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HDD failing - HP Pavilion g7-1100ev (laptop i5, 4Gb)

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Hello to all,

I'm using a laptop as mentioned in subject of post. It came with Windows Home 7/x64 pre-installed.

Earlier this year, it self-upgraded to Windows 10 Home/x64. Since then, I begun to have problems with internal HDD. It takes about 45' after boot, until laptop becomes usable. Disk is spinning continuously during this time.

Hard disk Sentinel 4, reports 2500 weak sectors and 52% health. I decided to replace the drive.

Since the old drive is Toshiba MQ01ABD075 (750Gb), i purchased a Toshiba MQ01ABD100 (1Tb) as a replacement. However, there read errors during  cloning and also during Disk backup (using ATI 2016).

At this very moment, I'm running "chkdsk /f /r" on partition C: of the drive.  It's already running for 2 hours and progress is at "11% complete". Soon as it completes....

What should be the next steps?
I plan to boot from ATI Rescue media and perform a disk backup to an outside (USB) disk.
Then to put the new disk in the laptop and booting again from ATI Rescue media, to try to recover to the new disk.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

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Your approach of creating a backup to an external drive and then restoring to the new drive is right way to go. You may have issues creating a valid backup because of the issues with the old drive. Be sure to validate the backup after completion. Its possible you may have to do a sector by sector backup to make this work. I'll reserve comment on that and wait for one of our MVPs' who have far more knowledge than I.

thomasjk, thanks for your reply.

After 4 hours, chkdsk still running, stuck at 11%

Yannis, you will need to wait out the chkdsk if you want to have a chance of rescuing the data off the failing drive.

Do you have any other backups of the problem drive that you could use to make a base restore with to the new drive, then try to rescue your user data and reapply any missing updates etc.

I have used the free Hiren's Boot CD - HDAT2 utility to check for and try to recover bad sectors on drives with some success but if the drive is going bad then you need to do what you can to recover what data you can.

See the attached PDF document with details of trying HDAT2.

Attachment Size
394037-133723.pdf 681.62 KB

Thanks for replyong Steve.

Chkdsk and Backup (via bootable media Win PE + Acronis) finished.

I'm attaching 2 photos, the Read error and the Log, after backup had finished.

I have numerous backups of my laptop in my Windows Home Server. I'm only concerned about the bootabiliry after the restore operation.

Attachment Size
394106-133762.jpg 1.36 MB
394106-133765.jpg 1.23 MB

Yannis, glad to hear that the CHKDSK and Backup both completed, though the screen images show that both encountered bad sectors - the difficulty here is that you do not know what data is / was held in the area of the bad sectors?

I would recommend testing a restore of the backup data to a spare disk drive and then testing whether you can boot successfully from that drive?

Hi Steve,

Recover was terminated, with several "Backup is corrupted but you still get data from it" and finally "Recover failed" in log.

I'll give a try to Hiren's CD now with my old HDD.

 

= Update =
HDAT2
Load error: No DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip

I really don't know the meaning of the above... but finally I think i reached at the testing screen.

Steve,

after approx 40 minutes running the "Check and repair bad sectors", I got the following reports (attached). However while testing, in the bottom line the text was: " Esc - Abort * Tests are disabled in this version * " . Did it realy do the test, or what?

Because No Errors were reported and I did the same twice.

 

Attachment Size
394151-133789.jpg 1.07 MB
394151-133792.jpg 1.02 MB

Yannis, the test results look good with all zeros returned for over 700GB.  I have seen the same tests disabled message at the bottom and it has still found and corrected bad sectors.  Have you tried re-running CHKDSK /R against the same drive?

Steve,

I have run"CHKDSK /f /r" before on this disk.

Why do you say just "CHKDSK /r" ?

Anyway I'll try once more. Thanks

The "new" drive already contains some partitions and data, from previous recovery (failed). How should I handle this, in view of a next recovery?

Yannis, CHKDSK /R implies /F too, so is the same (just less typing!).

When you do the next recovery, it will wipe out any partitions you have selected to restore.