gsmartcontrol LOG

[DanF]

I am diagnosing an XP era system. After giving the system a visual check, I moved on the my second step in my diagnoses I perform on each system on my bench... checking the HDDs.

I use gsmartcontrol. At first the system wouldn't boot cause a boot device wasn't found, restarted and it booted. Restarted a couple of times more and no probs. Did an extended test on the HDD and it stops after around a minute (or less). Test fails.

My problem may sound silly, but, I find the log to be quite difficult to read hehe. So my question is, is it really necessary to read to log or shall I consider the hard drive as... failing?

Another question is hardware wise. The system has another unused HDD (PATA), which is disconnected. My thoughts are that this also failed sometime ago, and it was replaced with this SATA HDD. Now this failed again, it seems. How would you deal with this? If the HDDs are physically failing, then I understand that this won't have anything to do with chipsettes / motherboard / connections.

Thank you all

EDIT: I am attaching the log file for your review, if it's necessary.

 

[PCX]

It failed with a Read Error . . . nuff said.

 

[FremontPC]

The log is easier to read if you pop it in to Word, set your orientation to Landscape, select all and set the font to Courier 10pt, then adjust your zoom as needed.

Yeah, this is an old 7200.10 Barracuda that has failing sectors and can't seem to reallocate from the pool of spares. It's really not worth much time. Grab the data you can, confer with the customer, then erase the drive or simply return it to them if they don't want to send it out for recovery.

 

[DanF]

Thanks for your replies, both of you

Also, good tip on the transfer to a word processor! I will inform the client first thing in the morning and proceed accordingly. It's highly probable that they don't have any data cause they have got it from one of their daughters and will be solely using the system to record DVDs or something. But it's irrelevant anyway... thanks!

Dan

 

[PCX]

Thanks for your replies, both of you

Also, good tip on the transfer to a word processor! I will inform the client first thing in the morning and proceed accordingly. It's highly probable that they don't have any data cause they have got it from one of their daughters and will be solely using the system to record DVDs or something. But it's irrelevant anyway... thanks!

Dan

Future reference. Any time you get a read error, whether it be on a short or extended test, its time to replace the hard drive.

 

[thebughunter]

I am diagnosing an XP era system. After giving the system a visual check, I moved on the my second step in my diagnoses I perform on each system on my bench... checking the HDDs.


Thank you all

EDIT: I am attaching the log file for your review, if it's necessary.

Don't waste too much time. inform customer drive replacement the best shot. Don't markup the drive too much, make money on the labor.

 

[FremontPC]

Might not be a bad idea to check for bad capacitors on the motherboard too, given the era.

 

[Ccomp5950]

It failed with a Read Error . . . nuff said.

Pretty much this.

197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       [B]2[/B]
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       [B]2[/B]

2 sectors are bad on this drive, and the hard drive has no way of correcting it.

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       90%      1685         63487890
# 2  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       90%      1685         63487890
# 3  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       90%      1685         63487890

Then you have these, you pretty much ran 3 tests in a row and all three failed in the same spot.

You can probably use ddrescue to clone the drive to a new drive or if you are handy with linux you can image it to a image file and mount the image file and pull data off and copy it to a clean install, whichever you are more comfortable with.

From a data recovery perspective this probably wouldn't be too tough of a job, just be sure to image it somewhere else and work off of that.