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Wonderful in XP, but Vista had problems...
Boggin:
The trial is for 30 days and I assume it would have a built in clock.
I'm not sure if the number of times that I have reinstalled has accrued to 30 days yet, but you only need it installed long enough to see how the HDD is faring.
When you run it, a window pops up for you to enter your registration key which also has a Close box for you to continue.
I use IOBit Uninstaller so that no residue remains in the registry and it has reinstalled without any problems when I have decided to use it.
This is what it gives for mine, which I like because you don't need to know what all of the S.M.A.R.T. data means.
Shane:
As soon as bad sectors show up in the chkdsk the drive will only keep getting worse. The reason why is every drive has a set of spare sectors set aside, it is normally about 200 sectors. So when a sector goes bad it is remapped to a spare. The drive does this and Windows normally doesn't see it, you can see it by viewing the drives smart status.
So when Windows starts seeing bad sectors that means all the spare sectors are used, and if that many bad sectors are showing up then that means something is bad with the drive and more and more will keep coming till the drive is unreadable.
So when you ran the repairs a system file or even part of the registry could have ended up on a troubled sector and why things went bonkers after that, get your data as soon as you can if you havent already. :wink:
Shane
joezapp:
Very interesting stuff, Boggin. Thanks for that. Glad to see that your HDD is in good shape!
Thanks, Shane, for the good explanation of what happened when I ran the repair tool. As far as the fact that more and more bad sectors will show up, ironically I have been stuck on 12 bad sectors for at least 6 months now. I first noticed the 12 bad sectors on 12/24. While the computer is not consistently stable, the majority of the time it is very functional, so I keep using it. Of course, my data is backed up.
It is probably rare that the 12 bad sectors prognosis has been maintained for such a long period, especially since I'm on the internet daily with the computer. I suppose I'm doing a good job at helping things not get any worse. For example, the computer has never picked up a virus or malware.
Shane:
The drive also has a thing called ECC which is built in error correction. Possible that is what has been keeping more bad sectors from showing up in scans.
Viewing the smart status of the drive would give you more details of how it is doing, but no matter what you may want to get a new drive soon :-)
Shane
joezapp:
Thanks for the info, Shane.
The idea of a S.M.A.R.T. scan made me think of something. I have HD Tune installed. The quick scan comes up all green and says my HDD is good. However, I can't perform a full scan. My computer freezes mid-scan. This is a familiar problem, as I can do a quick defrag but not a full defrag, and I can do a quick scan virus check but not a full scan. So I would anticipate that no matter what brand of utility that I were to use, the full scan would freeze my computer mid-scan.
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