HP hard disk puzzle

[PineT]

Hi,
I wonder if anyone has come across this before and can shed any light on this one:
A customer brought in an 18 month old HP g6-1394sa running Windows 7 home premium. It would start to boot but hung up before reaching the desktop.
He had run the built in self test, all passed except DST short test - fail on HDD. A fault code search did not result in any hits.
Looks like bad hard disk, so loaded Hirens and ran Victoria disk test. The result was unable to load SMART data and a full surface scan showed all failed sectors after the first 1% of the disk.
File explorer showed most top level directories were visible but unable to read below that. The recovery partition likewise looked in bad shape.
So I thought nothing to lose, I'll just try the HP system recovery option.
Lo and behold this ran successfully and the machine sprang to life. Loaded 100+ windows updates. Still looked good.
So booted into Hirens again, this time the surface scan ran with no failures and file explorer worked fine.

Now I'm really puzzled and thought I better slave the drive and make a copy of the recovery partition to my work machine (also Windows 7). This machine could not read the hard drive from the customers machine and suggested formatting all 3 partitions.

Some sectors were a little slow on the Victoria test so I told the customer not to be surprised if it failed again. The machine is back with him and he will return home 200 miles away this Friday.

I'm at a loss to explain this. Maybe a poorly seated RAM is involved, does anyone have any explanation or suggestions?

 

[HFultzjr]

Hi,
I wonder if anyone has come across this before and can shed any light on this one:
A customer brought in an 18 month old HP g6-1394sa running Windows 7 home premium. It would start to boot but hung up before reaching the desktop.
He had run the built in self test, all passed except DST short test - fail on HDD. A fault code search did not result in any hits.
Looks like bad hard disk, so loaded Hirens and ran Victoria disk test. The result was unable to load SMART data and a full surface scan showed all failed sectors after the first 1% of the disk.
File explorer showed most top level directories were visible but unable to read below that. The recovery partition likewise looked in bad shape.
So I thought nothing to lose, I'll just try the HP system recovery option.
Lo and behold this ran successfully and the machine sprang to life. Loaded 100+ windows updates. Still looked good.
So booted into Hirens again, this time the surface scan ran with no failures and file explorer worked fine.

Now I'm really puzzled and thought I better slave the drive and make a copy of the recovery partition to my work machine (also Windows 7). This machine could not read the hard drive from the customers machine and suggested formatting all 3 partitions.

Some sectors were a little slow on the Victoria test so I told the customer not to be surprised if it failed again. The machine is back with him and he will return home 200 miles away this Friday.

I'm at a loss to explain this. Maybe a poorly seated RAM is involved, does anyone have any explanation or suggestions?

Sounds like the hard drive may have been bad and you did a "temporary" fix.

Don't be surprised if it comes back.

You really need to do more thorough testing to be sure.

 

[Markverhyden]

I agree. Based on the symptoms it's time to swap it. Under warranty an ASP would have swapped it on the built in SMART test failure no questions asked.

 

[Boston Pro Comp Serv LLC]

What happened was the drive remapped the bad sectors. That's why your second test showed no bad sectors and didn't fail. The remap of failed/bad sectors is by design and you can see how many have been remapped via the SMART attributes. It's reallocated sector count, before the sectors are remapped (identified as bad, and flaged) they will show in pending reallocated sector count attribute. There's lots of threads on TN about when a HDD is considered bad. Your situation seems pretty run of the mill to me, I am not being condescending at all. Your talking a laptop HDD that had some bad sectors, likely got a good jarring while it was on, the arm smashed the platter creating a few bad ones. The data is then unreadable there causing the boot problems. It's when subsequent HDD tests continue to remap or find bad ones, or it breaks around 20 or so (IME drives tend to go downhill around 20-50). It's predicting drive failure ahead of time based on the SMART attributes that takes lots of experience with SMART and deciphering the attributes from different manufacturers, to get right. It's easiest for me to base it on a few factors, I'd rather replace it early than late. Dive into SMART a bit, I would say some of the most important attributes are pending reallocated count, reallocated count, power on time, spin up time (can indicate spindle wear), seek error rate, there are others but I'd call those the basics. I'm probably missing one or two but you get the idea. Different manufacturers count or valuate attributes differently so many of them need to be translated to meaningful. A raw error read rate that appears to be in the millions may actually translate into zero so be wary when glancing at SMART. The HDD recovery guys here could probably school me on SMART and provide even move insight on drive failure.

 

[johnrobert]

I just bought a refurnished Lenovo desktop from Staples I thought great Windows 7 and only $212
Smart said spin up time 34,000 hours and showing a caution
I told customer it has to go back.

Let customer buy there own.

 

[smashedbotatos]

I just bought a refurnished Lenovo desktop from Staples I thought great Windows 7 and only $212
Smart said spin up time 34,000 hours and showing a caution
I told customer it has to go back.

Let customer buy there own.

34,000 hours is like almost 4 years. So that disk is either lying or the program you used read the SMART data wrong.

 

[mraikes]

34,000 hours is like almost 4 years. So that disk is either lying or the program you used read the SMART data wrong.

Because of the hours? Or something else?

I've had customers buy "refurb" computers with SMART cautions and loads of hours on the drives.

If it's the number of hours, I've replaced them (and in one case maintain in constant operation to this day) machines with over 70,000 hours. Some of those beasts just won't die.

 

[PineT]

Hi, Thanks to all for your suggestions and comments.
Perhaps to clarify, despite my first post, these were not labelled as bad sectors but instead were listed as ERROR #15. There were several hundreds of thousands of these. The test was stopped after ~15 minutes when no further good sectors were found.
I have not been in this business for a long time and still have a lot to learn but I have fixed several laptops with broken hard disks and they have not had the symptoms of this machine.
After the rebuild the HP self test passed the SMART test but it does not display any data other than pass or fail. All other tests passed OK as well.

I know Victoria is not the most sophisticated test but it has served me well in the past.

I remained puzzled by this case.
Questions are:
Why was it not possible to read the SMART data before or after the rebuild. Has the SMART format changed a lot in the past couple of years?

The disk data looked terminally corrupt before the rebuild. How was it possible for the reinstall routine to recover from this leading to reasonable surface scan results?

Why could the bench machine running the same operating system not see the slaved suspect drive?

Cheers