Members 1001gear Posted June 19, 2016 Author Members Share Posted June 19, 2016 I think I'm going to pass on the zeroes. Worst estimate comes out to 4 days. I can't recall the exact circumstances. Would partitioning expedite chkdsk times in any way? IOW will chkdsk run on a per volume basis? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members nat whilk II Posted June 19, 2016 Members Share Posted June 19, 2016 I think I'm going to pass on the zeroes. Worst estimate comes out to 4 days. I can't recall the exact circumstances. Would partitioning expedite chkdsk times in any way? IOW will chkdsk run on a per volume basis? Yes, CHKDSK will run, checking one drive letter (volume) at a time. If you run CHKDSK from a command line, there's a bunch of command line options - the old forward slash/letter lingo. Some of them IIRC shorten the process. It should be easy to google up the available command line options for CHKDSK. It's been a long time since I've messed with command lines to any extent. I do remember that, to CHKDSK your system disk, you'll have to schedule it via Windows and it will run on your next reboot. nat whilk ii Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members philboking Posted June 22, 2016 Members Share Posted June 22, 2016 Instead of formatting, I run this:https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm Disclaimer: I'm not a shill for grc.com even though I've posted 2 links to it (counting this one) in the last month.I do it because I like the stuff they make, it just works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members 1001gear Posted June 23, 2016 Author Members Share Posted June 23, 2016 Instead of formatting, I run this: https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm Disclaimer: I'm not a shill for grc.com even though I've posted 2 links to it (counting this one) in the last month. I do it because I like the stuff they make, it just works. I remember GRC from before I even had a PC. Does Spinrite work in the background? At this stage, I just don't want my computer tied up for more than a few hours. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members *BLEEP* Posted June 23, 2016 Members Share Posted June 23, 2016 Do drives still have bad sectors? Absolutely. Virtually every hard drive has bad sectors. And when a bad sector is found during formatting, or when a significant ECC error is detected during a patrol operation, it is replaced by a "spare sector." If there is recoverable data in a bad sector, it is copied to a spare sector and the sector allocation table in the hard drive is updated to point the old sector ID to the new spare sector when the old sector ID is accessed. Spare sectors are allocated by the factory during manufacturing. Enterprise grade hard drives have more spare sectors than consumer grade hard drives. By the way, modern operating systems don't directly access sectors in hard drives. Operating systems have long used a higher level construct to keep track of storage allocation -- namely blocks or clusters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members *BLEEP* Posted June 23, 2016 Members Share Posted June 23, 2016 Bad sectors can be caused by either a physical defect in the disk (every hard drive is going to have some) or software-based errors. Only the software-based errors are fixable. I believe you are talking about so-called "soft errors." Hard errors versus soft errors -- both can be physical defects, though a soft error may just be a sector with a badly recorded bit or two and an ECC check will detect a problem. A hard error is an unrecoverable or unusable sector, whereas a soft error is an error that is normally correctable. A soft error is correctable by the hard drive's controller, in which the controller temporarily moves the *corrected* data off the presumed bad sector (checking ECC closely by repeatedly reading the bad sector) into the hard drive's buffer, reformatting that sector, and copying back the corrected data to the freshly re-formatted and presumably once-bad sector and performing more ECC checks to see if everything is now good before flushing the buffer. However, if a particular sector keeps experiencing a soft error -- after it has been corrected -- over a certain period of time, the data in that sector will be permanently moved to a spare sector and the offending sector deallocated and its ID pointed to the spare sector (which is no longer a spare). You might ask, "What can cause soft errors?" Well, a lot of things: Excess heat, excess cold, a bad controller, a bad data cable, contamination within the hard drive, a microscopic flaw in the plated recording medium on a platter surface, head positioning servo calibration problems, unexpected head movement during writing due to excess movement of hard drive mechanism (i.e. -- you drop yer notebook or external drive while it is performing a write operation), cosmic rays, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members *BLEEP* Posted June 23, 2016 Members Share Posted June 23, 2016 When we did LOW LEVEL formatting in the past... As far as ATA, SAS, and SATA drives go, the end user has been locked out of anything for except performing a high level format. Years ago, you could easily perform low level formats on most parallel SCSI hard drives. On the old MFM, RLL, and SASI drives, it was a bit of a chore, but doable. Some ATA, SAS, and SATA hard drives have jumpers -- mostly older drives, now. With the right jumper selection on the hard drive to put it into maintenance mode, along with use of the appropriate interface (ATA, SAS, or SATA) with custom firmware to issue special commands, you could lay down servo tracks, allocate / deallocate spare sectors, perform low level formatting, or even instantly convert a 500 GB hard drive into a 250 GB hard drive that could not be converted back to a 500 GB hard drive by the end user. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members philboking Posted June 24, 2016 Members Share Posted June 24, 2016 The time it takes is relative to how bad the drive is. Typically I let it run overnight every 3 months or so but Ive heard of people running it in a virtual machine while doing other stuff (NOT using that drive, of course) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members 1001gear Posted June 24, 2016 Author Members Share Posted June 24, 2016 Could big test files work in a diagnostic capacity? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members 1001gear Posted June 29, 2016 Author Members Share Posted June 29, 2016 Did a standard Win7 full format. Does the zeros gratis. Started out at the better part of 150 MBs and fizzled to the 70s when I quit checking. Had one glitch. The computer went to sleep. !!1!1111!! ck. Isn't drive activity considered activity? Anyway the whole thing took 11hrs start time to finish time give or take. Luckily Windows doesn't consider sleeping on the job grounds for termination and it finished the last couple hrs while ME sleeped. Thanks for the info and confidence guys! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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