a NAS. I don't need the drive, just curious if SR will tell me it is failed. I have a stack of drives ready to run through SR 6.1.
Click to expand...
Adding to what the others wrote, unless and until the drive really does fail -- like stops working completely, which SpinRite should detect -- all we have is an unhappy drive with a lot of errors.

If you're curious, you could start SpinRite with the no data recovery "dynastat 0" command-line option and run it at Level 3 to read and fully rewrite the drive. That might show you whether the drive's early regions can be recuperated.


#5

D

dmot

Steve said:
Adding to what the others wrote, unless and until the drive really does fail -- like stops working completely, which SpinRite should detect -- all we have is an unhappy drive with a lot of errors.

If you're curious, you could start SpinRite with the no data recovery "dynastat 0" command-line option and run it at Level 3 to read and fully rewrite the drive. That might show you whether the drive's early regions can be recuperated.
Click to expand...

Is "dynastat 0" something I need to add to the DOS prompt when I run/type srpr.exe?


#6

Tazz

Tazz

dmot said:
Is "dynastat 0" something I need to add to the DOS prompt when I run/type srpr.exe?
Click to expand...
Yes
srpr dynastat 0


#7

D

dmot

Tazz said:
Yes
srpr dynastat 0
Click to expand...

Thank you, I will try that, next, once this drive finishes.


#8

Steve

Steve

Yes. Exactly. You would enter: srpr dynastat 0


#9

Steve

Steve

Note that it will ask you whether you're SURE you want to do this, since this effectively turns off all of SpinRite's data recovery. If sector(s) cannot be read, SpinRite won't care. It'll rewrite what I obtained even if that's nothing! <g>


#10

A

AlanD

Alternatively, try "srpr dynastat 1" to speed things up yet still allow some chance of recovery


#11

D

dmot

Steve said:
Note that it will ask you whether you're SURE you want to do this, since this effectively turns off all of SpinRite's data recovery. If sector(s) cannot be read, SpinRite won't care. It'll rewrite what I obtained even if that's nothing! <g>
Click to expand...

I just started with dynastat 0, confirmed and changed it from level 2 to level 3. Drive is scanning now and making a noise ever few seconds from the motherboard speaker. Time is as 1200:xx and climbing. Still scanning the first .

I guess I'll leave it for a bit and see what happens.

Edit

10:57am still on the first . and time is at 14760:xx and climbing.

I don't mind counting this drive as dead, but I'll wait and see if anyone else replies with suggestions/questions/etc.


#12

Tazz

Tazz

dmot said:
I guess I'll leave it for a bit and see what happens.
Click to expand...
I recently let a level 2 'dynastat 0' scan run on a hdd that I knew had a bad spot. 29 hours later it had worked its way through.

BTW - Level 2 dynastat 0 is a lot faster than Level 1.

Code: 
|--- work ---- remaining --- completed +------- sector status key ---------|
  | megabytes:   1,592,903   404,514.543 | .oO analyzing   |  R  recovered   |
  |  20.3707%:      79.748%       20.252%|  .  unprocessed |  B  defective   |
  |      time:   114:26:26      29:03:43 |  :  processed   |  U  unrecovered |
  |==========================================================================|
  |                        Final Sector Event Counts                         |
  |--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |           command timeout:       0  command aborted:       0             |
  |           comm/cable errs:       0  not recoverable:  27,745             |
  |            minor troubles:      58  sect neverfound:       0             |
  |           dynastat recovr:       0  defective sectr:       0             |
  |==========================================================================|


#13

D

dmot

Ok, we have an error message, red screen.

edit- Image link removed, it was a red screen showing where the drive failed. No longer needed for this thread.


#14

Steve

Steve

The drive is definitely unhappy.
You could try again, restarting at the location of its failure.
Or you could restart a bit past that point.


#15

D

dmot

Steve said:
The drive is definitely unhappy.
You could try again, restarting at the location of its failure.
Or you could restart a bit past that point.
Click to expand...

Level 2 ran when I start it at 10%, but what will scanning the rest of the drive do if the first part isn't recoverable/erasable/etc?


#16

Steve

Steve

dmot said:
Level 2 ran when I start it at 10%, but what will scanning the rest of the drive do if the first part isn't recoverable/erasable/etc?
Click to expand...
Provide you with additional information? But you're right that the "sore spot" is the real focus. Now you know where it is. There's some chance that having SpinRite bump up against it will eventually induce the drive to take it out of service.


#17

D

dmot

Steve said:
Provide you with additional information? But you're right that the "sore spot" is the real focus. Now you know where it is. There's some chance that having SpinRite bump up against it will eventually induce the drive to take it out of service.
Click to expand...

Thanks Steve. I'll be adding this drive to the destroy pile.


#18

Steve

Steve

dmot said:
Thanks Steve. I'll be adding this drive to the destroy pile.
Click to expand...
Thanks to the much lower-level access that SpinRite v6.1 now offers, we've been encountering drives which have very specific trouble spots, like that one you have. Once SpinRite v7 adds files system awareness -- which is definitely on the road map because of all the MANY benefits that would accrue -- it WOULD be possible to "map around" such trouble spots to bring a drive back into service.

There are those who argue that any bad spot on a modern drive means that that the whole drive should be retired. But we're not seeing any evidence of that. Trouble is being localized in the drive's low-level format and at this point there's no reason to believe that this necessarily "contaminates" the rest of the drive.


#19

ColbyBouma

ColbyBouma

There's a chance Secure Erase could fix it.

Obligatory warning: performing a Secure Erase will permanently destroy all of the data on the drive!

Many modern motherboards have a Secure Erase utility somewhere in their UEFI menu. It may be called something else like Disk Wipe.

If your motherboard doesn't have such a utility, there are programs that can perform a Secure Erase. I use Parted Magic ($15), but there are free ones such as hdparm and HDDErase.

www.tomshardware.com

How to Securely Erase an SSD or HDD Before Selling It or Your PC

If you're selling your PC or storage drive, you need to wipe it.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com


#20

D

dmot

@Steve @ColbyBouma

Thank you for the information. Since I have a stack of drives I need to run through SR 6.1, maybe I'll make a new stack of drives that failed and then make a decision about what to do with those drives at a later date.


#21

S

SeanBZA

I have seen OS written bad blocks, which come from the OS timing out, and writing a bad block table entry, while the drive itself also reallocated the block with a hidden spare. That is fine, as this just is the OS doing it first, as modern drives hide all this, but the bad block table in the partition area is still there for legacy reasons. Full format with surface scan, which will also wipe that bad block table as it finds the bad block good, will fix it.


#22

rfrazier

rfrazier

I'll admit that I haven't read each post in this thread, just skimmed some. But, I adopt a tinfoil hat philosophy of tossing drives once they start throwing errors, reallocating sectors, or making any physical noise (if relevant) that's unusual. Of course, I'm not fond of losing $ 100 - $200 for a drive. But, I'm even more not fond of losing 1 - 2 TB of data.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron


#23

D

dmot

rfrazier said:
I'll admit that I haven't read each post in this thread, just skimmed some. But, I adopt a tinfoil hat philosophy of tossing drives once they start throwing errors, reallocating sectors, or making any physical noise (if relevant) that's unusual. Of course, I'm not fond of losing $ 100 - $200 for a drive. But, I'm even more not fond of losing 1 - 2 TB of data.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
Click to expand...

Backups, always.

In my case, the stack of drives I have are from a NAS system, specifically, synology. I can't speak for other NAS brands, but synology throws error messages a little prematurely, imo. I've had errors appear in synology that state the drive has bad sectors and that it should be replaced immediately. Since the data in question is part of a raid6 (again, in my scenario) AND I have a backup of the data in two additional places, I decide to roll the dice and leave the drive in the NAS. Years later, that drive has never thrown another error (at least synology hasn't given me an error for that drive) and it is still in operation as we speak.

If you replaced a drive each time synology threw an error, I guarantee you that you would change your opinion on tossing drives.

I've also had drives, in a synology NAS, that simply stop responding and appearing in synology. The array immediately goes into error mode and I replace the failed drive. In all my attempts with that drive, I was not able to get it to come back online. That's when I'm glad I have a raid and happy to have backups because not all drive errors can be ignored. I had no warning with this faulty drive, it just failed and I never got it back online.

Bottom line is, if your data is important/priceless/etc, make sure you don't only have a single copy of the data.

I've scanned 8 drives since the start of this thread. My results so far

1 drive that SR can't process.
3 drives had a single unrecoverable sector (red completed box)
4 drives completed the scan with no errors (green completed box)

0 data loss because of these drives being in a raid array and the data is backed up and offsite.


#24

rfrazier

rfrazier

What you pointed out is interesting. I don't have any experience with raid or NAS so I can't comment to much on that. It looks like SR is doing you some good. If a drive starts reallocating lots of sectors, I think I'd still be very suspicious of it.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron


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