If CHKDSK finds errors, but HD Tune Pro 5.50 does not, what does that mean?

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Sunday, December 14, 2014 11:23:07 PM UTC+8, RayLopez99 wrote:


Amazing, but apparently bad RAM can cause problems

Yes.

First you test for a solid RAM and CPU setup.

Then you worry about the hard drive.

The SMART statistics inside the hard drive, are
independent of the motherboard. If there are
reallocations listed in SMART, those would not
be caused by the motherboard.

Neither is the "clicking" of a disk, dependent on the motherboard.
A hard drive may spin down, if the PSU voltage is out of spec
(and make a spin-down noise). Otherwise, there's no reason for
a hard drive to "seek to zero" and click. It means there is
trouble brewing in there.

The most sensitive thing to RAM errors, with respect to
system operation, is registry corruption. Is the registry
getting corrupted ? Portions of it are held in RAM
during system operation.

Paul

On Tuesday, December 16, 2014 11:48:30 PM UTC+8, Paul wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:
On Sunday, December 14, 2014 11:23:07 PM UTC+8, RayLopez99 wrote:


Amazing, but apparently bad RAM can cause problems

Yes.

First you test for a solid RAM and CPU setup.

Then you worry about the hard drive.

The SMART statistics inside the hard drive, are
independent of the motherboard. If there are
reallocations listed in SMART, those would not
be caused by the motherboard.

Neither is the "clicking" of a disk, dependent on the motherboard.
A hard drive may spin down, if the PSU voltage is out of spec
(and make a spin-down noise). Otherwise, there's no reason for
a hard drive to "seek to zero" and click. It means there is
trouble brewing in there.

The most sensitive thing to RAM errors, with respect to
system operation, is registry corruption. Is the registry
getting corrupted ? Portions of it are held in RAM
during system operation.

Paul

Thanks Paul. Registry is not an issue since when I run CCleaner I don't get a lot of orphaned registry entries, just obvious stuff.

I just ran Prime95 and for 40 minutes no problems (usually if there's a RAM problem it manifests itself in seconds). I will run the memtest86 now overnight.

The 'click' of the HD is very very very subtle, a very faint metallic pinging sound, barely audible, and sometimes two or three in a row (like the heads are trying to write), but when it happens, it seems right away if you check for disk errors from File Explorer, it finds some (and correct them using Chkdsk on the next bootup). these pings don't happen every day, more like once a week a few weeks ago, then once every few days more recently. Obviously if it's what I've read about the drive is failing, but failing gracefully and SMART says it's still OK.

I did seem to get these CHKDSK problems right when I swapped drive D (current drive C, a Seagate, with drive C: (current drive D a Western Digital..

I decided not to get an SSD here in southeast Asia (Philippines) because: (1) prices are literally double the US prices. Sure I could get a friend or relative to send me an Egghead SSD (I like the Samsung EVO model, very expensive but apparently the 'best'), but it will literally take 30 days to get here, and sometimes the Post Office will try and stick you with 'duty tax' that nearly doubles the cost, even if the package is marked 'gift' and not commercially boxed (you can fight them and they will back down, but it's a hassle), and, (2) the SSD they tried to sell me at a computer superstore (and it was 512 GB which is very hard to find, usually they sell 256 or smaller, 180, etc SSDs) was a "Silicon Power" model (never heard of them until today) but, this is key, it was a 2012 December model (from the Serial number and model number)! Two years old. Remember what I said about refurbished here. I would not at all be surprised if this is some US used SSD shipped over here. All used junk from the US gets sent here. It's dirt cheap but used (as I type this, I'm wearing somebody's T-shirt from Florida--nice 100% cotton, which is hard to find in PH since they like, due to wear and tear issues, polyester/cotton mixes)--that I bought for 50 cents. Same actually with "new cars"--all cars here in PH are used, even when marked 'new' and all, bar none, every single one, has a mechanical problem of some sort. Literally the car dealers from all over the world ship their lemons to PH where they are sold as 'new' (under warranty to be sure, but still with major problems like the gear box is messed up on a stick shift, doors won't close right, etc etc etc, and btw never buy a used car here either, since hardly anybody here does even routine maintenance like oil changes, they drive it until it breaks then they 'fix' it, jerry rigged style).

So, in lieu of the above, I might skip even buying a HDD (since the Western Digital HDDs I saw today, Blue and Green models, look, from the package, as refurbished, and of course they are 2x more pricy than US equivalents).

But it leads me to ask: (1) from HD Tune info panel on a HDD, or otherwise, can you tell from firmware and/or serial number if the hard drive is used or when it was built (the sticker says Made in Thailand, and recall they had floods in their electronics plants a couple of years ago there, so I would not be surprised if these drives were all factory rejects from that flood year)? (2) what is the harm if I do the following:

1) go back to my old setup. Switch the WD 500 GB, now drive D:, and make it C: again, doing a clean reinstall. The WD is five years old (middle aged for a HD, but I've had them last 10 years plus), and use this "failing" Seagate 1TB as a backup (drive D and to store movies?

2) if I do 1), I will of course do daily backups, will turn on the 'differential file backup' feature of Windows 8, which copies to the second physical drive all important User data files, and I will do both drive image backups using Linux-based Clonezilla from a CD, and a Windows based program like Acronix.

Any issues? Worse case, if in fact, as you say, Sata drives cannot 'contaminate' each other if one is corrupt, I will wake up one day to find the Seagate drive (which will go back to being the "D" drive) is dead, and all my Drive C: image backups and movies on it are unreachable, but since I also use an external USB drive to store image and all the movies, I don't see the harm in that, do you? If anything not using the Seagate defective drive will prolong its life, since though it will be spinning, most of the time it will not be reading or writing if it goes back to being the backup "drive D:"?

PS--except for the nice people here, and my girlfriend half my age, this place is Third World and whack, lol. Not a serious place to do business except for light stuff like call center chit-chat...

RL

On Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:48:28 -0500, Paul wrote:

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Sunday, December 14, 2014 11:23:07 PM UTC+8, RayLopez99 wrote:


Amazing, but apparently bad RAM can cause problems

Yes.

First you test for a solid RAM and CPU setup.

Then you worry about the hard drive.

The SMART statistics inside the hard drive, are
independent of the motherboard.
Some SMART errors problems are not INSIDE the drive and may not
be the fault of the drive at all, but a bad cable or interface
in the computer:
Seagate ST32000644NS and ST32999641AS
(C7) Interface CRC Error Count
possibly
(B8) End To End Error Detection

I've see others (or possibly the same thing), labeled as
Cable errors
by HD Tune Pro 5.50

I remember being annoyed that because I didn't plug in a cable
correctly the drive flagged as being sick and have to remember to
check that the error count hasn't changed when I review things from
all my machines every few months.

If there are
reallocations listed in SMART, those would not
be caused by the motherboard.

Neither is the "clicking" of a disk, dependent on the motherboard.
A hard drive may spin down, if the PSU voltage is out of spec
(and make a spin-down noise). Otherwise, there's no reason for
a hard drive to "seek to zero" and click. It means there is
trouble brewing in there.

The most sensitive thing to RAM errors, with respect to
system operation, is registry corruption. Is the registry
getting corrupted ? Portions of it are held in RAM
during system operation.

Paul

Mark F wrote:
On Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:48:28 -0500, Paul wrote:

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Sunday, December 14, 2014 11:23:07 PM UTC+8, RayLopez99 wrote:


Amazing, but apparently bad RAM can cause problems
Yes.

First you test for a solid RAM and CPU setup.

Then you worry about the hard drive.

The SMART statistics inside the hard drive, are
independent of the motherboard.
Some SMART errors problems are not INSIDE the drive and may not
be the fault of the drive at all, but a bad cable or interface
in the computer:
Seagate ST32000644NS and ST32999641AS
(C7) Interface CRC Error Count
possibly
(B8) End To End Error Detection

But those might not put you into an immediate panic.

I'm trying to get across the subservient nature of the
hard drive design, and the lack of Peer to Peer relationship.
The hard drive does not control anything. It doesn't shove
packets up one cable and down another, and run amok inside
the computer. That's what I'm trying to get across.
I'm trying to prevent the formation of Skybuck-Flying-type
theories here... :-)

Paul

On Tuesday, December 16, 2014 8:12:08 AM UTC-7, RayLopez99 wrote:

Amazing, but apparently bad RAM can cause file problems on your HD! Never heard that before. This system does have RAM that sometimes is not seated properly (RAM chips seem to work themselves up from the socket somehow) and seating them 'fixes' the problem...and btw when the RAM is 'bad' the system does pass the MemTest86 RAM test often, but will sometimes fail (after passing the MemTest86 test, even run all night) the "Prime95" stress test, which amazes me. I will run both of these tests now to see if the RAM is seated properly.

MemTest86 and MemTest86+ are based on the same testing methods, but
for some reason they often give different results. Also there's
another diagnostic, Gold Memory, that beat MemTest86 in the very
recent (less than 15 years ago) comparison test of memory diagnostics,
and only the very expensive RST products from PhD beat it. A couple
of times, Gold Memory has found errors that I couldn't find in a long
time, and one person was having funny computer problems despite
overnight runs of MemTest86+ saying everything was OK. Gold Memory
reported a bad bit in 75 minutes, although it had to run another 10
hours before reporting it again (no other errors found). IOW always
run more than one memory diagnostic. Also almost all memory sold
now is made from overclocked or junk chips, as Ocaholic.ch proves
when it shows the chips under the heatsinks -- lots of 1600 MHz
memory actually has 1333 MHz or no-name chips, and the fastest DDR3
sold now is made from 1600 MHz 11-11-11 chips.

Try the surface scan diagnostic of MHDD (HDDguru.com has it,
and it's also on the Ultimate Boot CD) and the Windows version,
HDDscan, because they not only report which sectors are 100%
bad but also which sectors need several attempts to read. MHDD
is better because the Windows version reports a lot of false
positives, but I don't know if MHDD works with drives bigger
than 2TB. Here are MHDD results for 1TB 7200 RPM drives with
1TB/platter, Seagate on the left, Toshiba on the right:

3ms: 7,640,000 / 7,650,000
10ms: 16,800 / 3,700
50ms: 45 /1,500
150ms: 715 / 0
500ms: 0 / 0
500ms: 0 / 0

Both of those drives passed SMART.
FYI, one spin takes about 8ms.

On Wednesday, December 17, 2014 6:42:12 PM UTC+8, wrote:

[interesting stuff, noted, thanks]

I do feel the problem was the hard drive, not the memory, and I bought a brand new one today. I think my problem is solved, so far so good, and if there's any further problems I will post here.

I take back some of the things I said about the Philippines being sub-par. It is, but there are a lot of skilled people here that make do with what they have, and do a good job of it. Anyway it's common knowledge that something like 20% of 'new' PC components are in fact re-used (if not higher, at Fry's in California it seems every package was already opened).

RL

Hey.

I'll reply to other questions later but this now -

On 2014-12-14 22:53, RayLopez99 wrote:

Also, during peak (100% in Task Manager) times in "C" Seagate drive, I hear a very high pitched faint "ping" that's metallic, like a miniature golf club striking a miniature golf ball far in the recesses of my HD. Like a little Scotsman lepercon playing golf on my platters? Is this a sound of impeding failure or natural? Please opine you HD experts.

My experience is that a metallic sound from the hard drive is the heads
hitting the platters. I could be wrong, but at least when it happened to
me that's what it was. It was a SyQuest 88MB cartridge drive. I
opened-up the drive, flexed the heads a little, and the problem went
away. I would not recommend that on modern drives. But yes, if it sounds
like metal on metal, it's a bad sign...

Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Member-+-David-Suzuki-Foundation/EFF/Planetary-Society-+-
oO-( )-Oo Windows error 02 Oops, no error... Yet...

On Saturday, December 20, 2014 11:18:44 AM UTC+8, B00ze/Empire wrote:
Hey.

I'll reply to other questions later but this now -

On 2014-12-14 22:53, RayLopez99 wrote:

Also, during peak (100% in Task Manager) times in "C" Seagate drive, I hear a very high pitched faint "ping" that's metallic, like a miniature golf club striking a miniature golf ball far in the recesses of my HD. Like a little Scotsman lepercon playing golf on my platters? Is this a sound of impeding failure or natural? Please opine you HD experts.

My experience is that a metallic sound from the hard drive is the heads
hitting the platters. I could be wrong, but at least when it happened to
me that's what it was. It was a SyQuest 88MB cartridge drive. I
opened-up the drive, flexed the heads a little, and the problem went
away. I would not recommend that on modern drives. But yes, if it sounds
like metal on metal, it's a bad sign...

Regards,


Interesting. Incredibly, I took the drive to a PC shop as a gag, to show it to them and throw it away. They said not to, that they would, if I donated the drive to them, try and repair it by flexing the heads a little... LOL! So I gave the problem drive away and they were happy. I guess if you know what you're doing you repair a HDD that way, but don't try it at home with data on your drive...

RL