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whatupdet posted:I have the free version of CCleaner, will that suffice? Any tool that writes to every sector will suffice - they are all essentially the same. If you wanted to be extra careful, you would find a tool that supports Secure Erase, which is an ATA command that wipes drives. It should be a little quicker than a zero-fill and will also try and wipe parts that a standard wiping tool may miss due to bad sector mapping. I say "find a tool", but that includes a motherboard that supports passing the specific ATA command to your disks. Honestly, even if your wiping tool skips bad sectors (and if the sector can't be read or written to then you can't do much about it) even if some heavy-hitter got access to the data in those areas there are pretty low odds of them getting anything useful out of it. If you cared that much, you'd physically destroy any disks that had bad sectors.
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Oct 5, 2014 00:54
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Mr. Crow posted:What do y'all do with hard drives that work but you're not comfortable putting data on it alone? Like other people have said, I throw these drives away. For the cost of a hard disk these days I just don't waste time with something I don't trust.
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Oct 25, 2014 03:29
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Knifegrab posted:Kind of a weird question for this thread, but I am looking for a little standalone device that can erase HDD's and SSD's, ideally to the standard military standard. I am aware I can do this in most machines, but it is for a production line and it would be better to have a simple plug and play device to expedite the process. We've got a bunch of kit that can do this in my office, but the smallest unit is the WiebeTech Drive Erazer Ultra. The only issue I guess is that you can only connect 1 drive to it at a time. What I do like, though, is that the connector for SATA devices is a combo power and data cable, so it's a lot easier to plug new drives in. I personally use the TD2, as it lets me wipe 2 disks simultaneously, but I use the imaging side of it a lot more so that's why I have that.
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Oct 29, 2014 02:15
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Papercut posted:So I got all of the pieces to hook this up, it's correctly recognized in BIOS and I have the correct boot order, but Windows hangs on startup. I can hear the old drive spinning, but then it gives a little "thinking" sounds and then rhythmically clicks. Basically, whirrrr-thinking-click-click-click, pause, click-click, pause, click-click-click etc. So you are hooking this drive up as a slave to your existing system, and it's preventing it from booting into Windows? Or have you hooked this drive up solo and are trying to boot from it? You'd be doing the former, ideally. I'd gladly hook that drive up to my recovery hardware if you can get it to me in Australia, but I'm going to assume you live elsewhere.
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Nov 6, 2014 04:59
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You could try booting into a live unix CD environment of some sort and see if it will read. Sometimes you get better luck with those than with Windows.
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Nov 6, 2014 05:39
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Hell yeah I do a RAM test overnight on a new machine. Over the decades I've only had a couple of RAM failures, but they can cause such a myriad of seemingly unrelated issues or kill your OS install in very subtle ways that I just don't want to experience them again.
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Nov 11, 2014 14:48
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slightpirate posted:I don't know if this is the right thread to ask in, but I'm looking for a pair of decent outdoor IP webcams. My fiance and I have some livestock and they like to huddle up next to our barn. I already have two drops available to use, I'm just finding it difficult to find decent cameras that will last longer than a year or so outdoors. I planned on building a shroud to keep them safe from most of the weather. I live in NE Kansas so heat and humidity may play a factor in longevity. Budget is around $150 per camera. I'd post this in the Surveillance Camera thread in Ask/Tell. They seem to know everything about cameras there.
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Dec 7, 2014 04:24
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doctorfrog posted:Issues with this are obvious: Is the master key is unique to each drive? Are records of the master keys kept somewhere, accessible to our friends at the NSA, or vulnerable to posting on the internet for any hacker to use? Obviously these are edge cases, but who wouldn't want their data as secure as possible? If you want some anecdotal evidence from someone who you may rightly deem would want you to believe his lies (if they were such) - WD's encryption systems are a complete pain in the arse for those of us in law enforcement who need to copy data off hard drives that don't belong to us. Master keys are not kept anywhere. Pulling the drive out of its enclosure or swapping platters (depending on the model) will leave the disk unreadable. Or rather, readable but complete gibberish. Many's a law enforcement officer who thinks he gets a solid read off a disk pulled from a suspect's system only to discover random data. Of course everything hinges on your personal paranoia level. Any Taiwanese or Chinese chips on that circuit board with backdoors? NSA codes no-one knows about because they have a mole in WD? Or will "they" just keep hitting you with a rubber hose until you unlock the data for them?
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Dec 25, 2014 13:45
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Corte posted:I think at this point it's either an OS issue and I need to do a complete wipe and start from scratch or I need to upgrade my motherboard which is frustrating because I was trying to avoid doing so and now I've missed the good deals for boxing day. Boot your system with a live OS CD and see if that reads the drive okay. At least you'll know all your hardware is fine if it works.
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Dec 30, 2014 08:28
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I would buy a better-quality 2.1 set up over a set of 5.1 PC speakers, but that's really just a personal preference.
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Jan 14, 2015 03:50
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Disharmony posted:The SATA-to-USB module/adapter of my WD My Book Essentials is apparently damaged (I get a "fatal error" message whenever I try to access the drive) so I had to remove the hard drive from its enclosure so I can use it on my desktop. The BIOS can detect it but it doesn't show up on Windows at all; not even on the "give it a letter" part. I've read somewhere that these drives are encrypted so I won't be able to use it as an internal drive - is that true? If the controller board that has the encryption stuff on it is dead, I think you might be boned. If the USB port is physically damaged you could solder some wires around it if you have the gear and a steady hand. Showing up in the BIOS means the PC sees the controller, but that doesn't mean the drive itself is okay. If the BIOS displays correct info, like the drive size is good and the serial number is not random bullshit, that's a good sign for recovery. However, if the drive contents are encrypted and the encryption hardware is damaged then I doubt you'll be fixing it yourself. Maybe a replacement circuit board with the exact same revision/model number would get your disk reading again? That would depend on if the encryption keys are unique to each board or not, and I've no idea.
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Feb 22, 2015 03:33
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See if it can be read by a unix box or with a live boot CD or a Mac or something. If so, format it from there. If not, the problem is probably beyond what you can do yourself. That is to say, if you have a standard SATA connector on that drive and it still is not detected even by non-Windows systems then there's probably not much more that you are going to able to do with it. Do you know for sure that "fatal error" means the drive is fine but the USB controller is bad? Could you just be wasting your time with a completely dead disk?
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Feb 22, 2015 13:57
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I used MacDrive a few years back. All these programs tend to have free trials for a week or two, thankfully.
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Feb 23, 2015 12:39
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JesusDoesVegas posted:I just got a new laptop, an MSI GS60. It has windows 8.1 installed, and it is up to date. I tried plugging in my 1TB Transcend external USB 3.0 hard drive, and it doesn't show up anywhere. Not in my computer, device manager, or disk management. I've tried all three USB ports (which do work with other devices), and I've tried the HD in another computer so I know it's working. This isn't a power issue because the HD spins up upon plug in, and the LED comes on. I found a forum post where someone suggested turning off fast-boot in power management, but that didn't do the trick either. I've uninstalled all of the USB drivers and restarted the computer to reinstall them, but no luck. From what I can see from MSI's website, they don't have proprietary USB drivers available for download, so there's nothing new there I can get. So other USB storage devices work fine? Does your 1TB drive show up if you boot your laptop with a live OS CD? This might give you some idea if there's a hardware issue.
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Mar 14, 2015 23:58
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whatupdet posted:I just opened it, I was expecting a scan but it was instant. All of my drives are showing good except my WD 3TB green which has Caution [C6] Uncorrectable sector count: 1. I guess I'll replace that disk, is it fine to copy files from that drive over to another drive or will that corrupt the other drive? I have a requirement at work to be fairly certain my drives are good before using them, so they all undergo a single wipe pass to make sure I can write to every sector. This obviously takes time, and I've never considered doing it for any drives I use in my home system. The SMART data that CrystalDisk provides to you is not foolproof, but certainly if it reports a problem you should do something about it. Drives can and will report no problems in the SMART data but still fail. I can't recommend any particular non-destructive surface test - all the stuff I do overwrites the entire disk. As to your question about a Windows wiping tool, the built-in Windows full format will do this for you on any operating system from Vista onwards (so no problem with your Win 7.) The quick format will NOT do this, but the full format overwrites every sector. Only 1 pass, but as has been said any more than 1 is overkill anyway.
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Jul 2, 2015 03:24
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Smoking_Dragon posted:I have a 2 terabyte external harddrive that I use to store files and backup my computer. Ever since I upgraded to Windows 10 I haven't been able to back up to it since Windows tells me there is not enough space. Currently it says there is 468 GB of 1.81 TB free. However, when I open the drive and select all the folders, including hidden files, it only shows about 500 GB being used. Where is the remaining ~800 GB? I've run a disk scan and defragment with no issues. Is the disk formatted to FAT32? Maybe they changed the way backups are done and the system now needs to write a compressed file (or something) that is bigger than 4GB and FAT32 doesn't support that. When you try you'll get an error that sounds like you don't have enough disk space. If this is the case you'll need to reformat that disk to NTFS or ExFAT.
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Aug 10, 2015 01:12
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Nintendo Kid posted:On a decent group of drives, it just tells the cells to write themselves full of 0s, thereby using a write cycle. For that matter deleting anything on a drive with TRIM enabled tends to do the same thing, once the recycle bin is emptied that is. You do that and your only hope of recovering your just deleted data is breaking out the very low level test equipment maybe, if the cell hasn't been purged yet. Going around the hardware on an SSD in an effort to recover data marked as deleted is pretty much a fool's errand. With all the clever-as-gently caress block remapping and wear-levelling shenanigans, even if you get some data it's unlikely you'll know what cells to chain it to in order to get useful amounts of information out.
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Sep 18, 2015 02:27
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Nintendo Kid posted:Some of them are actually SSD quality: Yeah, there is huge variability between brands when you go to USB3. Some (most?) have excellent read speeds but slow write, some are good at both, and some are scary fast and you can't believe that USB3 supports such speed.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:13
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DeaconBlues posted:So what about police forensics being able to pick up child porn or terrorism information from mechanical hard drives then? Is that just a myth or do they have access to more sophisticated techniques than the average data recovery specialist? As someone working in this field for over 15 years, it's a fantasy.
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Jan 10, 2016 01:35
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DeaconBlues posted:I've built a cheap, small form factor PC for someone with a mini ITX board. It has 2x SATA 3 GB/s and 2x SATA 6 GB/s ports on the board. Obviously, I've got the system SSD plugged into one of the 6 GB/s ports and also have an old 2.5" mechanical drive to use for movies. In my office we heavily process terabyte datasets, so we ensure our various disks and arrays are on separate channels to maximise throughput. It makes a huge difference for us. However, it's not a hard and fast rule as there are a lot of usage considerations, as well as whatever weirdness is involved in how your motherboard manufacturer has connected everything together. You may not saturate a single bus with both your disks, but maybe you will? Your HDD will happily sit on that 3GB channel and not be slowed down. I would separate them so I wouldn't have to ever worry about it. Having said all that, if you're just using this as a HTPC then you aren't moving much data anyway so either way probably won't make a noticeable difference. Your SSD will be slowed by your HDD during file transfers so your performance will probably be like 2 HDDs, and they won't saturate that 6GB/s. Hell, you probably wouldn't notice any difference doing file copies if they were both on that 3GB/s bus. I could be full of poo poo, though. Someone here probably knows a lot more about this than I do.
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Jan 10, 2016 12:35
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Can you use an eSATA to SATA cable to connect a standard SATA drive? You'd still need to power the disk, of course.
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Feb 25, 2016 23:45
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Yeah, the raw value of reallocated sector count of zero is what you want to see, so that's fine. My two Seagate disks (3TB and 4TB) show very similar values to yours.
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Mar 22, 2016 07:37
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Housh posted:I'm not sure if this is the right place but I am wondering what is the cheapest media player device to hook up to a TV to play 1080p mkv files. I don't want to stream as the internet in the place is flaky. I want to be able to dump files on a usb drive and play them on the TV. I have a WDTV and it plays 1080 across my LAN from a NAS no problem at all, as well as off a USB stick plugged into it. As an MKV is just a container, it would depend on what the audio and video streams are encoded with before you could say if the WD could play it back or not, but I think I've found maybe one or two it couldn't manage out of many hundreds. Also, really new stuff like HEVC won't play at all.
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Apr 13, 2016 12:46
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Is compressed air okay to clean out a fan? One guy bitched at me for using compressed air when I was working on a server because he said it could cause condensation and fry the parts. The only issues I've heard with compressed air used to blow out fans is that you should jam the fan with something so you don't over-drive it to some crazy RPMs it was never made to run at. No idea if canned air has the grunt to do that, though - it was in reference to using a compressor.
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Apr 25, 2016 14:36
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DeaconBlues posted:Yeah. I was tired and left it overnight doing 'dd if=/dev/zero' to fill it with blank. dd should have blown it away, yes. As it failed, that card is dead.
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Jun 5, 2016 20:28
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ufarn posted:I’m doing some MEMTEST on my RAM (2x2 and 2x4), and I can’t remember what’s consider a good amount of passes, and what the best metric for bugged RAM is in terms of errors. Some errors are acceptable I imagine, but what’s the threshold? Like Geemer said, zero is the only number of acceptable Memtest errors. If I don't see any after a few hours I'm pretty happy. I might have run it overnight once when I was particularly worried, but whenever I've had a bad stick of RAM Memtest has flagged it within an hour or two at the most.
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Jun 26, 2016 13:04
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Red_Fred posted:I just bought a new stick of ram for my laptop (Lenovo x250). How long do I need to keep it running in memtest? Any options to include when I start it? I usually run Memtest for an hour or two, or overnight if timing suits. However, whenever it has detected a problem it has done so within the first 30 minutes.
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Jul 22, 2016 00:50
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Bovril Delight posted:I'm looking at SMART for two drives - one is a 250GB hard drive that I bought with a desktop from CL. The other is a 4TB Seagate model that I bought about a year and a half ago. The smaller drive has 200 listed for both the uncorrectable and pending sector count, but doesn't show up as a warning or any concerns. If that is coming out of CrystalDiskInfo, are you telling us the raw values?
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Aug 1, 2016 08:53
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Bovril Delight posted:Ah, makes more sense. The good drive has 0 in both current pending sector count and uncorrectable sector count. Yeah, SMART data can be weird. Don't quote me, but I think some of those values tell you what the threshold is before it sends an error, and the current value that is counting down from the threshold to zero. This means those numbers can be useless. But the raw value should be the actual number of "hits" for that entry, and so more useful. But like I said, I think that's how it works as I've not read up on it lately to confirm my dubious memory.
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Aug 2, 2016 03:44
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Dorkopotamis posted:Do I switch the hard drives out, or do I wait the 15 hours to complete a data migration over WIFI? I would wait the 15 hours. Kick it off around 6pm and you can eat dinner and catch a movie and go to bed and it's all done after you've eaten breakfast.
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Aug 19, 2016 05:53
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If you're seeing corruption even in the BIOS or start-up screens like that then it has to be a bad card. I'd be surprised if the card could get hot enough that quickly to show problems as soon as it powers on.
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Sep 26, 2016 11:32
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Ema Nymton posted:I did that already. But at 64 GB, I wish there was something more I could do with it. You could embed what you have in a great lump of Sugru, or whatever the name is of that putty that quckly tuns hard.
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Oct 22, 2016 22:24
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With HDD prices these days if a disk took me longer than half an hour to get working properly I'd RMA or bin it and get a new one. In the bad old days before the mid-90s you expected a fight with your hardware, but now it's either plug and play or it's broken as far as hard drives go.
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Nov 3, 2016 01:39
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Run a CrystalDiskInfo report and see what it says about bad blocks etc.
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Nov 4, 2016 03:44
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Easiest way would be to do a full format on each drive. It should report any write failures so you know to be wary of it. Note that this is not the same as a quick format, and should take hours to run over each disk.
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Nov 29, 2016 04:35
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Wilford Cutlery posted:I keep my laptop's old hard drive in a 2.5" USB enclosure since I upgraded to an SSD. Last night I dropped the enclosure, drive and all, a distance of about 3 feet. This morning I plug it in and it refuses to spin up. What can I try to retrieve the data and move it to a new drive? When you say "refuses to spin up", do you mean "the drive make noises but nothing happens", or literally "the drive makes no sounds and doesn't spin at all"? In either situation you'll want to hook the disk up directly rather than via USB. If it is still utterly dead, it could just be the TVS diode that has gone (it acts like a fuse) and is an easy fix by pulling it off the PCB. If it makes noises and tries to spin then you are in a much tougher situation.
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Nov 30, 2016 01:21
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funny Star Wars parody posted:Hey guys quick question: I noticed that my system will bog down and completely lockup occasionally, and when it does Windows says that the hard drive usage is at 100%. As far as I can tell, it's not failing based on this: I just took a look at my Seagate ST3000 drive and it reports Command Timeout and UltraDMA CRC error count are both 0, which is considerably different to yours. I'd be very wary of that disk at this stage, unless it's a dodgy cable causing command errors and data transfer failure.
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Nov 30, 2016 10:09
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Wilford Cutlery posted:I assume I need to contact a data recovery shop, then? Who is the go-to choice, DriveSavers? I've done training with Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied, so I can vouch for their skills.
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Dec 1, 2016 00:52
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I just got a Missing or Corrupt NTFS.sys file error just now. After using the computer last night, it wouldn't wake up, so I restarted it. It took a while to come up, and when I came back I was getting that error. I restarted it again, it came up fine. I wish I had gotten the exact error number. It's not in the event log, presumably because it didn't boot enough to be recorded in the event log. It was either 0x(some number of zeroes I forget)22 or 21. See what CrystalDiskInfo has to say about the disk. You should see 0 for the raw values that talk about errors. My 850 EVO says there is a POR Recovery Count of 1, which just means I've had 1 unexpected shutdown events.
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Dec 9, 2016 06:34
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Teledahn posted:
I use Rufus for converting optical media to USB. Regularly updated and lightweight.
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Dec 13, 2016 23:18
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