Refreshing data on the disk

[jaclaz]

9 minutes ago, AstroSkipper said:

perform then a low level format.

Please, no.

Low-level format does not exist since more than 20 (more like 30) years.

A manufacturer tool may (or may not) provide a way to check the ECC of sectors and re-map them, but that is NOT "low-level format".

You probably (hopefully) want to suggest a complete 00 wiping of the hard disk (which is not low-level formatting).

 

18 minutes ago, AstroSkipper said:

 and Spinrite 6.0.

Using Spinrite 6.0 on a 500GB disk is - more than anything else - an act of faith in the future seeking capabilities of Steve Gibson.

jaclaz

[AstroSkipper]

33 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

You probably (hopefully) want to suggest a complete 00 wiping of the hard disk (which is not low-level formatting).

That's what low level format means nowadays. So not no but yes.

33 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

Using Spinrite 6.0 on a 500GB disk is - more than anything else - an act of faith in the future seeking capabilities of Steve Gibson.

Before disposing of or smashing a hard disk, one should explore and try all options. I have said before, I am a non-believer. So no faith here in anything. Trial and error is an appropiate method, though.

Edited April 27, 2023 by AstroSkipper

[D.Draker]

16 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Well, JFYI, I have a few thin clients, good, ol' Fujitsu Siemens Futro S200/S300 (re-adapted as router/firewall) and - curiously enough - they have a TR5670 motherboard, manufactured by by TECO Electric and Machinery Co., Ltd:

https://www.teco.com.tw/fa/about.htm

which sports a (crappy BTW) Insyde BIOS:

https://www.insyde.com/company/fast-facts

with a Transmeta Crusoe 800 processor, Transmeta was an American fabless company, processors were actually manufactured, you guess, in Taiwan, by TSMC (part of the Acer group).

We are talking of hardware some 20 years old, so it is not a particularly recent trend to outsource the actual manufacturing to Taiwan (or China).

jaclaz

 

 

16 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

If "Made in Germany" or another imprint suggesting German production is found on electronic components, this does not mean that the part was produced entirely in Germany. The production costs in Germany are far too high. Therefore, most of it is produced abroad and perhaps finished here. Purely German, electronic components are certainly rather rare. You shouldn't fool yourself about that. The end consumer is just getting screwed anyway.

jaclaz, you're right ! Cheap/basic models of Fujitsu are/were indeed "Made in Taiwan" .

Middle class and up - Western Germany. A good example would be Celsius or Esprimo. 

Let's search for any picture of their motherboards from various years and zoom to see they're not asian.

D2317-A1 (2005-06 or so)  zoom the area near the barcode.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/CfMAAOSwYEJgfnRo/s-l1600.jpg

You can also search for some oldies : D2584 (mobo from FUJITSU SIEMENS Esprimo), 

D2587, D3011 (FUJITSU SIEMENS from 2010) or even the newer ones for Kaby Lake still says Europe

(the area near the CPU). model Nr. D3441-S2

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/oBoAAOSwxK5izaeR/s-l1600.jpg

Now what did they mean by "Europe" ? Italy ? France ? Holland ? 

One could only guess. I see the French Thomson components on these boards, 

Philips and other major European manufacturers.

And yes, I did look at their internals, opened up lots of their notebooks and monitors.

For example, 22 inches and up have Philips or Fujitsu guts, again, not cheap. Cheaper ones usually have LG(Philips) inside of them,

LG doesn't have any designs/LCDs of their own, it's all made by Philips and is owned by Philips since 1999-2000.

LG-Philips LCD is the world's second (now 1st?)  largest maker of ... liquid-crystal displays used for flat screens ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/28/business/lg-of-korea-and-philips-set-screen-making-venture.html

Now you all can do whatever you want with your choice of goods, while I continue to support Germany financially.

 

Edited April 27, 2023 by D.Draker
link to Philips (LG)

[AstroSkipper]

5 minutes ago, D.Draker said:

Now you all can do whatever you want with your choice of goods, while I continue to support Germany financially.

That is, of course, a nice touch from you. 

Edited April 27, 2023 by AstroSkipper
correction

[D.Draker]

13 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Yes, at the very least, you should go through these three steps (though here they are listed about metal detectors, should be applicable to other devices as well):

https://kts-electronic.com/en/made-in-germany.html

Still the issue about the possibility of having to deal with  ex-DDR communists and not integrally German ancestry of employees would remain unsolved.

jaclaz

 

I understand the worries, how about Kontron S&T AG then ? A very German company, they don't look like communists to me.  I once had their motherboard.

"The corporate group is headquartered in Augsburg and consists of the Kontron Europe GmbH and Austria-based S&T Group." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontron

Kontron motherboards look very cool. And they have my favourite PS/2, this one is with SLI support.

https://www.kontron.com/en/products/d3642-b-uatx/p157721

Benefits of Kontron motherboards )from their page):

Highest quality through German engineering and production

Strict lifecycle management and reliable product maintenance

Comprehensive feature and tool set

Excellent technical support

Beneficial total-cost-of-ownership

Not a word about Taiwan !

11 hours ago, UCyborg said:

Looks like the disk is getting wonky.

I didn't run any special program to go through empty space, just went and duplicated some files to fill most of it I think, assuming it will catch those sectors and remap them. Guess not. More bad sectors. Bleh, I don't know, I'll try to make an image of it in the near future, then see what happens after zero-fill or just writing the image back to it. I have a feeling it has run its course.

Looks like there's a free HDD repair tool from an author from your country !

Description of program : "HDAT2 is program for ...  ATA/ATAPI/SATA, NVMe, SSD and SCSI/USB devices.

This program cannot be run in DOS mode under Windows, only under real DOS system."

Be warned, I never tried it . I never repair hard disks with errors, only put them to the garbage.

https://www.hdat2.com/

 

[jaclaz]

Whose country?

The Author of Hdat2, a re-known and appreciated program was - last time I checked - Czech.

The program has been around since forever (since 2004 or earlier), the possible issue with it is only that is DOS based so that - likely - in a short timeframe it won't be possible to run it on "common" modern motherboards (with UEFI only, without CSM/BIOS).

About Kontron, they should be industrial grade boards (please read as very tough, usually slower than current retail boards, and - again usually - costly).

Still, while they may well be engineered and assembled in Germany, they may be produced in various EU countries, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia:

https://www.kontron-electronics.com/production/#c18

BUT, for large quantities:

https://www.kontron-electronics.com/production/

they have cooperation with Asian manufacturers "Very large unit quantities are produced by our collaboration partner Ennoconn, a subsidiary of Foxconn".

And of course their board assembly lines need anyway to source the components in China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc.

 

Thomson says little nowadays, there are a few companies connected to the "historical" Thomson (which was fractioned/dissolved/bought/merged some 20 years ago), right now AFAIK the brand for consumer electronics is property of Established Inc., together with many (once traditional european ones such as Nordmende  and Saba):

https://established.inc/

https://established.inc/brands/

incorporated in Delaware, offers branding to *anyone* (please read as "to Chinese manufacturers").

The effects of globalization (like it or not) are so deep that today *anything* related to electronics is anyway originating in some Asian country, you simply cannot avoid that.

The US are (again, rightly or wrongly) considering to re-gain manufacturing capabilities, but (if it will ever happen it will take years) while in EU there are only some projects of trifling relevance.

As a side note, last time I was in Sweden (circa 2016) the representative of a local company operating in the steel sector (that I won't name for two reasons, first one being that I don't remember their name) for a large national building project told me how most of their steel products[1] were manufactured in China anyway (under their supervision and with excellent quality control, still ...).

jaclaz

 

[1] Sweden was once re-known in Europe for the quality of some "special" steel products

 

Edited April 28, 2023 by jaclaz

[AstroSkipper]

5 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Whose country?

I think @D.Draker actually meant @UCyborg but he mixed it up a bit as @UCyborg is from Slovenia. 

5 hours ago, jaclaz said:

The Author of Hdat2, a re-known and appreciated program was - last time I checked - Czech.

The program has been around since forever (since 2004 or earlier), the possible issue with it is only that is DOS based so that - likely - in a short timeframe it won't be possible to run it on "common" modern motherboards (with UEFI only, without CSM/BIOS).

Yep, that's why I am on the sunny side of the street. The motherboard of my old computer is from 2000. Therefore, no problems here to use all old DOS tools.  It must be an advantage to be a dinosaur for once.  

By the way, HDAT2 has always been part of my emergency collection of CDs/DVDs.

Edited April 28, 2023 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[jaclaz]

I did understand that he was referring to UCyborg, mainly because D.Draker quoted him, but from Czechia to Slovenia there is some distance, maybe he was confused with Slovakia?

jaclaz

[AstroSkipper]

4 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

I did understand that he was referring to UCyborg, mainly because D.Draker quoted him, but from Czechia to Slovenia there is some distance, maybe he was confused with Slovakia?

jaclaz

Yep! At least, I think so. 

[UCyborg]

Robocopying stuff off the drive. Wanted to make an image with ddrescue at first from Linux, but this program does not come with sane defaults and works extremely slow, even on good parts, which should most of the disk for now, and I'm not sure what parameters to use exactly, so going the old fashioned file level copy. dd also sucks out of the box, but there's a published script somewhere on the internet to determine the fastest block size setting, so I find it to be OK to make a raw partition image of a disk that still works.

Admittedly, there is a lot of junk on the disk I only keep for sentimental reasons. I do cleanup occasionally, but it's never enough. Among the junk are also outdated drivers, even for the graphics card that has been sitting in the basement for last 9 years. And NLited Windows XP SP3 ISO I probably used last with the previous computer...seriously, I haven't used that OS on bare hardware since 2009 and I'll NEVER do it in the future either.

On 4/27/2023 at 6:35 PM, jaclaz said:

Using Spinrite 6.0 on a 500GB disk is - more than anything else - an act of faith in the future seeking capabilities of Steve Gibson.

I don't have high hopes, the day I posted the screenshot, even though the disk was just idling, several hours later it reported two more bad sectors. It's probably going the way of the previous one that started developing bad sectors during the warranty period. Might try zero-filling it after I got the data off and see how it behaves afterwards, will check what options WD's program (Data Lifeguard Diagnostics) has that I still have installed on that XP x64 partition. I once saw a modern replacement on a coworker's computer and oh my, what have they done with the UI? Although DLG on XP for some reason can't read S.M.A.R.T., but HD Tune can...wut?

[jaclaz]

Not really *needed* in your case, but you don't really-really want to use linux dd or ddrescue (or dd_rescue).

If you don't like/are not confident with command line tools you can use DMDE (from windows) to make an image:

https://dmde.com/

using dmde as a recovery tool or disk editor is a bit complex but the imaging part is straightforward.

jaclaz

[UCyborg]

Thanks for the DMDE suggestion, will try it out at the next opportunity. Robocopy seems to be in the 4th quarter of one of the biggest folders, with any luck, bad sectors are only the ones without files on them. Since the issue has existed for a while, it shouldn't crap out entirely right way.

How does DMDE handle bad sectors, though? I figured I should at least have touchable copy of the files, though full partition image would be nicer and can still make it later.

I do have dd figured out to the extent that I'm able to use it confidently to make images of my partitions, so far, I used it to makes copies of bootable partitions containing an operating system and also for backing up the first sector on the disk.

[jaclaz]

1 hour ago, UCyborg said:

How does DMDE handle bad sectors, though? I figured I should at least have touchable copy of the files, though full partition image would be nicer and can still make it later.

Look for I/O Errors here:

https://dmde.com/manual/devioparams.html

One of the good things is that you can choose a pattern to fill skipped sectors.

jaclaz

[UCyborg]

Encountered 3 files that couldn't be read the first time. Definitely last time to get everything off, this disk is really going the way of the old one where bad sectors just kept spreading. Heh, refresh definitely didn't keep those files fresh. If a person is a big collector of digital stuff, it definitely complicates matters when you gotta back these things up as it takes forever. And doing it the slower way this time around...

Though I don't get much new stuff these day, I'm trying to go by with less, so unless my messed up mind clicks in some strange way, I'll probably keep max capacity of my internal storage at 2 TB. Also have history/cache keeping turned off in my web browser...I'd probably feel bad about losing it if I did...

But some people can't imagine going by with "just" 2 TB. Though it's also true if the same people play modern games...those are of insane these size days so it's understandable the space goes quickly.

[UCyborg]

Made an image with DMDE, always great to have to preserve all the details of the source file system. 5 sectors couldn't be read, I left the default pattern to be written for bad sectors, just changed the setting to try to read them up to 3 times.

Even if you scan the entire file and get the offsets of those patterns in the image file, how do you know to which file they belong, if any, in case of NTFS file system?

In my case, I can still compare the directory tree in the image to the directory tree made with robocopy, just not sure what to use. I used WinMerge in the past, but for much smaller files. Back then, the only detail about binary files I was interested in was whether they differ or not. I don't remember if there was a hex view to compare.

I'd just like to know if any copy is better than the other, then make sure all good files end up in the file system image.