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[Done] Laptop HD is failing, will external drive be fine?
#342600 - 07/17/15 08:46 PM
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Question: will an external drive (mobile or desktop) be 'fast enough' for watching and streaming movies?
The Wire Cutter says the 4gb WD My Book is best desktops, whereas the best mobile is the Seagate 2TB Backup Plus Slim.
Story:
The other night during watching a movie stored on my laptop (theatre rig), I got a Windows alert saying the hard drive needed replacing or repairing. I backed up my stuff, and I haven't turned it back on. I'm pretty sure I need to take the laptop apart and re-do the thermal paste, as the fan has been running too much for a while now - not constantly, but constantly up and down in pitch.
500gb drives for the lappy are the same as a 2TB external drive, so I was thinking why not just go that route? I have a Seagate 2TB desktop for my back-up, so I don't want to use that.
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Re: Laptop HD is failing, will external drive be fine?
[Re: Traso]
#342613 - 07/17/15 11:55 PM
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>I got a Windows alert saying the hard drive needed replacing or repairing.
Windows does tend to be paranoid about the possibility of drives failing - and that's not a bad thing (much better to err on the side of caution where data is concerned). I got this same message in an old Laptop of mine about 5 years ago, so I installed Fedora on it (same hard-drive) and it's still working fine - although I only use it occasionally.
As long as you keep everything backed up, just keep using the laptop until it finally fails (or until Windows wont boot from it anymore).
Run a disk scan on it, defrag it (yes, a lot of use, but it will save use even in the short term).
> Question: will an external drive (mobile or desktop) be 'fast enough' for watching
> and streaming movies?
If all you are doing is streaming / watching videos, then the external HDD should be fine (assuming you've got USB 2.0 ports on your lappy, which should be the case given age).
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Moose
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Re: Laptop HD is failing, will external drive be fine?
[Re: Moose]
#342617 - 07/18/15 12:47 AM
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IMHO the very first thing you should do on a disk which gives SMART errors or other random read errors is use ddrescue to back the entire thing up to another hard drive as an image file. Once you have a backup, you can start dicking around with the original disk to see if its a transient issue (caused by bad powerdown or something) or a head crash etc.
LN
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Re: Laptop HD is failing, will external drive be fine?
[Re: Lord Nightmare]
#342632 - 07/18/15 07:37 AM
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That looks like a complicated command line program or something. It wasn't click and run. Windows offered to do an imaging, so I'll guess I'll go with that. I'm wondering whether it's a problem with either partition?.....
Then I'll do as Moose suggested.
> IMHO the very first thing you should do on a disk which gives SMART errors or other random read errors is use ddrescue to back the entire thing up to another hard drive as an image file. Once you have a backup, you can start dicking around with the original disk to see if its a transient issue (caused by bad powerdown or something) or a head crash etc.
> LN
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It's probly close to toast......
[Re: Traso]
#342651 - 07/18/15 10:48 PM
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It now displays the message at startup, which will pop up later as well. Windows defrag didn't seem to really get going. Auslogics defragger did its job, and it looks good, but the message still displays.
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Re: It's probly close to toast......
[Re: Traso]
#342652 - 07/18/15 11:18 PM
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> It now displays the message at startup, which will pop up later as well. Windows
> defrag didn't seem to really get going. Auslogics defragger did its job, and it looks
> good, but the message still displays.
Most (all?) drive manufacturers provide a bootable disk image that you can put on a flash drive or CD and use to test their hard drives. If drive and tool both support this feature, you may be able to have the software detect damaged sectors and simply mark them in the drive firmware as non-existent. Usually this is called "advanced test" or similar and has you read a disclaimer and confirm 73 times before it'll let you do it.
Back up all your stuff first. Even if the tool is able to correct the problem with minimal or no data loss, it's still a good idea to format the drive and reinstall.
Of course this only fixes the problem if the issue really is bad sectors, and not some kind of hardware defect.
S
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Re: It's probly close to toast......
[Re: Sune]
#342659 - 07/19/15 02:10 AM
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> Most (all?) drive manufacturers provide a bootable disk image that you can put on a
> flash drive or CD and use to test their hard drives.
Yes quite right.
For the case of my old laptop I mentioned above, I did the following:
* Backed up all my data / files.
* Ran ScanDisk / rebooted - Windows warnings about drive failure still appeared.
* Ran the drive manufacturers test / repair utils - Windows warnings about drive failure still appeared.
* Ran various other utils (SpinRite and several others) and poked around a hell of a lot - Windows warnings about drive failure still appeared.
* Deleted all partitions, repartitioned and fully reformatted and tried to install Windows again - Windows refused to install on the drive due to imminent failure.
* Install Fedora - no drive failure warnings popped up then or since. Been using it for ~5 years.  But, like I said, the laptop is only used occasionally.
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| redk9258 |
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Re: It's probly close to toast......
[Re: Traso]
#342664 - 07/19/15 04:48 AM
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Just buy a new drive and clone to original to the new one. Or, fuck around and end up losing all of your data a little later down the road when you have forgotten to back it up.
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| Dullaron |
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Re: It's probly close to toast......
[Re: redk9258]
#342665 - 07/19/15 06:03 AM
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> Just buy a new drive and clone to original to the new one. Or, fuck around and end up
> losing all of your data a little later down the road when you have forgotten to back
> it up.
How to clone it? I been wanting to clone mine onto a bigger hard drive. I don't want to start over from scratch.
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Re: It's probly close to toast......
[Re: Dullaron]
#342666 - 07/19/15 07:31 AM
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there are tons of applications out there to do it. All you need is google. I personally use a commercial option (Acronis True Image) since I can schedule my backups (I'll never lose more than half of a week's worth of data) and clone to a new drive, or set it up to clone to different hardware (otherwise, changing your motherboard to a completely different chipset is a PITA without doing a fresh install).
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Re: It's probly close to toast......
[Re: Dullaron]
#342687 - 07/19/15 03:52 PM
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> How to clone it? I been wanting to clone mine onto a bigger hard drive. I don't want
> to start over from scratch. After the clone, you can extend the partition in Disk Management.
A real MAME user would use chdman!
Another way would be disk2vhd then use Vhd2disk to restore the image.
I personally use SSR2013 Desktop.
You could also use a command line program called DISM that is included with Windows. You would want to do this offline from a Win PE disc. You would have to use DiskPart to prepare the new HDD / SSD though.
Edited by redk9258 (07/19/15 04:05 PM)
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Re: It's probly close to toast......
[Re: URherenow]
#342688 - 07/19/15 05:15 PM
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> (otherwise, changing your
> motherboard to a completely different chipset is a PITA without doing a fresh
> install).
It's a lot easier with 7 than it ever was with XP.
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Re: It's probly close to toast......
[Re: redk9258]
#342759 - 07/20/15 10:16 PM
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Acronis True Image is free, at least to do basic functions. Seagate has a version that I think is made by the same folks.
My shit's backed up. I have a 465gb drive in my T61. 500gb drives are at least as much as a 2tb external. Actually, I just found a refurbished 640gb T61 drive for $40 shipped, so I went with that.
Oh, also, the Lenovo storage diag-ware said the drive passed all but the last test. Which was such that it wouldn't repair the bad sectors: 'for safety reason, this can't be done'.
> A real MAME user would use chdman!
Another way would be disk2vhd then use Vhd2disk to restore the image. I personally use SSR2013 Desktop.
You could also use a command line program called DISM that is included with Windows. You would want to do this offline from a Win PE disc. You would have to use DiskPart to prepare the new HDD / SSD though.
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Success!
[Re: Traso]
#343083 - 07/29/15 01:37 AM
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I got the drive and set Windows to installing the backed up image on it.....and afterward it had a problem booting.....umm. Fortunately, others had the same problem, got the same error code, and it was as easy as changing the drive mode from ACHI (I swear this was the setting with the old drive....) to Compatibility. Drive was NOS, but whatever. All is normal and running. Hooray.
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[Done] Laptop HD is failing, will external drive be fine?
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[Re: 
But, like I said, the laptop is only used occasionally.
