My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not
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I have a
http://www.toshiba.eu/discontinued-products/satellite-l300-1fq/
https://www.laptopmag.com/uploadedimages/review/laptops/2009/toshiba/toshiba_l305_559g.jpgfrom ~2008. It has a LED that should indicate hard drive activity. This LED is blinking a steady rhythm. This makes me suspicious of hard drive failure, but software that is supposed to detect such things reports that everything is AOK.
A few years back, this machine had an issue when it would lock up partially. Windows UI was responsive but you couldn't open files or launch programs. It would take 1-15 minutes then revert to normal. This issue has magically gone away. When the issue was still present I ran a hard drive test in one of the above programs. It locked up for 15 minutes then reported that everything is normal.
Currently the only issue is that both the downloading of Windows 10 Creators Update and Windows Store app updates get stuck - but not regular Windows updates. And it has done a thing once when I couldn't sign into Windows. Typing my password brought up a page like this:
except the bottom line said "There is not enough storage for this operation".
I know that this is a community where the initial reaction will be "dump that machine, it's old". But other than that, what can I try? Are there, like, smarter SMART utility programs that will actually confirm my suspicion of the hard drive dying?
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Okay now it's stuck during a restart.
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
"There is not enough storage for this operation".
So is there actually enough space?
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@homobalkanus 30 GB on C:
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There is always the nuclear option of reinstalling Windows if you don't particularly care for the data. Could just be the file system that is corrupted.
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@deadfast said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Could just be the file system that is corrupted.
But is there any way to confirm that suspicion?
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@marczellm Did you try running chkdsk?
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@deadfast said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Could just be the file system that is corrupted.
But is there any way to confirm that suspicion?
If you have the Windows disc, you can boot into the Recovery whatever it's called and use the tools there.
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Could also be memory issues. Have you tried running memtest86?
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@marczellm There's no way a laptop HD from 2008 is still good. Even if the problem turns out to be something else, if you want to continue using that computer, you have to swap-out that HD... you'll lose everything on it at any moment as-is.
SMART is useless at detecting flaws, in my experience. It'll detect the HD has a problem roughly 3 days after it's obvious to everybody that the HD has MAJOR problems. It's great for the guy looking after 50,000 servers in a data center, but for home use it's not nearly as useful.
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You can boot some Live CD/USB system, backup most important data, then do full wipe and clean reinstall.
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@blakeyrat said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
There's no way a laptop HD from 2008 is still good.
Please tell WtfCorp management this.
Except swap "laptop HD" to "server"
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Basically, SMART looks at particular physical parameters of the drive that are indicia to certain classes of problems.
It it NOT comprehensive. All sorts of shit can go wrong that it can't detect.
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@dangeruss said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Could also be memory issues. Have you tried running memtest86?
Thanks for the tip, will try.
@blakeyrat said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
you have to swap-out that HD... you'll lose everything on it at any moment as-is.
I've gotten this machine used. Never had a laptop before. I was afraid of dropping it or something, so I kept every important file in Google Drive. There is nothing valuable on it that I don't have copies of. When it craps out it'll only be of minor inconvenience.
@weng said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Basically, SMART looks at particular physical parameters of the drive that are indicia to certain classes of problems.
It is NOT comprehensive. All sorts of shit can go wrong that it can't detect.Is there something more comprehensive? Because this machine is not critically important, I'm more curious on investigating than willing to spend money on mitigating.
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@weng said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Basically, SMART looks at particular physical parameters of the drive that are indicia to certain classes of problems.
It is NOT comprehensive. All sorts of shit can go wrong that it can't detect.Is there something more comprehensive? Because this machine is not critically important, I'm more curious on investigating than willing to spend money on mitigating.
Not really, unless you're operating at vast scale and can apply statistical models.
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@blakeyrat said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
SMART is useless at detecting flaws, in my experience. It'll detect the HD has a problem roughly 3 days after it's obvious to everybody that the HD has MAJOR problems. It's great for the guy looking after 50,000 servers in a data center, but for home use it's not nearly as useful.
It's baffling that AFAIK none of the OS-s have a GUI to warn you when SMART warnings appear.
You have to hunt down the proper tool and to remember to run it occasionally. Ridiculous.
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@cartman82 said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
It's baffling that AFAIK none of the OS-s have a GUI to warn you when SMART warnings appear.
Windows does. (Well, it definitely did in XP and Vista-- I haven't seen a system with a failed HD since then.)
The problem is, the SMART warning doesn't appear until it's already obvious the HD's useless. Which means, in most cases, it'll never appear because the user already swapped-out the HD before SMART got a clue. Or the HD's gotten so bad it can't even boot Windows anymore, so Windows never has a chance to show it.
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@weng
Well, toby faire, server hard drives are engineered for a much tighter tolerance level and aren't subject to being dropped, dragged around in mass transit buses, and otherwise jostled on a day to day basis. So they're probably still OK 10 years on.
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@izzion said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@weng
Well, toby faire, server hard drives are engineered for a much tighter tolerance level and aren't subject to being dropped, dragged around in mass transit buses, and otherwise jostled on a day to day basis. So they're probably still OK 10 years on.I'm not talking about hard drives. I'm talking about ENTIRE SERVERS.
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@weng
Your critical infrastructure servers can't reach 4,000 days uptime if they bother with little things like server upgrades. Or patching.
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Is there something more comprehensive?
On the SMART front, there's
smartctl
, you can run a long test in that (should take about 2-ish hours) which I found will usually fail if the things is completely borked.Above that, there's
badblocks
that will do a surface scan. Expect it to take ages.Both of these should be either available or easily installable from most any live Linux distro. There should be GUIs for both if you don't feel like messing with CLI (I know there are multiple for
smartctl
, not sure aboutbadblocks
though, I always just ran it in CLI).
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
smarter SMART utility programs that will actually confirm my suspicion of the hard drive dying?
Well, what were the smart stats? Sounds like a slow sector that hasn't been detected yet...
Edit: Something like http://hddscan.com/ that tries to read each individual sector and times the access could be illuminating, though of course make sure you're not using the computer at all (ideally in a recovery environment if possible) while doing so.
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Is there something more comprehensive?
I vaguely remember that one of the Linux disk management tools allows you to trigger a "SMART self-test". Maybe you should boot into a live CD and use that?
Edit: I see @Onyx already mentioned that. Using a live CD has the additional advantage of allowing you to run an offline test.
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@asdf said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
to run an offline test
All "offline" means is that the drive does the test without external input. It runs whenever the OS isn't accessing the disk is all.
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@izzion said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@weng
Your critical infrastructure servers can't reach 4,000 days uptime if they bother with little things like server upgrades. Or patching.From reading his thread, they probably omit any kind of preventative maintainance.
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@asdf said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
"SMART self-test"
I've already ran that. It found no errors
@dangeruss said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Have you tried running memtest86?
It found no errors
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@marczellm Once I saw a disk controller on the motherboard go bad, even though the disk it was attached to was fine. That's a possibility.
Different symptoms though. Windows kept ratcheting back the DMA compatibility level, as the controller would fail DMA requests, until finally it gave up and put the drive in PIO mode. The computer "worked" reliably, since Windows could detect and handle the DMA errors, but once it fell back to PIO it was about as fast as a frozen snail.
Until I diagnosed that one I never realized how fucking slow it is for a CPU to talk to a HD without any kind of memory buffer. Jesus.
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@blakeyrat said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@marczellm Once I saw a disk controller on the motherboard go bad, even though the disk it was attached to was fine. That's a possibility.
Different symptoms though. Windows kept ratcheting back the DMA compatibility level, as the controller would fail DMA requests, until finally it gave up and put the drive in PIO mode. The computer "worked" reliably, since Windows could detect and handle the DMA errors, but once it fell back to PIO it was about as fast as a frozen snail.
Until I diagnosed that one I never realized how fucking slow it is for a CPU to talk to a HD without any kind of memory buffer. Jesus.
Seen that too.
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@homobalkanus 30 GB on C:
Considering after applying a new insider build the disk cleanup utility cleans up between 20-30GB, this is probably not enough to install the Creators Update...
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@blakeyrat said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Until I diagnosed that one I never realized how fucking slow it is for a CPU to talk to a HD without any kind of memory buffer. Jesus.
QFFT. Holy crap does PIO mode suck. Thankfully I haven't personally seen a machine dealing with that in ~10 years.
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@dcon said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@homobalkanus 30 GB on C:
Considering after applying a new insider build the disk cleanup utility cleans up between 20-30GB, this is probably not enough to install the Creators Update...
Managed to pull that off with the Windows 10 Update Assistant eventually. Did the same thing the built-in update client should do except didn't hang in the middle.
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@blakeyrat said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
you have to swap-out that HD... you'll lose everything on it at any moment as-is.
I've gotten this machine used. Never had a laptop before. I was afraid of dropping it or something, so I kept every important file in Google Drive. There is nothing valuable on it that I don't have copies of. When it craps out it'll only be of minor inconvenience.
Is this laptop sufficiently "quarantined" though? I know people who would run Google's backup and sync tool on shoddy machines and then saw their entire Google Drive get cleaned out because the sync tool would silently remove the files which were disappearing in batches after each checkdisk run.
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@jbert said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Is this laptop sufficiently "quarantined" though? I know people who would run Google's backup and sync tool on shoddy machines and then saw their entire Google Drive get cleaned out because the sync tool would silently remove the files which were disappearing in batches after each checkdisk run.
Oh my, you have a valid point.
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@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@jbert said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Is this laptop sufficiently "quarantined" though? I know people who would run Google's backup and sync tool on shoddy machines and then saw their entire Google Drive get cleaned out because the sync tool would silently remove the files which were disappearing in batches after each checkdisk run.
Oh my, you have a valid point.
I think though, that the encrypted files don't replace the originals, they just get deleted, so in theory they'd all be there in the Drive Trash folder, right?
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@tsaukpaetra said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@marczellm said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
@jbert said in My laptop seems ill but it insists it's not:
Is this laptop sufficiently "quarantined" though? I know people who would run Google's backup and sync tool on shoddy machines and then saw their entire Google Drive get cleaned out because the sync tool would silently remove the files which were disappearing in batches after each checkdisk run.
Oh my, you have a valid point.
I think though, that the encrypted files don't replace the originals, they just get deleted, so in theory they'd all be there in the Drive Trash folder, right?
It gets all messy when it comes to folders shared with many people with files in them owned by yet others.