Solved what should I allocate?

referring to: my new-old HDD doesn't work

After spending hours on this already today, can somebody be good enough to give me a concise quick answer on what to allocate, initialize or whatever on this new-old drive? Not a link.

Here it is on minitools partioner, disk 3

Bob1212 said:

referring to: my new-old HDD doesn't work

After spending hours on this already today, can somebody be good enough to give me a concise quick answer on what to allocate, initialize or whatever on this new-old drive? Not a link.

Here it is on minitools partioner, disk 3

View attachment 47768

Click to expand...

Do these things with Minitool Partition Wizard...
Give it a drive letter.
Convert it to GPT.
Then make partitions (with drive letters), where ever you want, for whatever you want, on Disk 3.


I make partitions like this...
F: Copies of installed programs
G: Macrium Reflect backups
H: All my Media (pics, music, movies, videos, etc.)
I: Television Series'






Note:

You don't "have" to covert the disk to GPT, but you should...

Ghot said:

Give it a drive letter.
Convert it to GPT.
Then make partitions (with drive letters), where ever you want on Disk 3.


I make partitions like this...
F: Copies of installed programs
G: Macrium Reflect backups
H: All my Media (pics, music, movies, videos, etc.)
I: Television Series'

View attachment 47770

Click to expand...

Thanks, Ghot. I would like to just get it recognizable for today, then repartition later. I have two options for GPT.

Bob1212 said:

Thanks, Ghot. I would like to just get it recognizable for today, then repartition later. I have two options for GPT.

View attachment 47772

Click to expand...

Use the one near the bottom.... Convert MBR to GPT disk.

Partitions are very easy and fast to make.
Once you start putting "data" on the drive... things get more complicated and slower (partition wise).




Creating a partition...

Right click unallocated space and choose: Create
Top RED box: Same as shown, but with whatever name and drive letter you want.
Bottom RED box: Size in GB. (space "before", should be 0.00) (space after, depends on the partition size you choose).

For an external 500GB disk it's not really that important whether it's MBR or GPT. Converting to GPT would give a little more protection should it ever get corrupted, but I've not yet seen a case where any of my external MBR drives have suffered any such corruptions.

If you are going to use this for external data storage then I'd create a single NTFS partition using all of the available space.

Oh well, it was like I was 6 feet from the finish line, but I guess I have to pause to learn this stuff.

But before that, I decided to do a surface scan to see if it's worth keeping this drive. It looks like 5 bad sectors already? (I'm color blind.) And 24 errors found. Is that many to be expected, or is that an indicator that the drive's surface won't be reliable in the coming years?

Maybe I should have done the SMART (if minitools can) first? To see if the drive is new or used.

Bob1212 said:

Oh well, it was like I was 6 feet from the finish line, but I guess I have to pause to learn this stuff.

But before that, I decided to do a surface scan to see if it's worth keeping this drive. It looks like 5 bad sectors already? (I'm color blind.) And 24 errors found. Is that many to be expected, or is that an indicator that the drive's surface won't be reliable in the coming years?

Maybe I should have done the SMART (if minitools can) first? To see if the drive is new or used.

View attachment 47774

Click to expand...

Examine drive with CrystalDiskInfo. Check for Power On Hours, and Uncorrectable Sector Count
Open elevated command prompt and run: Chkdsk X: /r (where X: is the drive letter)
Then, run your surface test.

I decided to see if minitools made the new-old drive now visible to CrystalDiskInfo. Yep, there it is. Can anyody speculate on how minitools made it visible to CDI? Those figures from CDI indicate that the drive is unused, right?

And Disk Management now sees it and tells me I need to initialize it.

I can tell you it's not gonna last very long, and it has a slow rotation rate.

Ghot said:

I can tell you it's not gonna last very long, and it has a slow rotation rate.

Click to expand...

Oh, I don't know. I have a Toshiba 500GB drive in one of my laptops that's proving remarkably difficult to kill

Bree said:

Oh, I don't know. I have a Toshiba 500GB drive in one of my laptops that's proving remarkably difficult to kill

View attachment 47789

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Yeah, but yours doesn't say: Caution.

Ghot said:

Yeah, but yours doesn't say: Caution.

Click to expand...

Oh yes, @Bob1212 has a 'C5: Current Pending Sector Count' of F8 (hex) (248 decimal).

The thing about pending sectors is that they have only been marked as potentially weak sectors, they may (or may not) truly be bad. The only way to find out if these were 'false positives' or genuinely bad sectors is to let the drive's internal controller test each one. The best way to do that is to create a partition using all the available space then perform a FULL format on it (not a quick format).

For each sector that on testing turns out to be good the pending sector count will be reduced by 1. If all of them are good then it will be reset to zero and the drive can be regarded as healthy.

For each sector that turns out to be bad, then a sector from a pool of spares is reallocated to replace it, the pending sector count goes down by 1 and the '05: Reallocated Sector Count' goes up by 1. The pending sector count will also be zero at the end of this, but anything above zero for the reallocated sector count is a sign of a failing drive.

I once bought a used drive that had thousands of pending sectors. After formatting none needed to be reallocated and the pending sector count was reset to zero. That was years ago and it has performed faultlessly ever since.

Ghot said:

Yeah, but yours doesn't say: Caution.

Click to expand...

It might actually clear, I had a drive here with Pending sector count that went away, still working 4 years later.

Bree said:

Oh yes, @Bob1212 has a 'C5: Current Pending Sector Count' of F8 (hex) (248 decimal).

The thing about pending sectors is that they have only been marked as potentially weak sectors, they may (or may not) truly be bad. The only way to find out if these were 'false positives' or genuinely bad sectors is to let the drive's internal controller test each one. The best way to do that is to create a partition using all the available space then perform a FULL format on it (not a quick format).

For each sector that on testing turns out to be good the pending sector count will be reduced by 1. If all of them are good then it will be reset to zero and the drive can be regarded as healthy.

For each sector that turns out to be bad, then a sector from a pool of spares is reallocated to replace it, the pending sector count goes down by 1 and the '05: Reallocated Sector Count' goes up by 1. The pending sector count will also be zero at the end of this, but anything above zero for the reallocated sector count is a sign of a failing drive.

I once bought a used drive that had thousands of pending sectors. After formatting none needed to be reallocated and the pending sector count was reset to zero. That was years ago and it has performed faultlessly ever since.

Click to expand...

clam1952 said:

It might actually clear, I had a drive here with Pending sector count that went away, still working 4 years later.

Click to expand...

One can always hope. ^^

Well, do these reports mean it is senseless to use this drive? I ran CHKDSK first then minitools surface scan as per Ghot. It looks like 590 HARD physical errors.

Plus CrystalDI now at this minute says the count pending is 0x250, up from 0xf8 just yesterday. Isn't that alarmingly unusual for 1 day?

I might try a full format overnight to see what happens, as Bree says, if the drive's controller does anything that chkdsk didn't. Might take forever.







C:\Windows\System32>Chkdsk M: /r
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Macrium.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
256 file records processed.
File verification completed.
Phase duration (File record verification): 3.64 milliseconds.
0 large file records processed.
Phase duration (Orphan file record recovery): 0.34 milliseconds.
0 bad file records processed.
Phase duration (Bad file record checking): 0.24 milliseconds.

Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...
2 reparse records processed.
284 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
Phase duration (Index verification): 23.15 milliseconds.
0 unindexed files scanned.
Phase duration (Orphan reconnection): 0.35 milliseconds.
0 unindexed files recovered to lost and found.
Phase duration (Orphan recovery to lost and found): 0.66 milliseconds.
2 reparse records processed.
Phase duration (Reparse point and Object ID verification): 0.68 milliseconds.

Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Phase duration (Security descriptor verification): 11.92 milliseconds.
14 data files processed.
Phase duration (Data attribute verification): 0.61 milliseconds.

Stage 4: Looking for bad clusters in user file data ...
240 files processed.
File data verification completed.
Phase duration (User file recovery): 1.07 minutes.

Stage 5: Looking for bad, free clusters ...
120360526 free clusters processed.
Free space verification is complete.
Phase duration (Free space recovery): 1.96 hours.
Adding 590 bad clusters to the Bad Clusters File.

Windows has made corrections to the file system.
No further action is required.

488370175 KB total disk space.
6846884 KB in 9 files.
76 KB in 16 indexes.
2360 KB in bad sectors.
81107 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
481439748 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
122092543 total allocation units on disk.
120359937 allocation units available on disk.
Total duration: 1.97 hours (7122153 ms).

clam1952 said:

It might actually clear, I had a drive here with Pending sector count that went away, still working 4 years later.

Click to expand...

Thanks. How would SMART even know the condition of my drive that had been sitting unused since 2015, and was unused back then? Doesn't SMART track things as the drive is used? It didn't do a lengthy scan as far as I could tell.

Bob1212 said:

Thanks. How would SMART even know the condition of my drive that had been sitting unused since 2015, and was unused back then? Doesn't SMART track things as the drive is used? It didn't do a lengthy scan as far as I could tell.

Click to expand...

That information is stored in the hard disk controller (the little circuit board on the hard drive).
So in effect, the SMART data values, travel with the hard drive.

I would imagine that someone with the knowledge and the necessary equipment, could alter that data, but it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.

Ghot said:

That information is stored in the hard disk controller (the little circuit board on the hard drive).
So in effect, the SMART data values, travel with the hard drive.

I would imagine that someone with the knowledge and the necessary equipment, could alter that data, but it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.

Click to expand...

Right, but how would SMART itself acquire the data? It was in effect sleeping since it was made. SMART is a real time monitor AFAIK.

Bob1212 said:

How would SMART even know the condition of my drive that had been sitting unused since 2015, and was unused back then? Doesn't SMART track things as the drive is used? It didn't do a lengthy scan as far as I could tell.

Click to expand...

You did a scan, and SMART would have recorded any potentially weak sectors found in that scan as 'pending'.

Bree said:

You did a scan, and SMART would have recorded any potentially weak sectors found in that scan as 'pending'.

Click to expand...

Okay, that makes sense. CDI couldn't at first see the drive. That would have been the real naive report.

Then minitools made it visible, and I did a brief/partial surface scan via minitools. That's when SMART observed itself. Only later came my full chkdsk and full surface scan.


A lesson learned: when the drive arrived and I saw that its box had been previously opened... That signals that somebody had bought it before me, it didn't work and they returned it. Then it was sold to me.

Another lesson: always look for the date on an internal drive's label. (But you can't see that on external drives.)

Another: Amazon's positive reviews are from people who plug it in and it works. Very few likely do any of this testing. In fact, even a brand new recently manufactured drive in a sealed box should be immediately tested to make sure that it doesn't have hard errors made at manufacture.