CHKDSK _ stage 3

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[DaveYVR]

Hi Folks, first post since migrating over from windows secrets.

I just had a drive “failure”. 8TB WD MyBook external.  So I am running chkdsk /f using a windows 7 pro 64 bit laptop in a nice chilly room.

I am running from within windows using run> cmd> chkdsk /f .

I forgot to elevate the privileges before starting but did not get any warning about insufficient privileges.  I am using an admin account so have some admin privileges.

Questions:

-Will the above stated lack of elevated cmd privileges result in something unforeseen?

-At stage 3, “CHKDSK is resetting USN information”, will bombing out by powering down or unplugging the drive cause any drastic loss of data?

Now the fluff of my post below. Not necessary to read if you’re in a rush…

I realise powering down at stage 1 is safe (reading operation only) and stage 2 can be potentially detrimental to data (some writing operation may be happening), but I am unsure about how important the USN stage 3 is to the data integrity. From another site:

Stage 3: ChkDsk verifies the security descriptors for each volume During stage 3, ChkDsk examines each of the security descriptors associated with each file and directory on the volume by verifying that each security descriptor structure is well formed and internally consistent. The percentage complete that ChkDsk displays during this phase is the percentage of the number of files and directories on the volume that are checked.
The percentage complete indicator advances relatively smoothly throughout this phase, although some unevenness might occur.

This drive repair has been an exercise of patience. It has been running for over a week now, suggesting that there is a fair bit of corruption on the drive.  Every time I am almost ready to give up and try data recovery instead, it makes a jump in progress. Today is a great example.  I came on here to ask if powering down during stage 3 was prudent because it had been sitting at 0 percent of this phase for 2+ days. Just five minutes ago I went to check the message about USN it was giving me to type in here.  And of course it just jumped to 21 percent.  This has been the pattern throughout. And stage 3 seems to be mirroring stage 1 which suggests it is checking a whole wack of small files in the first part of each stage.

So anyways, was wondering if anyone had any insight to my two questions above.

Cheers,
Dave

• This topic was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by DaveYVR.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Kirsty.

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b/c its external, you werren’t prompted for Admin.

8TBs is a lot!  My experience w/ MyBooks has been like yours, slowww.  Depending on the machine’s hardware (the one set-up in the chilly room), you could be looking at some time.  At least you didn’t run /f /r E: 

Weigh the pros and cons.  Weigh your time spent waiting vs. odds of chkdsk /f increasing your odds of recovering data.  Id say its safe/ok to power off and try data recovery tools -but it’s not my data to lose.  Good luck!

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DaveYVR

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NO! Do not abruptly disconnect the drive! If you are having this severe problem your drive is probably not in good condition, and any existing files should have been copied on to a new drive before now. Not recommended but you can attempt to interrupt the check disk program and then safely shutting down Windows Seven, however could be too late for some portion of your data.

You have enough permissions to run Check Disk or else you would have seen an warning message about insufficient privileges.

About the security descriptors, when check disk (chkdsk) is performing normally the descriptor clean up procedure improves performance. Based on oft repeated observation of check disk summaries XP NTFS descriptor problem was horrible, Windows Seven much better, and Windows 8/8.1/10 very much better than Seven. Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft’s author(s) of check disk included a specific command-line option to clean them without going through a full filesystem check up.

There are programs that can help but require some know how. A small list of untried software dd_rescue, Unstoppable Copier (author & virus free – unknown). Commercial backup programs like Macrium Reflect may be able to try to blindly clone the drive to an new external disk.

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DaveYVR, Bertram Pincus

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Yeah, agreed w/ the post beneath my original.  After further thought I would let the chkdsk /f run its course.  Any writes currently being done to your MyBook could come back to haunt you when it comes time to try Macrium or its like.  Be patient if you can, but if time is of essence, YMMV w/ power-down while chkdsk is running.  An 8TB MyBook… I feel for you!

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When running chkdsk, let it run to completion.  Do not interrupt it at any stage.

Also, I never use /f, I always use /r (implies /f, but also looks for bad sectors and tries to recover readable data).  Using /r, if/when chkdsk finds bad sectors and recovers readable data (if there is any), it marks the sectors as bad, and they will not be written again.  It also flags empty bad sectors, as well, so that they will not be written in the future.

An 8TB disk is going to take a good while, and a lot of patience.  I would suggest that if chkdsk can get the disk up and running again, create a drive image, replace the disk and restore the image to the new disk.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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DaveYVR

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Thanks you two for the answers and suggestions….and the sympathy

Thanks also to Kirsty. I think you must have cleaned up my double post after my edit glitched.

I do own a copy of Macrium for my work computer, so I appreciate that suggestion. I would not have thought of it. I’m not sure if it will work on a drive that windows wants to format (can’t read), but I’ll see once chkdsk completes. I started scanning the drive with EaseUS and it seemed to be able to see the data. It just looked at first blush that it didn’t seem to recognize any directory structure, but I didn’t allow it to finish scanning before changing paths to chkdsk. EaseUS was also a little on the pricey side so I decided to try the free options first.  I’ve also heard some good things about SpinRite, except for the fact that it hasn’t been updated much since the days of IDE drives. Any thoughts you folks have about SpinRite would be welcome.

Cheers,

Dave

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Bertram Pincus

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Dave, list the WD software installed, please.

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Bertram Pincus

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Thanks bbearren as well for your suggestion. I was replying to the others when you wrote.  I didn’t run /r since I knew it was likely going to take quite a while just for /f and that /r would increase that time several fold. I decided to just get it readable, recover as much data as possible, and then run /r  on the drive after to get an idea how much is affected by bad sectors. Then I can decide if the drive was just corrupted by windows or if it is actually failing. If /r comes up with a lot of issues I would just retire the drive.

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I have a licensed copy of SpinRite, and it is most assuredly the very last resort.  It is more fine-grained than chkdsk, and takes much, much longer to run.  The last time I used it was on a 120GB laptop disk, and it took over 3 days to complete.

On the other hand, it made the disk usable, and I could extract all the data from it, replace it, and restore the data to the new drive.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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wavy, DaveYVR

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That’s very good to know about the time it took. I will definitely only go down that road as a last resort then.

Thank you!

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satrow wrote:

Dave, list the WD software installed, please.

I’m not working from that computer at the moment so I’m not sure off the top of my head all the different WD utilities I have installed. I do recall the one utility WD has that does a quick health check of the drive. Oddly enough I used that utility in the week leading up to the failure and it detected no issues.

Would you mind me asking what you’re thinking about? Is there a particular WD driver or software that may be causing the issue?

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Bertram Pincus

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Maybe Satrow was hinting at this:

https://www.wd.com/products/features/acronis.html

One last thought, kill any unnecessary process(es) on the machine in the chilly room (if you haven’t already).  No need for AV or any extraneous process to be running.  Allow every bit of CPU muscle to finish that chkdsk /f .  Good luck Dave.  (huge fan of GRC and Steve -but you have many free options to consider before you have to open your wallet).

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DaveYVR

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No, satrow wasn’t, stop guessing, please.

WD’s SmartWare and the allied drivers/utilities can play some strange tricks, occas. leading to what appears to normal disk tools to be a corrupt partition containing one huge file. Auto-encryption and auto-compression are a great idea…

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Bertram Pincus

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satrow, I have installed the the WD drive utilities program.  This is what I did the quick scan with.

At this point I am not trying to trouble shoot the original cause of the issue since I think that’s a rabbit hole I don’t have the time to go down, but for your interest, I suspect it has something to do with the ASmedia USB 3 drivers I installed on my fresh windows 7 install.

Or it may have also been something to do with the dual boot environment I had with windows 10 and windows 7. I forgot to disable the quick start in windows 10 which was leaving the disks mounted (if I recall the behavior correctly). However, since I ran several restarts in dual booting with the quick start active, I don’t believe it was this.

More likely culprit, or just pure coincidence, are the ASMedia usb drivers. The problem occurred immediately after installing the ASMedia drivers. I’m still not sure if that could have affected my WD MyBook which was plugged into the already functioning Intel USB ports at the time.  Those drivers were already installed before plugging in the WD MyBook.

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So you’ve never had SmartWare installed?

Just trying to troubleshoot the problem – which might just vanish if all it needs is a reinstall of the ‘missing’ software to rejoin the dots.

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DaveYVR

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[DaveYVR]

This thread is getting a little long and easy to miss. Flattened out the conversation:

-see the quote at August 20, 2019 at 7:40 am for continuation of this thread.

Edit: I didn’t add that bbs code above. Not sure why that got plugged in automatically.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by DaveYVR.

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satrow wrote:

No, satrow wasn’t, stop guessing, please.

WD’s SmartWare and the allied drivers/utilities can play some strange tricks, occas. leading to what appears to normal disk tools to be a corrupt partition containing one huge file. Auto-encryption and auto-compression are a great idea…

Most humble apologies @satrow… in my haste while rushing from work, I used an ill-conceived segue.My post’s intention was only to note a free utility avail. to OP, never to sully ones name w/ undeserved speculation.No need for OP to spend money on a data recovery tool when there are multitudes of apt free options.

Moderator note: Correct spelling of member entered.

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Hi Bertram,

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m not familiar at all with GRC and Steve, but will look them up if chkdsk doesn’t resolve the issue.

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Bertram Pincus

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DaveYVR wrote:

Hi Bertram,

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m not familiar at all with GRC and Steve, but will look them up if chkdsk doesn’t resolve the issue.

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

Look ’em up even if you solve your present problem.

Steve Gibson

So many years ago Fred Langa turned me onto Steve’s collection of work.

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DaveYVR, Bertram Pincus

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Okay, so GRC are the developers of SpinRite which bbearren and I were talking about earlier.  Thanks for the link and clearing me up on that.

Yes, I have heard good things about that and it’s ability to really strengthen a drive and improve the data fidelity of already stored data.  But as mentioned earlier, it would probably be my last resort since it sounds like it can take a very long time even on drives less than 1TB. I can’t imagine how long my external 8TB would take.  $89 dollars puts it in that area where I would really have to need it.  Not terribly expensive, but I prefer in the $30 or less territory for software that gets infrequent use.  For professionals though, that $89 is a steal.

It might be interesting to try on some of my older failed drives however.

One question about SpinRite: I have been reading that it occasionally has trouble with non-IDE drives depending on the motherboard. Would you know of the top of your head if they have updated and resolved these issues?

 

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I can’t speak with any authority whether SpinRite will work with Serial or Parallel (SATA-PATA)
drives. IDE would be the latter.

Apologies for off topic posting about GRC, I have used several of the free products (ShieldsUp for one) and it performed as advertised.

I will look it up though. I recall something about mom board settings affecting how SpinRite performs. This could be true for any repair product, idk.

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Here’s quick look-see at SpinRite for SATA drives on GRC (you may have already read this)

As an alternative to Windows built in Chkdsk you might look on Oldergeeks.com
I see one program, Checkdisk v1.6 64bit

CheckDisk is a powerful tool for searching and repairing disk errors. It is quite similar to the ScanDisk tool or chkdsk.exe, supplied with the Windows OS

It’s not a Windows OS program, afaik
HTH

PS: You might want to pay attention to @satrow , he knows what he’s talking about.

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BigBadSteve, satrow, DaveYVR

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Hi Bluetrix,

I took a look at the link you provided. I had read that before but too early in my research to understand the relevance of it. After clicking your link and reading it a second time it is more clear that they still haven’t released version 6.1 which would officially support SATA. This was written by them in 2011:

Since this is a rapidly growing problem for SpinRite, due to the market’s rapid success and uptake of of SATA drives, we are considering the development and release of v6.1, which will cure this problem, sooner rather than later. The upgrade to v6.1 (and any other “dot releases”) of SpinRite will be no-charge and all registered owners of SpinRite will be informed as soon as v6.1 is available. This is not something we have started work on, but it has a high and growing priority.

Given that it is 8 years later, and they are still at version 6.0, it looks like something prevented them from taking their plans forward. In any case, if I understand it correctly, the problem only affects older mother boards (older in 2011).  The laptop I would use for the correction must be less than 10 years old, or a relatively new computer in 2011.

I wonder if Steve Gibson is still alive? Sounded like he was semi-retired in 1998

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DaveYVR, Gibson is still at it.  He’s doing Twitter now.  Check the column on the right on this page: https://blog.grc.com/

Windows 10 Pro x64 v1909, Windows 7 Home Premium x64, Windows Vista Home Premium x64

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DaveYVR

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What is a USN journal? (The author of the Wikipedia summary did a great job without being too technical on the subject.)

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DaveYVR

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Morning.  Did you check the drive using “Diskpart” (command prompt, as admin)?   If unfamiliar, Command prompt (admin), List Disk, List Volume, (you can also type help -if unfamiliar), once list volume populates, select volume “3” (whatever volume# MyBook, 8TB reads), then type Detail Volume.  Is it Read Only, by chance?  Encrypted, or Offline?  What did you mean by “drive failure” in OP btw?  Diskpart will give you some intel (no pun) on the state of your data (also list partition > select Partition “Mybook#” > detail partition.  Here’s to hoping you don’t see RAW, instead see 6TB+ NTFS of your healthy data.  Sorry if Diskpart mention was too elementary.  But I empathize b/c years ago I had problems w an old Mybook (a **** exFat format to the thing drove me bananas ironing-out).  Be well.

Please follow the –Lounge Rules– no personal attacks, no swearing

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DaveYVR

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Hi Bertram,

I took a look at the drive in Disk Management under windows. If I recall correctly, I do believe it was showing as RAW.  But I imagine this is likely due to corruption in the sensitive bits of the drive (file allocation table and such) since EaseUS could see the data and chkdsk sees files.

Does anyone have any alternatives to EaseUS that they prefer? I might as well research them while I wait for chkdsk to finish. It hasn’t moved since yesterday morning. Still at 21% of “resetting the USN information” . I’m crossing my toes that this is the last phase of stage-3!

Patience.

 

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Bertram Pincus

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Try using diskpart tool, command prompt as admin next time.  I’ve found it’s more reliable than Disk Management… plus it allows you to do some neat stuff (just never ever type “clean” if you’re trying to salvage data). 

Glad to hear your on your way to figuring this pickle out!  Good on you for being patient.  I liked the one suggestion to go to Folder Options and unhide System Protected files.  I think that was your ticket to seeing what’s doing in that newly created folder.  Nice work troubleshooting!

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[DaveYVR]

satrow wrote:

So you’ve never had SmartWare installed?

Just trying to troubleshoot the problem – which might just vanish if all it needs is a reinstall of the ‘missing’ software to rejoin the dots.

Hmmm, I almost missed this.  I haven’t seen nested forums for a while. Oh well, still better than the current trend of doing all this on facebook.  But I think I’ll flatten this out a bit using a quote since that thread above was getting a bit distant, and a bit narrow.

So I looked up Smartware’s description, and see that it is a backup software package. Unless it has another function I may have needed in the past, I don’t believe I would have ever intentionally installed it.  Look how well that worked out for me .

Edit: I almost forgot to mention that I was also seeing some missing SES drivers for the drive after I plugged it in again.

The info below is just chatter. No important info, so feel free to skip it:

My more sensitive / important data I keep on a dropbox directory, so no desperate need for back up.  In this case, this was a relatively new drive, with semi-important information (old projects and such) that I had hoped to backup.  My pattern is to wait a couple years for a new larger hard drives to come down in price and copy the data over, retire the smaller drive as backup, and continue forward with the larger drive.  Murphy’s law, I was just pricing out some new drives.

I used to have a nice backup program that just did a straight copy of files over to the backup location. I should really get that back up and running again, but really haven’t used it since 2007 or so.  It had a lot of the same design philosophy as macrium with iterative, full, etc.  And like so many of the backup programs, didn’t rely on creating packs or volumes that could only be read by the backup software that created them,  and make finding older files cumbersome.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by DaveYVR.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by DaveYVR.

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As I alluded to earlier, SmartWare/SES combo could mean auto-encryption + compression, something goes wrong and conventional disk tools would see RAW with a single incomprehensible file.

With an error showing from a WD driver, the first consideration should have been to consider correcting, or at least, investigating that as possible cause.

I’d suggest a test uninstall of the WD Smartware, SES and WD Backup from the computer, shutdown and then restart the PC and reinstall the software. See what happens, if there’s a difference then.

Of course, you may have to wait another day of so before you can do that…

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Yes, that probably would have been a more prudent course of action. I guess the initial panic clouded my judgement on steps I should have taken.  And I should mention that I never imagined that chkdsk would take this long.

The action I did take was to try the drive on several different computers. The behavior of how windows recognized the drive was the same on all computers. And these other computers did not have the same SES issues that my new win 7 install was having.  I did quickly investigate the SES issues, but it was generally taking me down dead ends.

I don’t recall exactly, but it may have been that SES research that lead me to the chkdsk resolution. I came across a post from someone that was having the exact same issues as me and it was completely resolved with a relatively quick chkdsk in their case.  If I still have the tab open, I will try and post a link to that resolution here.

I’m curious satrow, what are your thoughts on the ASmedia USB driver installation deleteriously affecting a drive plugged plugged into the Intel usb ports. Wish  I never installed those darn ASMedia drivers. I think they’ve been the cause of some really aberrant behaviour on my past windows 7 installs. Or maybe it’s just the ASUS board itself.  Going to try an EVGA x299 dark next time which seems to keep all usb native.

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A USB chipset driver install/upgrade isn’t likely, imo, to trigger a reset/redirect of devices unless shared drivers were in use, maybe something like a reconfiguration of sleep/wake timers/settings caused a momentary loss of voltage to the USB buses? Difficult to be sure without knowing the exact install routines and having access to all the logs.

I look on my ASMedia USB3 as an overflow, it’s rarely used, not been updated since the last OS install, over 2.5 years ago. I try to keep to a lean and mean, drivers only routine – currently only 15 3rd party drivers are loaded, 5 of which are security related and one of those is due for removal at the next reboot/restart – which might be 3-4 months away yet.

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DaveYVR

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Forgot the illustration:

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satrow wrote:

A USB chipset driver install/upgrade isn’t likely, imo, to trigger a reset/redirect of devices unless shared drivers were in use, maybe something like a reconfiguration of sleep/wake timers/settings caused a momentary loss of voltage to the USB buses? Difficult to be sure without knowing the exact install routines and having access to all the logs.

I look on my ASMedia USB3 as an overflow, it’s rarely used, not been updated since the last OS install, over 2.5 years ago. I try to keep to a lean and mean, drivers only routine – currently only 15 3rd party drivers are loaded, 5 of which are security related and one of those is due for removal at the next reboot/restart – which might be 3-4 months away yet.

Yes, I am of the same mindset. I wasn’t going to even enable those ports, even though that left me with only two intel usb3 ports, until on reboot my computer would not recognise the keyboard, even though all handoffs were enabled in the bios.  Knowing from the past troubleshooting that the number 1 usb port has the best chance of firing up the keyboard during boot/post, I switched the keyboard to the ASmedia ports which for some reason ASUS decided to make the number 1 and 2 ports.  While that worked for post, as soon as I entered the windows environment I was forced to install the drivers as a necessary evil if I wanted a working keyboard during and after post.

P.S.: found the resolution that lead me down the chkdsk path:

https://community.wd.com/t/its-asking-me-to-re-format-and-i-dont-want-to/8284/7

Took a while to find. One problem leads to another.  When did firefox start restricting history to 7 days???  Miss the days when one device was enough and syncing was something spies did to their watches. In fact, lately, missing the days of typewriters. Letter jams weren’t too difficult to troubleshoot.

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If I’m reading that screenshot correctly, it looks like you have a z77 generation motherboard there?  Same gen as the one I’m experiencing all this trouble on (Asus P8z77 premium).  Mine’s getting a bit long in the tooth.

I assume you added that 3.1 usb controller as a card?

Mine looks a little bit like the screenshot below. You can see I’ve left quite a few drivers uninstalled. The only one I’m still iffy about is the Marvel controler, although I seem to recall it was pretty buggy as well. I do have SATA drives plugged into those 6gb sata ports, but seem to have less trouble without the drivers than with. Maybe I’m not getting top speeds, but that’s okay. There are another 2 6gb sata ports that have drivers installed.

As a point of interest, I’ve also avoided installing the Intel management engine since I understand it’s only useful for some remote bios control, and I also saw recently that without an update it is a vector for attack.

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ASRock Z77E-ITX with a XEON 1230v2, the ASMedia’s built into the ITX ‘board (along with a PS/2 port), afaik IME isn’t fully functional with Z series and it would also require a compat. CPU (the XEON is), I think B, Q and H series have the full IME set. It’s also disabled (mostly, not brewed my own BIOS’ yet) in all my rigs.

I see you have SR open, you do know that it only protects a subset of Windows’ files, not 3rd party?

7 days? That’s not browser history, this is:

The Marvell might work on the Windows drivers should you need the extra SATA ports.

Still got those SES drivers installed? Tut-tut

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I think we’ve scared everyone else out of the topic. oops And yes for SES. I’m still not doing much with this new install, but will have to get those sorted before plugging in the repaired drive.  Windows was unable to locate anything so your suggestion to uninstall and reinstall anything WD related will have to be my recourse. So much for a clean install. I’m almost tempted to start over from scratch.

Regarding system restore, yes I actually placed it in the screen shot intentionally to remind me about the roll back to before installing the ASmedia usb drivers. Seems to have removed them fine. I checked the drivers affected before and after. Although no, I did not know that it did not roll back 3rd party software. I thought it just did not do an automatic restore point before installing 3rd party software.

Finally I just hooked the keyboard into the USB port that can be used to flash the BIOS while powered down. That seems to have worked like a charm, so no more need for the ASmedia drivers. I would have said that I will have to remember that, but this will be my last ASUS board I think. I’m no longer infatuated with all the bells and whistles. I’m more interested in board stability now.  I originally purchased the asus premium board since it sort of straddled the line between work station and mainstream board.

Yours is quite and interesting little board. The internal wires to the external antenna connectors look like a bit of an afterthought.  I’m assuming that was to make it a bit modular so you could change out the radio in the future with a faster radio? It looks like the wires are attached to a removable card. Interesting Or maybe just because it is a small form factor board.

I’ve never used a Mini-ITX board before.  What was your original intended use for that little powerhouse. Xeon processor makes me think some kind of workstation, but I’m curious what your actual purpose for it was.

Sorry everyone. Just passing time. My repair is still stuck at 21 %

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Well, 3 days later and USN completed overnight. Stalled at 21% for almost 2 days on then finished in less than 8 hours.

As I feared, another step in stage 3. See below.

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Paul T

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So the patience paid off.

Yesterday afternoon the Chkdsk ran to completion and the directory structure looks intact.  If I recall correctly, that is about 10 days to repair an 8TB 5400rpm drive for anyone else who goes down this road.

A review of the project files looks fine.

There was a small group of Mozila profile backup files in a folder in the root directory. Those seem to have disappeared, but when I re-scan the drive with EaseUS they are found in a directory called dir0000.chk which I assume is a directory that chkdsk created for orphan/corrupted files.

In any case, I’m pleased with the results and on first review the files seem intact.

Also, EaseUS looks to be $20 off today (now $70), so I may just bite the bullet and purchase it. I’ve come across a lot of good comments regarding this software.

Thanks all for your help. Especially Bertram and Anonymous who belayed my fears that I was going to need to start all over with an elevated command prompt.

satrow, it was nice passing the time with you discussing computer builds and driver maintenance.

Thanks again all.  On to my next problem…

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Thank you for keeping us updated and this is unexpected good news! Cheers!

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DaveYVR

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I had a small old Windows XP boot drive (100 GB) in a computer that was running slow, so I shut down and ran chkdsk /f from an external CD.  Upon completion, it reported a single instance of repairing cross linked files, that it corrected.  Subsequently the computer would no longer boot.

Attempting to boot under Safe Mode without networking, the boot stalled in the middle of loading a long list of driver files from C:\Windows\System32\Drivers.  This leads me to think at least one of the cross linked files was in there, and got truncated.  (I haven’t yet gotten around to copying over all the files in that directory to see if that fixes the boot problem.)

From what I can understand, truncating the pairs of crosslinked files is the only solution available to CHKDSK.  If this is a system critical file, as appears to be the case here, that’s a solution that can NEVER work.  I don’t understand why there is no option to identify the broken pieces of the files, and reattach them, as we used to do in the old days of Norton Disk Doctor, or at least identify the names of the cross-linked files involved.  Am I missing something here?

Why would I trust CHKDSK, except as a last resort?  Is there anything better out there?

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Hi anonymous.

I just saw your reply here. Gosh nested forums is a pain in the behind.

I mentioned in my last post that I have purchased SpinRite which seams to have some of the functionality you are looking for. I think I will start a new thread dedicated to SpinRite, and maybe put in some screenshots from the manual if it doesn’t go against any copyrights.

The one I recall was PCtools, which may or may not have been a precursor to Norton Disk Doctor. I seem to have a vague memory that it is the same company but PCTools was the DOS and windows 3.1 days, so my memory is extremely fuzzy on it. I may even have the name wrong.

Anyway, apparently SpinRite can actually fill in some missing data as well by interpolation. But I can’t imagine it could do this for anything other that photo files. I could be very wrong though.

Dave

 

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woody

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SpinRite is good but, as you say, it was a loooooooong time ago.

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While SpinRite is a really useful tool, it will not fix the CHKDSK problem originally cited in the post above regarding the old Windows XP 100 GB drive that wouldn’t boot after CHKDSK.

The original DOS CHKDSK saved the fragments in the root directory for inspection and possible recovery.

But even then it did not provide the filename from the root or subdirectory of the files it had truncated. So the only way you could figure that out was by inspection of the fragments.

In Windows XP and later, isn’t there a system file monitoring service that alerts when any system file is corrupted, and automatically replaces it?

If so, it might not be just a driver file that was broken in the example above.

It’s the complete lack of any useful corrective information that’s so frustrating about CHKDSK, which makes one want to find a better alternative — and not just for XP.

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DaveYVR

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Was XP still based on DOS? I don’t recall.  There has been some significant loss of functionality since the loss of DOS. I’m not saying we’re not better off for leaving DOS behind, but I remember one function that I got a lot of use out of in older windows versions, like Win95, that were based on DOS.

I don’t remember why I needed it so often, it was so long ago, but I remember feeling the loss of being able to:

rename *.xyz TEST*.xyz

Or something similar to that. Maybe Im remembering wrong and it was actually the extension I was trying to rename.

I also miss being able to go over to my buddies place and edit his bat or .sys files to load up stupid pictures on his screen when he started his computer. He generally had a lot of explaining to do to his parents.  ahem. I was younger then. Although probably still to old to be doing those types of shenanigans 

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[BigBadSteve]

DaveYVR wrote:

… There was a small group of Mozila profile backup files in a folder in the root directory. Those seem to have disappeared, but when I re-scan the drive with EaseUS they are found in a directory called dir0000.chk which I assume is a directory that chkdsk created for orphan/corrupted files.

…on first review the files seem intact.

Be very wary of using these files at all, since if they were crosslinked, they are by definition corrupt, possibly in subtle ways. You refer to them as “profile backup files”, which hopefully means they’re not “mission critical.”

I presume you’re referring to Mozilla Firefox files (Mozilla is the manufacturer, Firefox the software). Windows 10 on my main laptop abnormally terminates every few weeks, for reasons I won’t go into here, and for some reason Firefox files always seem to take the worst damage, as shown by the automatic chkdsk performed on boot. However, most times this happens to me, dozens of Firefox files are damaged and deleted, yet I’ve not yet had any Firefox file that matters get damaged. Cache files, for instance, seem to take a lot of damage.

I run a full file comparison against my last partition backup (with FreeFileSync, a very handy freeware program) whenever it happens, just in case, and Google up any filenames affected which I don’t already know about to check if they were actually needed. You can’t beat daily backups!

DaveYVR wrote:

… when I re-scan the drive with EaseUS…
… Also, EaseUS looks to be $20 off today (now $70), so I may just bite the bullet and purchase it. I’ve come across a lot of good comments regarding this software…

Easeus is the manufacturer name. To which program of theirs are you referring?

Asus N53SM & N53SN 64-bit laptops (Win7 Pro & Win10 Pro 64-bit multiboots), venerable HP Pavilion t760 32-bit desktop (XP & Win7 Pro multiboot), Oracle VirtualBox VM's: XP & Win7 32-bit, XP Mode, aged Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2019s (8" & 10.1"), Blu-ray burners, digital cameras, ext. HDDs (latest 5TB!), AnyDVD, Easeus ToDo Backup Home, Waterfox, more. Me: Aussie card-carrying Windows geek.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by BigBadSteve.

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Hi Steve,

I am referring to their data recovery software (Data Recovery Wizard).  Most people on line seem to just say EaseUS, so I assume the data recovery is what they’re mainly known for.

I’m inclined to agree with you about the firefox profile files.  I’ve had numerous bluescreens in windows 10 whenever I try to manipulate them in the hidden directory (copy, etc.).  I don’t know if it’s coincidence or not. The only other common activity I’ve been involved with during blue screens is AskWoody, so maybe Woody has a mean streak

 

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[BigBadSteve]

DaveYVR wrote:

I am referring to their data recovery software (Data Recovery Wizard). Most people on line seem to just say EaseUS, so I assume the data recovery is what they’re mainly known for.

The webpages you looked at in regards to your issue would no doubt have focused on that particular program. Easeus do make some other excellent and popular programs, including Easeus ToDo Backup and Easeus Partition Master. Both of these have freeware versions.

Easeus Partition Master Free version works well, in my experience, though Easeus say its speed is less than for the pay version.

I’ve been using Easeus ToDo Backup and Easeus Partition Master for years, and recently sprung for lifetime licenses for each.

A caveat for Easeus ToDo Backup is that a pay version license is required to make the uncrippled version of the boot disk, which might be needed for full recovery capability. Some users have been very unhappy to find out they need buy a payware version to recover from backups they’d done with the free version, upon attempting to recover to another computer after disaster.

Another thing I had watch for when buying Easeus software was their dodgy marketing of what they called a “lifetime license” – which in reality only allowed upgrading for the current major version of the program. They excused this by claiming that you could still use the software ‘for life’ after upgrades cease – which is in actuality misleading rubbish, as any new version of Windows 10 could make an old version of Easeus (or other) software inoperable. The “free lifetime upgrade version”, I learnt, was the version to buy, which genuinely provided lifetime upgrades. I looked at the Easeus website just now, and it looks like they’ve now stopped this practice (thank goodness).

When I bought the two programs mentioned, I spent some time googling up offers at Easeus’ website, thereby finding some of the best offers, including some bundles, which were not easy to find by simply navigating their website.

Something else to consider re these two programs: Easeus support won’t tell you that boot disks made with both the (payware) Easeus ToDo Backup and Easeus Partition Master will run on any computer – technically a license is required for each machine they’re used on.

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard appears to be simpler to purchase than the two programs I described here. It looks like you either use the free version, with a 1GB data recovery limit, or buy the full version.

Asus N53SM & N53SN 64-bit laptops (Win7 Pro & Win10 Pro 64-bit multiboots), venerable HP Pavilion t760 32-bit desktop (XP & Win7 Pro multiboot), Oracle VirtualBox VM's: XP & Win7 32-bit, XP Mode, aged Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2019s (8" & 10.1"), Blu-ray burners, digital cameras, ext. HDDs (latest 5TB!), AnyDVD, Easeus ToDo Backup Home, Waterfox, more. Me: Aussie card-carrying Windows geek.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by BigBadSteve.

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DaveYVR

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Thanks Steve for the rundown. There is some good info and warnings there. I’ve been caught by backup software that required you use it to restore a backup, which is my main reason for avoiding backup software that creates volumes where the data is stored.

I use to have a backup program that left everything in it’s original directory structure making restoring files later very easy and software independent. It did all the incremental, full, etc. backups you would hope for.  I haven’t used it in years. I know it is on one of my old backup drives somewhere, and if I find it I will post it’s name here.

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As a follow-up to my chkdsk excercise, my drive has reverted back to it’s raw state. This may or may not be related to one of the following two things:

-firefox files (I was trying to recover old open tabs from these profiles at the time)

-Windows 10

I have had this drive attached to windows 7 for years, with never an issue.  These problems seem to have started when I replaced my windows 8.1 install with windows 10 on this dual boot machine.  This time for sure I know I was in windows 10 when the drive was corrupted.

Thankfully I had already made a full backup of all the files onto another drive which I won’t touch until I can make yet another backup onto a new drive I ordered yesterday.  In the mean time I have started running chkdsk /f again on the same drive again. Looks like it’s going to run the full 10 days again.

Based on some comments here, and what I have read online, I sprung the $89 US (ouch) for the SpinRite software.  I hope I get some value out of it by running it on some old paperweights I have in a box.

I started perusing the manual for SpinRite last night, and yikes!  I didn’t thing I would ever have to write config.sys and batch files again! And am I going to have to find my old floppy drives??? . Ick! .  And which version of windows left DOS behind? Anyway, I’m sure everything will work out, but if anyone has any tips for starting SpinRite in a more modern manner, I would be appreciative.  The manual they provide is a bit dated and for the last major release (5.0), not the current release (6.0).

Thanks,

Dave

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Burn SpinRite 6 to a CD and boot from it.  Run it from the default, which is Level 2, and let it do its thing, however long it takes.

The interface is relatively simple once you explore it a bit.  It contains a fair amount of the usual Steve Gibson overkill, but underneath, it’s straightforward and effective.

— WSRon

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DaveYVR

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Excellent, thank you Ron. And good news since I think I would be fairly challenged figuring out how to install my old floppy into a laptop.

Should I burn the disk as bootable?  (I know that’s a rookie question, it’s something I do fairly infrequently these days).

Cheers,

Dave

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Of course the CD has to be bootable because you want the target drive to be entirely passive.  But I don’t remember if this happens automatically when you run the program after download, as an installation option.

What I do when working semi-blindly with new software like this is save a copy of the download to an Installers directory either on my production machine if it is reputable paid software, or on a “development” (i.e throwaway, sandboxed, or virtual) machine, if it is freeware or trial software.

Then I run the installer and poke around.  There may well be a burn-to-bootable-CD option in SpinRite 6.  (I use CDs because they are easier to keep track of than memory sticks, and some old machines can’t boot from USB,  while everything from at least 2002 on can boot from a CD).

Let us know how you go.

 

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DaveYVR

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The ISO is bootable once you burn it to CD.  Remember that Spinrite is very, very thorough, and running it on an 8TB disk is going to take a very, very long time (think “days”).

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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DaveYVR

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Thank bbearren,

Yes I’ve been previously warned about that and am prepared for it. Considering chkdsk /f (not even /r) takes 10 days on this drive, we may even be talking months for SpinRite . Now that I have a backup, I will have the patience to see it through without worrying about it every day.

I won’t be getting around to SpinRite for about 10 days though, since the manual says to run chkdsk before running spinrite.

 

Cheers

Dave

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Dave-Y, I remember years ago we had a bad drive in a computer and someone had spinrite. We put the computer in the corner of a room and let it sit there running. It ran for months. Yes months. I noticed it running very s l o w l y as it was checking and trying to recover the bits. One day we had a power outage in that room and I thought, “ohhh no, now it will have to start over. Let’s see what happens.” When restarted it quickly ran through the previously done section of the drive and arrived at the point where it lost power. It started checking the drive link normal. A reasonable speed not slowly and looked good. I thought “I wonder why it was so slow yesterday?” We let it run and the next day came in and it was slow again. Seems after 24 hours it would slow down. I stopped the program and rebooted the computer then restarted the program. It was scanning normally again. Every day I noticed it was running slowly I would shut it down reboot restart and continue. We were done in a week. Remember it was already running months, now it was finished in a week. It did repair the drive.

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That’s very interesting anonymous.  Too bad you couldn’t monitor the memory usage during this operation. The manual says SpinRite will suck up computer resources pretty quickly.  The manual does say that spinrite will remember where it left off, but not necessarily about a power failure. My laptop and drive undergoing chkdsk are connected to a pretty hefty power supply that should run a couple hours if the power goes out.

For my work, I run some pretty intensive scientific modelling and GIS programs.  For this reason I always max my computer memory.  Both my 7 year old desktop and 2 year old laptop have 32 gigabytes. My next computer I am aiming for at least 64, and maybe 128 if not cost / technically prohibitive.

The reason I bring this up is because I can watch the memory fill up with some of the modelling programs. The better optimized one are efficient, but some others will use every megabyte you throw at it. And once the memory fills up, you’re dead. An operation that would take 1 hour with free memory, will take days once the program starts swapping / scratching data to the hard drive.

I wonder if SpinRite is similar for memory use.

I also wonder if SpinRite can utilize all the memory on the computer given it seams to run in a DOS environment (correct me if Im wrong)

Sadly the only computer I have for the task is a 2011 sony laptop with 6 gigabytes of memory. But I guess my biggest worry with that laptop is a housefire

 

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Hopefully the file can be made a bootable flash drive, not too many optical drives these days..
I have been waiting 7 or 8 years for the ‘New’ SpinRite. All I see is some folk think it might also be good for SSDs.
BTW Steve does a pod cast with Leo Laporte https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm called securitynow. He is a bit long winded but still the genuine article IMHO.

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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DaveYVR

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Ha! Thanks for the lead.  I wonder why he didn’t push spinRite 6.1 out if he’s still active. He was even suggesting a v7.0 would be in the works on his site.

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So thanks again folks for guiding me through SpinRite. I successfully burned it to a bootable DVD.  For others benefit, I will show the screen you get when you run the .exe file that you get when you purchase SpinRite.

So I wasn’t quite sure what was involved with burning an ISO as mentioned above, but I see now that the .exe file has the option to create an ISO that you then right click on and choose burn to disk.

I should note that I first ran SpinRite from windows 7. When I went to get a screen shot of the spinRite screen from windows 10, windows 10 would not let me run it. First it thought it was a suspicious program, and then when I chose the “run anyway” button, it gave me an “incorrect parameter” error.

My checkdisk finished relatively quickly this time (4 days compared to 10 days like last time), so I’ll be diving into running SpinRite onto this drive in the next few days/weeks/months.

 

 

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First speed bump with SpinRite.

I will start digging through the documentation, but if anyone has a quick answer, feel free to chime in.

I have run SpinRite from a bootable CD inserted into an internal drive on the laptop. It sees my main laptop hard drive, but not the external WD mybook.

I will look into the bios to see about usb support, but any other suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Dave

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From SpinRite FAQ:

“Is SpinRite compatible with USB and Firewire devices?

The best answer to this is a firm “maybe”. DOS device drivers are available for most USB and Firewire controllers. If such drivers are added to a DOS boot diskette so that your USB or Firewire drive is “seen” by DOS, SpinRite will also be able to “see” and operate with it. However, the performance of the drive through the DOS drivers and the serial (USB/Firewire) cable will likely be far lower than if the external drive were connected directly to a PC’s motherboard controller. If you have the ability to temporarily relocate the IDE drive inside of the external enclosure to a PC— plugging it directly into the motherboard’s controller — SpinRite will be able to operate at the drive’s highest possible performance.”

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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satrow, DaveYVR

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Thanks for digging that up. Im seeing something similar in the manual about the diskette with drivers, editing config.sys, etc., but was hoping to not have to go down that road.  Shucking the drive and connecting it directly to a desktop is not a preferred option since I’ve heard of some potential issues with shucking WD MyBook drives, as well as voiding any warranty.  And the only spare desktop I have is old (core2duo/P5N-D), a bit finicky, and prone to crashing.  Who knows though, I may give this some thought. I’ve got two spare backups of the data now, so maybe if I was going to shuck a WD drive, this might be the one to experiment with since it seams to be failing anyway.  Just more time than I have this year for playing around. Maybe next January.

 

 

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