unable to boot now that one drive went bad in dual boot config

[JBI]

I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into. Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it, but now I
get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot disk
at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS and the
boot up menu and I still get the same message. This is for my drive
with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to dual boot.
My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have
placed the dual boot program on there also. How can I now get the XP
drive to boot the way it used to by itself? Thanks.

[Good Guy]

Post by JBI
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into. Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it, but now
I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot
disk at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS
and the boot up menu and I still get the same message. This is for my
drive with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to
dual boot. My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it,
I must have placed the dual boot program on there also. How can I now
get the XP drive to boot the way it used to by itself? Thanks.

Manually edit the file called "boot.ini" that is saved in the root
folder of your default system.

All dual boot system have a default OS that kicks in after some time
(the default is 30 seconds but some nutters would change it to 5
seconds). In your case, it looks like th default drive is corrupted so
perhaps changing the boot.ini file to the other drive might do the trick.

Obviously, you need to boot the system using something else like usb
drive or linux system but I leave this to you to investigate it further
in your own time as Linux is not supported here.

[Good Guy]

This document will help you how to go about editing the file:

<https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/overview-of-the-boot-ini-file>

Post by Good Guy

Post by JBI

/--- This email has been checked for viruses by Windows Defender
software.
//https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/comprehensive-security/

I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into. Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it, but
now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a
boot disk at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the
BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same message. This is
for my drive with XP that I used singly for years before I
reconfigured to dual boot. My guess is that when I added the drive
with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot program on there
also. How can I now get the XP drive to boot the way it used to by
itself? Thanks.

Manually edit the file called "boot.ini" that is saved in the root
folder of your default system.
All dual boot system have a default OS that kicks in after some time
(the default is 30 seconds but some nutters would change it to 5
seconds). In your case, it looks like th default drive is corrupted
so perhaps changing the boot.ini file to the other drive might do the
trick.
Obviously, you need to boot the system using something else like usb
drive or linux system but I leave this to you to investigate it
further in your own time as Linux is not supported here.

[Wolf K]

Post by JBI
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive.  I select at boot up which OS to go into.  Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).  I removed it, but now I
get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot disk
at startup.  I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS and the
boot up menu and I still get the same message.  This is for my drive
with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to dual boot.

Sounds like it's finally worn out.

Post by JBI
 My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have
placed the dual boot program on there also.

The boot manager ("dual boot program") is on the XP drive, which is no
longer working.

Post by JBI
How can I now get the XP
drive to boot the way it used to by itself?  Thanks.

I don't think you can. Somewhat simplified, this is what happens: BIOS
looks for a master boot record, which points to a boot manager, which
BIOS runs. The boot manager calls the boot loader, which loads the OS.
On a dual- or multi-boot system, the boot manager presents the selection
of OS, or starts the default boot loader.

When you select the Win7 drive in BIOS, BIOS looks for a boot loader,
but there isn't one, it's on the XP drive, which by the sound of it toast.

You can fix this is with a W7 install/repair disk, which will create a
boot manager and boot loader on the Win7 drive. Repair or reinstall may
wipe the drive, but it may be possible to copy/backup data from the
drive to an external drive first. If you had a data-only partition on
the drive, that should not be touched by a repair/reinstall

You will probably have to replace the XP drive, it sounds like it's
done. However, you may be able to access it when you finally boot into
Win7, if so, back up any important data from the XP drive to an external
drive. You may then be able to reinstall XP, but I wouldn't risk that on
a drive that's failed. I would dual-boot from the Win7 drive, there's no
need to have separate drives, two partitions is enough. Plus a common
data partition. Plus a separate drive (or two) for data only.

HTH & GL

[Wolf K]

Post by Wolf K
When you select the Win7 drive in BIOS, BIOS looks for a boot loader,
but there isn't one, it's on the XP drive, which by the sound of it toast.

Sorry, s/b "looks for a boot manager".

[Paul]

Post by JBI
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into. Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it, but now I
get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot disk
at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS and the
boot up menu and I still get the same message. This is for my drive
with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to dual boot.
My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have
placed the dual boot program on there also. How can I now get the XP
drive to boot the way it used to by itself? Thanks.

The first questions are physical.

I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.

If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.

Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.

*******

A cardinal rule of OS installation is:

Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.

Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's damaging.

So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.

Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.

If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.

In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.

*******

OK, let's discuss fixing it.

You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.

A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.

Loading Image...


| <-- MBR -------->| <---------------- C: -------------------->|
| Boot | Partition | Partition boot.ini rest of WinXP C: |
| Code | Table | Boot Record |

^ ^ ^ ^
| | | |
"fixmbr" | "fixboot" "more C:\boot.ini"
Set (to read this file)
Active
Flag on
C: partition
"diskpart"???

For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.

Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.

You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .

The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.

diskpart
list disk # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0 # select the only disk in the menu
list partition # The partition size is your hint of your C:
select partition 1 # My first partition is WinXP
detail partition # How you find out stuff, with "detail" option

Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden : No
Active : No <=== Oops, OK, we need to fix this

Active # This makes the currently selected partition
# the active one

detail partition # now we check it again

Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden : No
Active : Yes <=== OK, C: is ready to boot (or close to it)

exit # All done

*******

To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.

Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.

The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"

To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
WinXP CD. I can do this:

help
more C:\boot.ini

and at least review the text to see it's sane.

It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.

copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak

Now you can mess around if you want.

You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.

help attrib

*******

The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.

HTH,
Paul

[JBI]

Post by Paul

Post by JBI
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive.  I select at boot up which OS to go into.  Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).  I removed it, but now
I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot
disk at startup.  I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS
and the boot up menu and I still get the same message.  This is for my
drive with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to
dual boot.  My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it,
I must have placed the dual boot program on there also.  How can I now
get the XP drive to boot the way it used to by itself?  Thanks.

The first questions are physical.
I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.
If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.
Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.
*******
   Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.
   Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.
So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.
Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.
If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.
In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.
*******
OK, let's discuss fixing it.
You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.
A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.
https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif
| <-- MBR -------->| <---------------- C: -------------------->|
| Boot | Partition | Partition     boot.ini  rest of WinXP C:  |
| Code | Table     | Boot Record                               |
   ^        ^           ^             ^
   |        |           |             |
 "fixmbr"   |        "fixboot"     "more C:\boot.ini"
          Set                      (to read this file)
          Active
          Flag on
          C: partition
          "diskpart"???
For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.
Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.
You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .
The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.
diskpart
list disk                     # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0                 # select the only disk in the menu
select partition 1            # My first partition is WinXP
detail partition              # How you find out stuff, with "detail"
option
Partition 1
Type   : 07
Hidden : No
Active : No                   <=== Oops, OK, we need to fix this
Active                        # This makes the currently selected partition
                              # the active one
detail partition              # now we check it again
Partition 1
Type   : 07
Hidden : No
Active : Yes                  <=== OK, C: is ready to boot (or close to it)
exit                          # All done
*******
To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.
Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.
The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"
To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
   help
   more C:\boot.ini
and at least review the text to see it's sane.
It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.
   copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak
Now you can mess around if you want.
You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.
   help attrib
*******
The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.
HTH,
   Paul

Thanks for the information. Just when I thought the drive might be
shot, I hooked it up with a USB-SATA adapter and it seems to be working
normally, so not sure what to do next.

By the way, it is the XP drive that went bad and not the Win 7 drive.
One of the earlier repliers actually had this right from the start and I
didn't. However, I'm not even sure if the drive is bad now since it
seems to be working with the adapter. I'm wondering if there's a way to
be sure? I'll keep it coupled to the laptop this way and run some
recommended tests.

At one point when I was trying to boot up with it in the desktop
configuration, I got a blue screen that said something about a pci.sys
error. I've been wondering for a while if adding a USB 3 card to my
desktop caused problems. My desktop would also randomly reboot for no
reason. At first I thought memory but Memtest revealed no problems
after running overnight. I've since removed the USB 3 card as next
possible suspect, assuming this drive *really is* ok. I'm wondering if
the USB 3 card could cause issues even if it was working correctly?? I
got it in order to do faster backups, which it did well.

Thanks,
JBI

[JBI]

Post by Paul

Post by JBI
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive.  I select at boot up which OS to go into.  Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).  I removed it, but
now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a
boot disk at startup.  I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the
BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same message.  This is
for my drive with XP that I used singly for years before I
reconfigured to dual boot.  My guess is that when I added the drive
with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot program on there
also.  How can I now get the XP drive to boot the way it used to by
itself?  Thanks.

The first questions are physical.
I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.
If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.
Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.
*******
    Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.
    Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.
So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.
Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.
If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.
In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.
*******
OK, let's discuss fixing it.
You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.
A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.
https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif
| <-- MBR -------->| <---------------- C: -------------------->|
| Boot | Partition | Partition     boot.ini  rest of WinXP C:  |
| Code | Table     | Boot Record                               |
    ^        ^           ^             ^
    |        |           |             |
  "fixmbr"   |        "fixboot"     "more C:\boot.ini"
           Set                      (to read this file)
           Active
           Flag on
           C: partition
           "diskpart"???
For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.
Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.
You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .
The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.
diskpart
list disk                     # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0                 # select the only disk in the menu
select partition 1            # My first partition is WinXP
detail partition              # How you find out stuff, with "detail"
option
Partition 1
Type   : 07
Hidden : No
Active : No                   <=== Oops, OK, we need to fix this
Active                        # This makes the currently selected
partition
                               # the active one
detail partition              # now we check it again
Partition 1
Type   : 07
Hidden : No
Active : Yes                  <=== OK, C: is ready to boot (or close
to it)
exit                          # All done
*******
To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.
Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.
The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"
To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
    help
    more C:\boot.ini
and at least review the text to see it's sane.
It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.
    copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak
Now you can mess around if you want.
You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.
    help attrib
*******
The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.
HTH,
    Paul

Thanks for the information.  Just when I thought the drive might be
shot, I hooked it up with a USB-SATA adapter and it seems to be working
normally, so not sure what to do next.
By the way, it is the XP drive that went bad and not the Win 7 drive.
One of the earlier repliers actually had this right from the start and I
didn't.  However, I'm not even sure if the drive is bad now since it
seems to be working with the adapter.  I'm wondering if there's a way to
be sure?  I'll keep it coupled to the laptop this way and run some
recommended tests.
At one point when I was trying to boot up with it in the desktop
configuration, I got a blue screen that said something about a pci.sys
error.  I've been wondering for a while if adding a USB 3 card to my
desktop caused problems.  My desktop would also randomly reboot for no
reason.  At first I thought memory but Memtest revealed no problems
after running overnight.  I've since removed the USB 3 card as next
possible suspect, assuming this drive *really is* ok.  I'm wondering if
the USB 3 card could cause issues even if it was working correctly??  I
got it in order to do faster backups, which it did well.
Thanks,
JBI

Ok, while I was waiting for recommendations, I found this page:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health

While I had the drive hooked up in Win 7 with the USB-SATA adapter, I
ran WMIC and it reported "OK" status. To be sure, since it didn't
specify which of the three drives in the system were ok (just three
ok's), I disconnected the USB drive and it simply reported two ok's.

From this I assume the drive is ok then?

[Paul]

Post by JBI

Post by JBI

Post by Paul

Post by JBI
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on
a different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into.
Now, one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it,
but now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or
insert a boot disk at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining
drive in the BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same
message. This is for my drive with XP that I used singly for years
before I reconfigured to dual boot. My guess is that when I added
the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot program
on there also. How can I now get the XP drive to boot the way it
used to by itself? Thanks.

The first questions are physical.
I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.
If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.
Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.
*******
Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.
Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's damaging.
So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.
Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.
If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.
In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.
*******
OK, let's discuss fixing it.
You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.
A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.
https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif
| <-- MBR -------->| <---------------- C: -------------------->|
| Boot | Partition | Partition boot.ini rest of WinXP C: |
| Code | Table | Boot Record |
^ ^ ^ ^
| | | |
"fixmbr" | "fixboot" "more C:\boot.ini"
Set (to read this file)
Active
Flag on
C: partition
"diskpart"???
For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.
Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.
You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .
The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.
diskpart
list disk # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0 # select the only disk in the menu
select partition 1 # My first partition is WinXP
detail partition # How you find out stuff, with "detail" option
Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden : No
Active : No <=== Oops, OK, we need to fix this
Active # This makes the currently selected partition
# the active one
detail partition # now we check it again
Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden : No
Active : Yes <=== OK, C: is ready to boot (or close to it)
exit # All done
*******
To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.
Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.
The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"
To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
help
more C:\boot.ini
and at least review the text to see it's sane.
It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.
copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak
Now you can mess around if you want.
You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.
help attrib
*******
The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.
HTH,
Paul

Thanks for the information. Just when I thought the drive might be
shot, I hooked it up with a USB-SATA adapter and it seems to be
working normally, so not sure what to do next.
By the way, it is the XP drive that went bad and not the Win 7 drive.
One of the earlier repliers actually had this right from the start and
I didn't. However, I'm not even sure if the drive is bad now since it
seems to be working with the adapter. I'm wondering if there's a way
to be sure? I'll keep it coupled to the laptop this way and run some
recommended tests.
At one point when I was trying to boot up with it in the desktop
configuration, I got a blue screen that said something about a pci.sys
error. I've been wondering for a while if adding a USB 3 card to my
desktop caused problems. My desktop would also randomly reboot for no
reason. At first I thought memory but Memtest revealed no problems
after running overnight. I've since removed the USB 3 card as next
possible suspect, assuming this drive *really is* ok. I'm wondering
if the USB 3 card could cause issues even if it was working
correctly?? I got it in order to do faster backups, which it did well.
Thanks,
JBI

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health
While I had the drive hooked up in Win 7 with the USB-SATA adapter, I
ran WMIC and it reported "OK" status. To be sure, since it didn't
specify which of the three drives in the system were ok (just three
ok's), I disconnected the USB drive and it simply reported two ok's.
From this I assume the drive is ok then?

I don't think there is S.M.A.R.T. tunneling through USB. SMART
is how you get a quick indication of drive health.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

The drive should be connected to a *SATA* port, then check the health.
SMART works over SATA or IDE, not USB as far as I know.

The free version of HDTune has a "Health" tab and you can look
at that for the "Reallocated" raw data field. It should be zero,
under normal conditions. This program is 10 years old now. It's
not the trial version - this one is perfectly free.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

The hard drive "temperature" is delivered via SMART, so if HDTune
shows a temperature, that's generally a good sign. If the temperature
isn't shown, then SMART might not be available over the hardware path
being used.

*******

Seagate and Western Digital (wdc.com) have diagnostic programs
for their drives. They will show a "code" if the drive is bad.
They will say the drive "passed" if it is good. You can use
tests like that for more info.

So, you have two drives. One is questionable. The other one boots ?
I got the impression you had a broken drive and a non-booting
drive.

What's your inventory now ?

Macrium Reflect Free emergency boot CD, has a "boot repair" menu
item, which is good for Vista+ problems. But I wouldn't reach for
that yet, because the root cause of your failure is unknown.
Doing a lot of writes to the drive, might not actually
be a good idea, depending on what is broken.

Checking the health is probably a start, but won't provide
all the answers.

I use the "Boot Repair" on Macrium, after some other boot-related
thing has fouled up.

If the disk is corrupted, it might even be dangerous to use CHKDSK
(in its repair mode). Some partitions have been absolutely
destroyed by CHKDSK, which is why it's regarded as a
"good/bad" tool. It's good when it fixes stuff,
and bad when it destroys stuff. That's why is has to be
used with a good deal of skepticism. If I have concerns
that the hardware itself is bad, I concentrate on doing
a backup first. The gddrescue package on Linux (GNU
ddrescue) can make backups, when other utilities refuse to
do it.

Paul

[JBI]

Post by Paul

Post by JBI

Post by Paul

Post by JBI
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on
a different hard drive.  I select at boot up which OS to go into.
Now, one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).  I removed it,
but now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or
insert a boot disk at startup.  I tried reselecting the remaining
drive in the BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same
message.  This is for my drive with XP that I used singly for years
before I reconfigured to dual boot.  My guess is that when I added
the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot
program on there also.  How can I now get the XP drive to boot the
way it used to by itself?  Thanks.

The first questions are physical.
I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.
If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.
Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.
*******
    Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.
    Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.
So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.
Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.
If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.
In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.
*******
OK, let's discuss fixing it.
You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.
A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.
https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif
| <-- MBR -------->| <---------------- C: -------------------->|
| Boot | Partition | Partition     boot.ini  rest of WinXP C:  |
| Code | Table     | Boot Record                               |
    ^        ^           ^             ^
    |        |           |             |
  "fixmbr"   |        "fixboot"     "more C:\boot.ini"
           Set                      (to read this file)
           Active
           Flag on
           C: partition
           "diskpart"???
For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.
Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.
You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .
The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.
diskpart
list disk                     # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0                 # select the only disk in the menu
list partition                # The partition size is your hint of
select partition 1            # My first partition is WinXP
detail partition              # How you find out stuff, with
"detail" option
Partition 1
Type   : 07
Hidden : No
Active : No                   <=== Oops, OK, we need to fix this
Active                        # This makes the currently selected
partition
                               # the active one
detail partition              # now we check it again
Partition 1
Type   : 07
Hidden : No
Active : Yes                  <=== OK, C: is ready to boot (or close
to it)
exit                          # All done
*******
To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.
Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.
The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"
To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
    help
    more C:\boot.ini
and at least review the text to see it's sane.
It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.
    copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak
Now you can mess around if you want.
You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.
    help attrib
*******
The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.
HTH,
    Paul

Thanks for the information.  Just when I thought the drive might be
shot, I hooked it up with a USB-SATA adapter and it seems to be
working normally, so not sure what to do next.
By the way, it is the XP drive that went bad and not the Win 7 drive.
One of the earlier repliers actually had this right from the start
and I didn't.  However, I'm not even sure if the drive is bad now
since it seems to be working with the adapter.  I'm wondering if
there's a way to be sure?  I'll keep it coupled to the laptop this
way and run some recommended tests.
At one point when I was trying to boot up with it in the desktop
configuration, I got a blue screen that said something about a
pci.sys error.  I've been wondering for a while if adding a USB 3
card to my desktop caused problems.  My desktop would also randomly
reboot for no reason.  At first I thought memory but Memtest revealed
no problems after running overnight.  I've since removed the USB 3
card as next possible suspect, assuming this drive *really is* ok.
I'm wondering if the USB 3 card could cause issues even if it was
working correctly??  I got it in order to do faster backups, which it
did well.
Thanks,
JBI

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health
While I had the drive hooked up in Win 7 with the USB-SATA adapter, I
ran WMIC and it reported "OK" status.  To be sure, since it didn't
specify which of the three drives in the system were ok (just three
ok's), I disconnected the USB drive and it simply reported two ok's.
 From this I assume the drive is ok then?

I don't think there is S.M.A.R.T. tunneling through USB. SMART
is how you get a quick indication of drive health.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
The drive should be connected to a *SATA* port, then check the health.
SMART works over SATA or IDE, not USB as far as I know.
The free version of HDTune has a "Health" tab and you can look
at that for the "Reallocated" raw data field. It should be zero,
under normal conditions. This program is 10 years old now. It's
not the trial version - this one is perfectly free.
http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe
The hard drive "temperature" is delivered via SMART, so if HDTune
shows a temperature, that's generally a good sign. If the temperature
isn't shown, then SMART might not be available over the hardware path
being used.
*******
Seagate and Western Digital (wdc.com) have diagnostic programs
for their drives. They will show a "code" if the drive is bad.
They will say the drive "passed" if it is good. You can use
tests like that for more info.
So, you have two drives. One is questionable. The other one boots ?
I got the impression you had a broken drive and a non-booting
drive.
What's your inventory now ?
Macrium Reflect Free emergency boot CD, has a "boot repair" menu
item, which is good for Vista+ problems. But I wouldn't reach for
that yet, because the root cause of your failure is unknown.
Doing a lot of writes to the drive, might not actually
be a good idea, depending on what is broken.
Checking the health is probably a start, but won't provide
all the answers.
I use the "Boot Repair" on Macrium, after some other boot-related
thing has fouled up.
If the disk is corrupted, it might even be dangerous to use CHKDSK
(in its repair mode). Some partitions have been absolutely
destroyed by CHKDSK, which is why it's regarded as a
"good/bad" tool. It's good when it fixes stuff,
and bad when it destroys stuff. That's why is has to be
used with a good deal of skepticism. If I have concerns
that the hardware itself is bad, I concentrate on doing
a backup first. The gddrescue package on Linux (GNU
ddrescue) can make backups, when other utilities refuse to
do it.
   Paul

I hooked the drive back up to the desktop. While booting, I pressed F8
and then chose last good config. It booted right into the Win7 drive.
I exited and rebooted and then the screen came up for choice between the
two drives (Win7 and XP). Choosing XP, there seems to be an attempt,
but then I get either blue screen or missing files.

I think that since I now am able to boot to the Win 7 drive now, I'll
use it to run tests on the XP, since the XP drive is now hooked up again
via the SATA cable. Since the WMIC didn't apparently work by USB as you
kindly pointed out, I'll have to use some other tools in Win 7 now to
check health of the XP drive.

Sorry, I've been all over the place, but I've been trying a lot of
things trying to get the drive to boot up. If it really turns out to be
bad, all is not lost except I'd be out the $ for a suitable 1 TB
replacement. I do have a back up that's a year old, but I haven't used
the desktop in a year so nothing is lost. I'm just trying to rule out
the drive's status for sure before investing in a new one.

[JBI]

Post by Paul

Post by Paul

Post by JBI
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on
a different hard drive.  I select at boot up which OS to go into.
Now, one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).  I removed it,
but now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or
insert a boot disk at startup.  I tried reselecting the remaining
drive in the BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same
message.  This is for my drive with XP that I used singly for years
before I reconfigured to dual boot.  My guess is that when I added
the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot
program on there also.  How can I now get the XP drive to boot the
way it used to by itself?  Thanks.

The first questions are physical.
I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.
If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.
Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.
*******
    Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.
    Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.
So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.
Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.
If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.
In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.
*******
OK, let's discuss fixing it.
You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.
A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.
https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif
| <-- MBR -------->| <---------------- C: -------------------->|
| Boot | Partition | Partition     boot.ini  rest of WinXP C:  |
| Code | Table     | Boot Record                               |
    ^        ^           ^             ^
    |        |           |             |
  "fixmbr"   |        "fixboot"     "more C:\boot.ini"
           Set                      (to read this file)
           Active
           Flag on
           C: partition
           "diskpart"???
For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.
Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.
You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .

I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I ever
saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and even
nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Post by Paul
The drive should be connected to a *SATA* port, then check the health.
SMART works over SATA or IDE, not USB as far as I know.
The free version of HDTune has a "Health" tab and you can look
at that for the "Reallocated" raw data field. It should be zero,
under normal conditions. This program is 10 years old now. It's
not the trial version - this one is perfectly free.
http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe
The hard drive "temperature" is delivered via SMART, so if HDTune
shows a temperature, that's generally a good sign. If the temperature
isn't shown, then SMART might not be available over the hardware path
being used.

Now I have Win 7 booted up and I am currently running it's scandisc/
defragment/ auto repair tools on the XP drive. I'll also take a look at
HDTune and see what it says.

Post by Paul
*******
Seagate and Western Digital (wdc.com) have diagnostic programs
for their drives. They will show a "code" if the drive is bad.
They will say the drive "passed" if it is good. You can use
tests like that for more info.
So, you have two drives. One is questionable. The other one boots ?
I got the impression you had a broken drive and a non-booting
drive.
What's your inventory now ?
Macrium Reflect Free emergency boot CD, has a "boot repair" menu
item, which is good for Vista+ problems. But I wouldn't reach for
that yet, because the root cause of your failure is unknown.
Doing a lot of writes to the drive, might not actually
be a good idea, depending on what is broken.
Checking the health is probably a start, but won't provide
all the answers.
I use the "Boot Repair" on Macrium, after some other boot-related
thing has fouled up.
If the disk is corrupted, it might even be dangerous to use CHKDSK
(in its repair mode). Some partitions have been absolutely
destroyed by CHKDSK, which is why it's regarded as a
"good/bad" tool. It's good when it fixes stuff,
and bad when it destroys stuff. That's why is has to be
used with a good deal of skepticism. If I have concerns
that the hardware itself is bad, I concentrate on doing
a backup first. The gddrescue package on Linux (GNU
ddrescue) can make backups, when other utilities refuse to
do it.

I'll look at Macrium boot repair option since I can't get past the
password thing with the XP CD.

Post by Paul
   Paul

[Paul]

Post by JBI
I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I ever
saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and even
nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/reset-lost-windows-passwords-with-offline-registry-editor/

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Reverse_Engineering/Cracking_Windows_XP_Passwords

Reset capability - this involves the least effort, but
the tools are kinda command line looking :-) I didn't really
want to crush the password on my test VM. I like to play around,
so I'll be testing my hand at rainbow tables.

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

********

On the other side of the spectrum is cracking.

Dump to standard format. It's too bad I didn't see tools
like this in the regular package manager, which would
have saved a trip here.

https://tools.kali.org/password-attacks/creddump

(Click the file manager, click the "volume" which may or may not
be labeled well enough to say it is your WinXP partition, click
it and see.)

df <=== gives mount table info
<=== my test WinXP mount shows a string of
digits for the partition name


cd /media/root/<digits>/WINDOWS/system32/config

pwdump system SAM <=== case-sensitive reg names
<=== UID = 0x1F4 = 500 = Admin account

aad3b435b51404eeaad3b435b51404ee : fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889
^ ^
| |
<username>:<uid>:<LM-hash> : <NTLM-hash>:<comment>:<homedir>: (This is a PWDump Format)

I tried this. It refused to crack my "fc..." thing.

http://www.objectif-securite.ch/en/ophcrack.php

Testing the process, I tried entering a known password into the hash generator
That's to verify I really know what the password is that I'm
trying to crack and calibrating the process. If the web cracker
isn't set up to use the full set of WinXP tables, that might
account for it not giving a result.

Passw0rd! ==> fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889

Entering fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889 into the box above it

"Enter your NTHash here"

fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889 ==> Cracking result: Password not found

Using the Kali DVD, it will take the XP Special table set (7.5GB)
to crack my (Microsoft-provided) VM "Passw0rd!" password using ophcrack
on the DVD. I shouldn't need the German tables with umlaut and
friends in the character set. So I don't need a 15GB torrent.
Just downloading the other half of it should be enough.

The XP table set handles up to 14 characters. There are several
sets of tables. The company offering them "objectif",
makes money from selling media with table-sets on it. The
XP Special table is only 96% effective, so it's not nearly as complete
as the "punctuation free" tables which are much smaller. This is
why it's important to put "!" in your password.

Anyway, if you know for a fact the administrator password
is not critical to operating your computer room, you
could find a pwdump utility and dump your password to be
cracked in pwdump format.

The pwdump utility on the Kali DVD is actually a copy
of creddump. I guess they renamed it for the LOLs.

Using pwdump just puts the info in a standard format. The
cracking tools may or may not accept pwdump format, so while it
was a start at a standard, right away the objectif web site
insisted I only needed to enter 32 characters to be cracked.

It will take me a while to download the tables. If you
can post your pwdump, I can run it through while this
shit is booted :-) (It's going on the Test Machine when
I get all the materials gathered. It will probably take
at least another two hours of downloads.) I will be
trying to crack fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889 for
my test.

If you need an alternate location to download Kali, you
can try here.

http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/kali-images/

Paul

[Paul]

Post by JBI
I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I ever
saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and even
nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).

Loading Image...

Paul

[JBI]

Post by Paul

 I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password.  I don't have a clue as to what it is.  It's nothing I ever
saved.  I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and even
nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).
https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif
   Paul

Thanks for the information with both of these posts! Unfortunately,
last night, after a lot of trial and error, I went for the backup, but
found this morning that it didn't restore, not due to a bad back up
image, but bad hard drive. Telltale sign it's time to get a new hard
drive.

[Paul]

Post by JBI

Post by Paul

Post by JBI
I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I
ever saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and
even nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).
https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif
Paul

Thanks for the information with both of these posts! Unfortunately,
last night, after a lot of trial and error, I went for the backup, but
found this morning that it didn't restore, not due to a bad back up
image, but bad hard drive. Telltale sign it's time to get a new hard
drive.

Well, I was just having a little fun. I've never "cracked"
a password before :-) Now I will need some more passwords to crack.

Paul

[JBI]

Post by Paul

Post by Paul

 I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password.  I don't have a clue as to what it is.  It's nothing I
ever saved.  I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password"
and even nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).
https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif
    Paul

Thanks for the information with both of these posts!  Unfortunately,
last night, after a lot of trial and error, I went for the backup, but
found this morning that it didn't restore, not due to a bad back up
image, but bad hard drive.  Telltale sign it's time to get a new hard
drive.

Well, I was just having a little fun. I've never "cracked"
a password before :-) Now I will need some more passwords to crack.
   Paul

You know what, I've been foiled again! These darn PC's. I DO now have
it working, on the original drive! Here's what happened:

1) I first tried restoring an image from Clonezilla, my standard back up
tool. It failed to restore the back up to the suspected drive, so I
assumed the drive was faulty. Then, just for kicks....

2) I discovered I had another back up, apparently made at the same time,
but using True Image. I popped in the True Image CD, chose the True
Image of the XP drive, and, to my surprise, the image was restored and
is now working!

I'm not sure why Conezilla failed and why TI worked.

For now, I have the XP system up and running on the "suspected" drive
and I went into the F8 menu and disabled reboot in event of system
failure. I suspect the reason the drive had become corrupted was
because the system was randomly rebooting and I'm still not sure why. I
switched out the power supply for a different one, ran Memtest several
times, and had removed one or more suspected cards. It's possible the
drive or OS had already become too corrupted by the time I removed the
offending card and was causing random reboot anyway, not sure.

Now that it's up and running, I'm going to try analyzing the drive using
some of the tools you recommended plus just leave it run while it does
tasks to see if I can (hopefully) get the BSOD to pop up instead of
rebooting to find out for sure what's happening.

[JBI]

Post by Paul

Post by Paul

 I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password.  I don't have a clue as to what it is.  It's nothing I
ever saved.  I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password"
and even nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).
https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif
    Paul

Thanks for the information with both of these posts!  Unfortunately,
last night, after a lot of trial and error, I went for the backup,
but found this morning that it didn't restore, not due to a bad back
up image, but bad hard drive.  Telltale sign it's time to get a new
hard drive.

Well, I was just having a little fun. I've never "cracked"
a password before :-) Now I will need some more passwords to crack.
    Paul

You know what, I've been foiled again!  These darn PC's.  I DO now have
1) I first tried restoring an image from Clonezilla, my standard back up
tool.  It failed to restore the back up to the suspected drive, so I
assumed the drive was faulty.  Then, just for kicks....
2) I discovered I had another back up, apparently made at the same time,
but using True Image.  I popped in the True Image CD, chose the True
Image of the XP drive, and, to my surprise, the image was restored and
is now working!
I'm not sure why Conezilla failed and why TI worked.
For now, I have the XP system up and running on the "suspected" drive
and I went into the F8 menu and disabled reboot in event of system
failure.  I suspect the reason the drive had become corrupted was
because the system was randomly rebooting and I'm still not sure why. I
switched out the power supply for a different one, ran Memtest several
times, and had removed one or more suspected cards.  It's possible the
drive or OS had already become too corrupted by the time I removed the
offending card and was causing random reboot anyway, not sure.
Now that it's up and running, I'm going to try analyzing the drive using
some of the tools you recommended plus just leave it run while it does
tasks to see if I can (hopefully) get the BSOD to pop up instead of
rebooting to find out for sure what's happening.

Ok, I ran HDTune and here is what I get:

https://ibb.co/mHAMdS
https://ibb.co/iB8JQ7

I wasn't sure which reallocation you were referring to, but (05) and
(C4) show 0 if I'm not mistaken.

I'm currently doing the error scan (slow one), so it will be a while
before I have the results.

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

In message <p83qd3$t02$***@dont-email.me>, JBI <***@ez1.net> writes:
[]

Post by JBI
https://ibb.co/mHAMdS
https://ibb.co/iB8JQ7

Hmm, those are pretty deep spikes at 2 and 49 %. If you run it again,
are they still in the same places? (Such spikes _can_ be due to just
general Windows activity, hence running it more than once.) If they are,
then it suggests the disc has dud sectors. In theory, not a problem _if_
the bad patches don't grow (wider). One of them being around 2% might
well be where some of the OS is, though.
[]

[Paul]

Post by JBI

Post by JBI

Post by Paul

Post by JBI

Post by Paul

Post by JBI
I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I
ever saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password"
and even nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).
https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif
Paul

Thanks for the information with both of these posts! Unfortunately,
last night, after a lot of trial and error, I went for the backup,
but found this morning that it didn't restore, not due to a bad back
up image, but bad hard drive. Telltale sign it's time to get a new
hard drive.

Well, I was just having a little fun. I've never "cracked"
a password before :-) Now I will need some more passwords to crack.
Paul

You know what, I've been foiled again! These darn PC's. I DO now
1) I first tried restoring an image from Clonezilla, my standard back
up tool. It failed to restore the back up to the suspected drive, so
I assumed the drive was faulty. Then, just for kicks....
2) I discovered I had another back up, apparently made at the same
time, but using True Image. I popped in the True Image CD, chose the
True Image of the XP drive, and, to my surprise, the image was
restored and is now working!
I'm not sure why Conezilla failed and why TI worked.
For now, I have the XP system up and running on the "suspected" drive
and I went into the F8 menu and disabled reboot in event of system
failure. I suspect the reason the drive had become corrupted was
because the system was randomly rebooting and I'm still not sure why.
I switched out the power supply for a different one, ran Memtest
several times, and had removed one or more suspected cards. It's
possible the drive or OS had already become too corrupted by the time
I removed the offending card and was causing random reboot anyway, not
sure.
Now that it's up and running, I'm going to try analyzing the drive
using some of the tools you recommended plus just leave it run while
it does tasks to see if I can (hopefully) get the BSOD to pop up
instead of rebooting to find out for sure what's happening.

https://ibb.co/mHAMdS
https://ibb.co/iB8JQ7
I wasn't sure which reallocation you were referring to, but (05) and
(C4) show 0 if I'm not mistaken.
I'm currently doing the error scan (slow one), so it will be a while
before I have the results.

Your Reallocated raw data is zero. This is Good.

However, you have something I've not seen for quite a while.
There is a Current Pending field. On a lot of disks,
it simply does not work. It never registers anything.

Well, lucky you, yours registers 195. The Current Pending
get "resolved" the next time the disk drive tries to write
those locations. And if you do an "end-to-end" write of the
entire drive, that could decide all 195 of those. They could
all be moved to Reallocated.

It's possible that the Current Pending is thresholded somehow,
or that field only starts to populate under certain conditions.
For my own gear here, I've grown used to seeing Reallocated
go non-zero, without ever catching any activity in Current Pending.

The second thing about your setup that is weird, is your
ratio of Start-Stop, to your power on hours. The POH is 22,077
hours, which is pretty good as drives go. I have just one drive
here, with 38000 hours on it, to match you. I don't think any of
my other drives have lasted that long. Yet, in the 22,000
hours your drive was powered, it only parked the heads 383
times. That means on average, you leave the machine running
for more than two days straight without shutting down. I used
to do that at work (on Unix machines), as they were intended
for that sort of operation (continuous performance, even for
our workstations, never get shut down). But for Windows machines,
a lot of people would sleep them at night, and sleep would
cause the power to drop on the disk drive, you'd bump the
start-stop by one, and the power on hours would stop counting
hours at that point. Your ratio of POH to start-stop in such
a pattern, would work out closer to an 8 hour work day.
So it seems your work pattern looks like a Unix-style pattern.
I'm surprised the start-stop count isn't higher, for a disk
with that many hours on it.

So anyway, what would I do if I was there:

1) Back up the drive contents. You have a disk which is
"under suspicion". You make sure you have at least one
backup on hand.

2) Write some pattern, any pattern will do, to the whole drive.
The DiskPart "select disk 2" "clean all" type method would
do the job. Or, use some other method if you wanted to
collect statistics as such an operation was run.

3) Now, that will force the drive to "resolve" the Current Pending.
The Current Pending will drop to zero. A given sector, can
end up in two possible states. "It was all a simple mistake" - the
sector status returns to "normal", with no consequences. Or,
the sector is spared out, and now the Reallocated gets bumped
by one count. The reallocated only starts to show, after there
are a large number of them. The reallocated is not an honest
count. The first hundred thousand could register as "zero" in
that field, before some day, the counts actually start to show.

4) If, after (2), the Reallocated is still zero, and the benchmark
curve is mostly "wide spike free", then you can put the drive
back in service.

Your chart does have some spikes in it. That means there are some
reallocated, or some sector reads that were a little slow to get
a good copy of data. I find sometimes, as the HDTune heads go
over the pagefile, the OS slows down the reads there for some
reason. So one of the spikes could correlate with the pagefile
location. But other spikes might indicate the presence of a problem.
I might run the HDTune bench a couple of times, just to "average"
the graphs and remove outliers from my mental picture of the
drive health.

Back up first - very important! Do you have at least
one good backup on hand now ? You need to write the
entire drive, to flush out the Current Pending and
see what the real situation is like. Then HDTune bench
again and see how many more spikes are present.
If you don't "harvest" the Current Pending during your
maintenance activity, they will only "harvest" during
later disk usage, when you might not be watching the unit
at the time...

You can run Diskpart from a running OS. You need an OS drive,
and the drive to be tested, in that case. Or, you can boot
the installer DVD, to the Command Prompt option, and run
DiskPart from there, and do a Clean All on the only
hard drive which is plugged in at the time. Those are
two ways you can run DiskPart and its Clean All.

I've had Seagate drives here, where re-writing the drive from
end to end, actually "perks up" the drive. Which makes
no sense at all. It all-round behaves better. It's one
of lifes little mysteries what that one is all about.

Paul

[JBI]

Post by Paul
Your Reallocated raw data is zero. This is Good.
However, you have something I've not seen for quite a while.
There is a Current Pending field. On a lot of disks,
it simply does not work. It never registers anything.
Well, lucky you, yours registers 195. The Current Pending
get "resolved" the next time the disk drive tries to write
those locations. And if you do an "end-to-end" write of the
entire drive, that could decide all 195 of those. They could
all be moved to Reallocated.
It's possible that the Current Pending is thresholded somehow,
or that field only starts to populate under certain conditions.
For my own gear here, I've grown used to seeing Reallocated
go non-zero, without ever catching any activity in Current Pending.
The second thing about your setup that is weird, is your
ratio of Start-Stop, to your power on hours. The POH is 22,077
hours, which is pretty good as drives go. I have just one drive
here, with 38000 hours on it, to match you. I don't think any of
my other drives have lasted that long. Yet, in the 22,000
hours your drive was powered, it only parked the heads 383
times. That means on average, you leave the machine running
for more than two days straight without shutting down.

Are you a hard drive palm reader? Just kidding, but you hit the nail on
the head. Up until 1.5 years ago, that desktop drive ran 24 hours a day
for years. It's only when I started using laptops that it hasn't been
powered much over the last year.

I used

Post by Paul
to do that at work (on Unix machines), as they were intended
for that sort of operation (continuous performance, even for
our workstations, never get shut down). But for Windows machines,
a lot of people would sleep them at night, and sleep would
cause the power to drop on the disk drive, you'd bump the
start-stop by one, and the power on hours would stop counting
hours at that point. Your ratio of POH to start-stop in such
a pattern, would work out closer to an 8 hour work day.
So it seems your work pattern looks like a Unix-style pattern.
I'm surprised the start-stop count isn't higher, for a disk
with that many hours on it.

The problem with powering it off and on regularly was the horrendously
long start up times... it takes that old XP desktop what seems like an
eternity to fully boot up. I did lose one of the memory modules so
there's only 1 GB in there which makes matters worse. So, when I was
using it on a regular basis, it was just better to leave it on all the
time and have it ready to go. My fastest laptop has an SSD drive and
it's ready to go in seconds rather than minutes like the old desktop.
The only reason I've been using the desktop lately is that there are
some audio files I created that I have been searching for and needed to
access. I actually open the files with the laptop via RDP so the XP
window actually opens on the laptop, but after I lost the connection a
week ago and the XP desktop appeared to have rebooted, I knew I had a
problem. Then, a few days later, the drive exhibited the symptoms of
having the corrupted boot sector. >

Post by Paul
1) Back up the drive contents. You have a disk which is
"under suspicion". You make sure you have at least one
backup on hand.

Yes, both back ups are fine. In fact, getting the drive to work again
was with the TI back up.

Post by Paul
2) Write some pattern, any pattern will do, to the whole drive.
The DiskPart "select disk 2" "clean all" type method would
do the job. Or, use some other method if you wanted to
collect statistics as such an operation was run.

Ok, thanks.

Post by Paul
3) Now, that will force the drive to "resolve" the Current Pending.
The Current Pending will drop to zero. A given sector, can
end up in two possible states. "It was all a simple mistake" - the
sector status returns to "normal", with no consequences. Or,
the sector is spared out, and now the Reallocated gets bumped
by one count. The reallocated only starts to show, after there
are a large number of them. The reallocated is not an honest
count. The first hundred thousand could register as "zero" in
that field, before some day, the counts actually start to show.
4) If, after (2), the Reallocated is still zero, and the benchmark
curve is mostly "wide spike free", then you can put the drive
back in service.
Your chart does have some spikes in it. That means there are some
reallocated, or some sector reads that were a little slow to get
a good copy of data. I find sometimes, as the HDTune heads go
over the pagefile, the OS slows down the reads there for some
reason. So one of the spikes could correlate with the pagefile
location. But other spikes might indicate the presence of a problem.
I might run the HDTune bench a couple of times, just to "average"
the graphs and remove outliers from my mental picture of the
drive health.
Back up first - very important! Do you have at least
one good backup on hand now ? You need to write the
entire drive, to flush out the Current Pending and
see what the real situation is like. Then HDTune bench
again and see how many more spikes are present.
If you don't "harvest" the Current Pending during your
maintenance activity, they will only "harvest" during
later disk usage, when you might not be watching the unit
at the time...
You can run Diskpart from a running OS. You need an OS drive,
and the drive to be tested, in that case. Or, you can boot
the installer DVD, to the Command Prompt option, and run
DiskPart from there, and do a Clean All on the only
hard drive which is plugged in at the time. Those are
two ways you can run DiskPart and its Clean All.
I've had Seagate drives here, where re-writing the drive from
end to end, actually "perks up" the drive. Which makes
no sense at all. It all-round behaves better. It's one
of lifes little mysteries what that one is all about.

Once again, thanks for the thorough information. I'll get on this right
away and see what happens.

Post by Paul
Paul

[JBI]

Post by Paul
You can run Diskpart from a running OS. You need an OS drive,
and the drive to be tested, in that case. Or, you can boot
the installer DVD, to the Command Prompt option, and run
DiskPart from there, and do a Clean All on the only
hard drive which is plugged in at the time. Those are
two ways you can run DiskPart and its Clean All.

Ok, I currently have the drive in question hooked up via the USB-SATA
adapter to one of my Win 7 laptops and I am running Diskpart clean all.
I think this will take some time to complete since I can only get USB 2
speed via the adapter with the 1 TB drive. Anyway, once it completes,
can I just start up HDTune and check it this way, or do plug it back
into the desktop first via SATA cable to run HDTune? It appears as if
HDTune would have no trouble checking it via the adapter, but just
wanted to be sure. Thanks.

Post by Paul
I've had Seagate drives here, where re-writing the drive from
end to end, actually "perks up" the drive. Which makes
no sense at all. It all-round behaves better. It's one
of lifes little mysteries what that one is all about.
   Paul

[Paul]

Post by JBI
Ok, I currently have the drive in question hooked up via the USB-SATA
adapter to one of my Win 7 laptops and I am running Diskpart clean all.
I think this will take some time to complete since I can only get USB 2
speed via the adapter with the 1 TB drive. Anyway, once it completes,
can I just start up HDTune and check it this way, or do plug it back
into the desktop first via SATA cable to run HDTune? It appears as if
HDTune would have no trouble checking it via the adapter, but just
wanted to be sure. Thanks.

HDTune doesn't care if there is even a file system on the drive.
HDTune can run on a drive that is freshly cleaned (zeroed) with "Clean All".
HDTune doesn't actually look at the data while it benchmarks,
and any old pattern in the sector will do.

When you're on the USB2 cable, your benchmark run will be a flat
line at 30MB/sec or so. If there are "downward spikes", you'll
still see them. But doing a run on the 30MB/sec limited cable,
kinda obscures your dynamic range, so the chart isn't quite as
good for "eyeball testing".

You will still need to restore from backup, and the restore
from backup will only write the data clusters representing
each file. If a 500GB disk has 10GB of user files, the
restore operation only does 10GB of writes. The other 490GB
of space on the drive, doesn't receive any further interaction.

The purpose of the clean all, was to make sure that "every
sector receives service" and any Current Pending states
are evaluated. Any "suspicious" sectors will either
be spared out by the 500GB of writes during "Clean All",
or they'll be given a clean bill of health until next time.
The idea is, to make sure the drive is presenting it's
"true colors". A single write pass, could make the spikes
worse, but the user wants to know whether the drive should
be tossed or not. And for that, we need brutal honesty in
the testing. Maybe the benchmark run after the "Clean All"
tells us to not even bother doing a data restore, because
the drive presents obvious symptoms it's toast and should
no longer be used.

You're at least going to need to cable up that drive
to SATA, just so you can read the SMART and see what
the Reallocated says now. I don't think USB supports
SMART tunneling. So if you want to use the Health
tab again, you'll need to be back on SATA for that.

Paul

[JBI]

Post by Paul
You're at least going to need to cable up that drive
to SATA, just so you can read the SMART and see what
the Reallocated says now. I don't think USB supports
SMART tunneling. So if you want to use the Health
tab again, you'll need to be back on SATA for that.
   Paul

Ok, I'll just break open an unused desktop and use its SATA for the
drive, then run HDTune. I should have remembered this unused PC earlier
as I could have done the clean all process that way instead of USB 2.
Oh well, forget what I have.

I'll report results tomorrow with separate jpgs as I did today. The
results will be just for the clean drive with no OS restoration.

JBI

[JBI]

Post by JBI

Post by Paul
You're at least going to need to cable up that drive
to SATA, just so you can read the SMART and see what
the Reallocated says now. I don't think USB supports
SMART tunneling. So if you want to use the Health
tab again, you'll need to be back on SATA for that.
    Paul

Ok, I'll just break open an unused desktop and use its SATA for the
drive, then run HDTune.  I should have remembered this unused PC earlier
as I could have done the clean all process that way instead of USB 2. Oh
well, forget what I have.
I'll report results tomorrow with separate jpgs as I did today.  The
results will be just for the clean drive with no OS restoration.
JBI

Took about 14 hours to complete clean all via USB 2 adapter, then hooked
the drive up internally to SATA. Here are the results:

https://ibb.co/mUk4Hn

I ran benchmark three times followed by the other two tests.

Appreciate your thoughts: is this a drive I can reuse or should I ditch
it and get another?

Again, thanks, in advance,
JBI

[Paul]

Post by JBI

Post by JBI

Post by Paul
You're at least going to need to cable up that drive
to SATA, just so you can read the SMART and see what
the Reallocated says now. I don't think USB supports
SMART tunneling. So if you want to use the Health
tab again, you'll need to be back on SATA for that.
Paul

Ok, I'll just break open an unused desktop and use its SATA for the
drive, then run HDTune. I should have remembered this unused PC
earlier as I could have done the clean all process that way instead of
USB 2. Oh well, forget what I have.
I'll report results tomorrow with separate jpgs as I did today. The
results will be just for the clean drive with no OS restoration.
JBI

Took about 14 hours to complete clean all via USB 2 adapter, then hooked
https://ibb.co/mUk4Hn
I ran benchmark three times followed by the other two tests.
Appreciate your thoughts: is this a drive I can reuse or should I ditch
it and get another?
Again, thanks, in advance,
JBI

OK, if you look at the three graphs, the "repetitive" pattern has
a different offset to the origin in each run. This means some
activity on the computer is interfering with the time measurement
routine.

However, the deep spike at the 2% mark, is there in each scan.
So that spike is for real.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1155702

I can show you the pattern for one of the drives that
has been put in my scratch-drive pile.

Current Worst Threshold Data Status
Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 0 OK \
Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 57 OK \___ These grew in
Reallocated Sector Count 98 98 36 104 OK / a couple days
Reallocated Sector Count 92 92 36 334 OK ----- Two years later...

(Future) 36 36 36 ~2672 Fail ----- By extrapolation...

But judging drives is quite tricky.

I've had a drive with a "gouge" or flat spot where the
OS was stored. It had reallocated of zero. I tried looking
for that drive today, and *no* drive tested showed such
a gouge.

I have a drive with the sad state of affairs in reallocated,
but it's not reflected in the transfer curve.

Loading Image...

For comparison, this is my golden drive, the one that defies
all logic. The transfer curve looks similar to the previous
picture.

Loading Image...

Those happen to be tested on two different OSes on two
different machines, so cannot be compared directly exactly,
but the golden drive really is "that quiet and ripple free".

Your "seek dots" seem to be all over the place. You could
try Googling and see if others get the same kind of
plot to see if it's normal or not to do that.

OK, the lower left quadrant of this picture, shows your
drive model. The seek dots are relatively well behaved,
except a few seek dots look like it took an extra
rotation to get the data. There's a tiny strip of
outliers.

Loading Image...

This is not your drive model - but this one is "retire immediately!!!" :-)
I'm sure the drive still works and all, and these are
all judgment calls.

Loading Image...

You can tell I'm conservative on these things, because
*none* of my retired drives is dead. None have
a CRC error yet (i.e. a sector that could not be
reallocated because no nearby spares are left).
I try my best to extrapolate "where a drive is going",
but they continue to surprise me, every time I
run scans.

Paul

[Paul]

Post by Paul
https://s13.postimg.org/mld1y6kkn/golden_drive.gif
https://s13.postimg.org/k41aqxntj/reallocating_drive.gif

Looks like I got those mixed up in the text...

The file name should say which is which.

Paul

[JBI]

Post by Paul

Post by Paul
https://s13.postimg.org/mld1y6kkn/golden_drive.gif
https://s13.postimg.org/k41aqxntj/reallocating_drive.gif

Looks like I got those mixed up in the text...
The file name should say which is which.
   Paul

Thanks for your response. Well, here's what I think. I believe I'll
keep the drive and perhaps reload the OS on it, but in the meantime look
around for another 1 TB HD. I seldom use any of my desktops anymore,
heck even the back up from a year ago was still considered "recent"
since I hadn't powered it up for nearly a year.

Budget is a factor; if funds weren't problematic, I'd spring for a 1 TB
SSD as that would speed up the old dog desktop, but I'm going to have to
go with a standard HD. I'm tempted to install a 2.5" laptop style drive
as I do see that they seem cheaper than the 3.5" drives. My more recent
desktop does have a 2.5" SSD and it is very fast, but to keep costs down
I went with just 250 GB size.

Well, thanks again for all your help and suggestions. If nothing else,
I may be able to apply a similar procedure in the future with other
questionable HD's I may run across. All of my desktops are quite aged
now, along with their HD's, so I'm sure I'll be doing some testing &
checks again soon.

With the desktop in question, I'm still not sure why it was randomly
rebooting, so replacing the HD may or may not solve that issue. Time
will tell.

JBI

[Paul]

Post by JBI

Post by Paul

Post by Paul
https://s13.postimg.org/mld1y6kkn/golden_drive.gif
https://s13.postimg.org/k41aqxntj/reallocating_drive.gif

Looks like I got those mixed up in the text...
The file name should say which is which.
Paul

Thanks for your response. Well, here's what I think. I believe I'll
keep the drive and perhaps reload the OS on it, but in the meantime look
around for another 1 TB HD. I seldom use any of my desktops anymore,
heck even the back up from a year ago was still considered "recent"
since I hadn't powered it up for nearly a year.
Budget is a factor; if funds weren't problematic, I'd spring for a 1 TB
SSD as that would speed up the old dog desktop, but I'm going to have to
go with a standard HD. I'm tempted to install a 2.5" laptop style drive
as I do see that they seem cheaper than the 3.5" drives. My more recent
desktop does have a 2.5" SSD and it is very fast, but to keep costs down
I went with just 250 GB size.
Well, thanks again for all your help and suggestions. If nothing else,
I may be able to apply a similar procedure in the future with other
questionable HD's I may run across. All of my desktops are quite aged
now, along with their HD's, so I'm sure I'll be doing some testing &
checks again soon.
With the desktop in question, I'm still not sure why it was randomly
rebooting, so replacing the HD may or may not solve that issue. Time
will tell.
JBI

If you do buy one, get one of these.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1Z4-0002-002U9

Why ? $80 (expensive). Operates 8760 hours per year. You
can leave it on. Has a 550TBW rating (you can write the drive
from end to end 550 times in one year).

A Seagate I could find, a "money-saver" for $60 has a 55TBW
and 2400 hours per year powered spec. So yeah, you'd save
a bit of money on the Seagate, but it's not quite as "care free"
as a competing product. If you left your desktop turned on for
a year, who knows whether that drive does aggressive spin-downs
to avoid using up its 2400 hours.

The WDC one will be slightly slower. 184MB/sec on the outside
of the platter. Seagates now, can run around 210MB/sec, but you
may find a tiny bit of unit to unit variation. It's the Seagate
SMR drives which seem to not quite meet their datasheet spec.

For desktops, you want PMR drives. And now that Seagate has
introduced SMR ones (their 4TB drive that is only 0.8" tall),
we're going to have to watch the market like a hawk, to not
get scammed. The 1TB drive is (fortunately) too small of
a capacity of drive, to make the SMR platter practical, so
even if it has the 2400 hour limit, I'm hoping that one is
PMR for the sake of people (cheap enough) to buy it :-)

I could find a 128GB SSD for $73, but it uses TLC, and to get
an MLC drive now is getting to be tough. SLC stores
one bit per cell (good write life). MLC stores two bits per
cell and can be written about 3500 times. TLC stored three
bits per cell and can be written about 3000 times. TLC can
sometimes get "mushy" and need to be re-written. And the idiots
are working on QLC (four bits per cell) in the lab. The thing
is, to store a 512 byte sector, it takes around maybe 10%
overhead bytes to make a "checksum" for the sector (total storage
for a sector is 560 bytes or so), to allow error correction.
Each time they increase the density, the overhead for error
recovery keeps going up and up. And the "mushy" characteristic
(parametric drift) will always be with us. I can't imagine
how sloggingly slow a QLC drive will be, two weeks after you
loaded an OS on it. I'm wondering if common sense will ever
come to these people.

Paul

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

In message <p87u7s$v3l$***@dont-email.me>, Paul <***@needed.invalid>
writes:
[]

Post by Paul
You can tell I'm conservative on these things, because
*none* of my retired drives is dead. None have
a CRC error yet (i.e. a sector that could not be
reallocated because no nearby spares are left).
I try my best to extrapolate "where a drive is going",
but they continue to surprise me, every time I
run scans.
Paul

(Me too.) I'm intrigued by your use of the word "nearby" above: do you
mean that drives only reallocate to _nearby_ sectors? I'd understand if
they choose those _first_. (It hadn't occurred to me to wonder about the
distribution of the spares: I suppose spread out _would_ be best. If
anything, I'd thought they were all at the end.)

Do reallocated sectors themselves get reallocated if they go bad, or is
it only a one-level thing? Or does it vary between makes/models?

(Do you have those figures (TBW and hours-per-year-powered) for my HGST
HTS541010B7E610 drive [now 345 hours]?)

[Paul]

Post by J. P. Gilliver (John)
[]

Post by Paul
You can tell I'm conservative on these things, because
*none* of my retired drives is dead. None have
a CRC error yet (i.e. a sector that could not be
reallocated because no nearby spares are left).
I try my best to extrapolate "where a drive is going",
but they continue to surprise me, every time I
run scans.
Paul

(Me too.) I'm intrigued by your use of the word "nearby" above: do you
mean that drives only reallocate to _nearby_ sectors? I'd understand if
they choose those _first_. (It hadn't occurred to me to wonder about the
distribution of the spares: I suppose spread out _would_ be best. If
anything, I'd thought they were all at the end.)
Do reallocated sectors themselves get reallocated if they go bad, or is
it only a one-level thing? Or does it vary between makes/models?
(Do you have those figures (TBW and hours-per-year-powered) for my HGST
HTS541010B7E610 drive [now 345 hours]?)

If a reallocated sector is on the same track, it can be sitting in
the track buffer on a read. That means there will be minimal
interference with performance, if the sector that happens to be
spared out, is "nearby".

IBM at least, used to keep the sector mapping in the cache RAM,
to translate "from-to" and figure out which LBA is the one
they need to use as the space.

To have to head switch to get a sector, costs 1 millisecond
for the head switch, plus the rotation time to get to the sector.
So you really don't want to switch platters to get your spare.

And to the best of my knowledge, they don't leave all the heads
running in parallel on a read. Like if you had four platters and
eight heads, if there was enough bandwidth at the controller,
you could put all eight tracks in the track buffer. But I don't
think the RAM is currently fast enough. The RAM usually isn't
the most modern version, merely the cheapest version they can
get in bulk.

I've not seen any info on the "locality" of spares, but if you
move them too far away from the trouble area, it's going to make
the drive really slow.

And if a drive has sectors sitting in "Current Pending" status,
they stay there until the sector is written. Then the drive can
decide whether to spare them out or not. If a sector like that
sits in Current Pending, it can take *fifteen seconds* worst
case to read it. It takes less time on RE drives with TLER
enabled, which reduces the retries below the RAID timeout
constant. The RAID timeout constant is a lot less than 15 seconds.

So if you have a drive that's looking bad in any case, it probably
wouldn't hurt to back it up, "Clean All" from end to end,
do the restore, just to get all the trouble maker sectors spared
out. Then see if the drive has any "health" left in SMART.

I don't really retire drives when they're broken, I
retire them when they annoy me :-)

Paul

[Sjouke Burry]

Post by JBI

Post by Paul
You can run Diskpart from a running OS. You need an OS drive,
and the drive to be tested, in that case. Or, you can boot
the installer DVD, to the Command Prompt option, and run
DiskPart from there, and do a Clean All on the only
hard drive which is plugged in at the time. Those are
two ways you can run DiskPart and its Clean All.

Ok, I currently have the drive in question hooked up via the USB-SATA
adapter to one of my Win 7 laptops and I am running Diskpart clean all.
I think this will take some time to complete since I can only get USB 2
speed via the adapter with the 1 TB drive. Anyway, once it completes,
can I just start up HDTune and check it this way, or do plug it back
into the desktop first via SATA cable to run HDTune? It appears as if
HDTune would have no trouble checking it via the adapter, but just
wanted to be sure. Thanks.

Post by Paul
I've had Seagate drives here, where re-writing the drive from
end to end, actually "perks up" the drive. Which makes
no sense at all. It all-round behaves better. It's one
of lifes little mysteries what that one is all about.
Paul

Hdtune will just show you the speed of the usb interface.
In my test, a nice horizontal line.....

[Ken Blake]

Post by JBI
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health
While I had the drive hooked up in Win 7 with the USB-SATA adapter, I
ran WMIC and it reported "OK" status. To be sure, since it didn't
specify which of the three drives in the system were ok (just three
ok's), I disconnected the USB drive and it simply reported two ok's.
From this I assume the drive is ok then?

I'm not in favor of top posting, but the standard argument against
bottom-posting is that nobody wants to have to scroll way down a
message to see what you've posted.

My standard reply to that argument is that the culprit is not
bottom-posting, it's the lack of appropriate trimming of the quoted
post. You should *always* trim of enough of what you quote so that all
that remains is enough to put your reply into perspective. You don't
do that, and as a result your replies are very hard to read. Like
those who argue against bottom-posting, *I* don't want to have to
scroll way down a message to see what you've posted.

[Mark Lloyd]

On 03/10/2018 02:09 PM, Ken Blake wrote:

[snip]

Post by Ken Blake
I'm not in favor of top posting, but the standard argument against
bottom-posting is that nobody wants to have to scroll way down a
message to see what you've posted.
My standard reply to that argument is that the culprit is not
bottom-posting, it's the lack of appropriate trimming of the quoted
post. You should *always* trim of enough of what you quote so that all
that remains is enough to put your reply into perspective. You don't
do that, and as a result your replies are very hard to read. Like
those who argue against bottom-posting, *I* don't want to have to
scroll way down a message to see what you've posted.

I agree.

I'd still rather see top-posting than bottom posting after 200 or more
lines of quoted material I just read in the original post.

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

Post by Mark Lloyd
[snip]

Post by Ken Blake
I'm not in favor of top posting, but the standard argument against
bottom-posting is that nobody wants to have to scroll way down a
message to see what you've posted.
My standard reply to that argument is that the culprit is not
bottom-posting, it's the lack of appropriate trimming of the quoted
post. You should *always* trim of enough of what you quote so that all
that remains is enough to put your reply into perspective. You don't
do that, and as a result your replies are very hard to read. Like
those who argue against bottom-posting, *I* don't want to have to
scroll way down a message to see what you've posted.

I agree.
I'd still rather see top-posting than bottom posting after 200 or more
lines of quoted material I just read in the original post.

I'd rather see snippage, and interposting (but below the sections being
responded to).

But if you must top-post without snippage, at least in a 'group like
this one where that is not the norm, at least say "nothing further" or
similar at the end of your addition, so we don't have to scroll down
through it to see if there _is_ any more new.