PC Peripherals HDD Woes... Need help badly !

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Anish

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Ok I'm sensing somethings wrong with my 120GB Seagate SATA drive :(

I've posted a Speedfan SS below, would like to know your views on it.



Also I wanna start creating backups. I've heard that Norton Ghost can create exact images of the hard-drive, and incase my drive crashes, will I be able to back up using the image, exactly to the same state ?

Whats the size of each image ?

Also, for backups I have two options :

1) Buy a BenQ 1640.
20 Buy a 80GB HDD.

I would prefer to buy the 1640, buy will the Norton Ghost images fit on the DVD-RW, say I backup every week ?

Please help me out here :S
 
Before you do anything try another software and confirm that these is actually a problem on the HDD... here is a freeware ...Diskcheckup... from http://www.passmark.com/ftp/diskcheckup.zip

If you have one HDD than you should look at DOS based backup solutions - the BEST IMHO is Acronis True Image. You can also use Ghost 8.x for DOS. In Windows you can use the same Acronis or Ghost 9.

Acronis installs in Windows and has an option to make a bootable CD ... once you make this CD you can backup and restore from DOS after booting from this CD. You can backup to CD DVD USB-HDD or another HDD. Acronis has a GUI interface and is very slick. Acronis recognises NTFS partitions.

The DOS version of Ghost on the other hand works from a 1.3mb file (fits on a floppy) the interface is quite basic and it does not "see" NTFS partitions but it does blind backups and restores of these partitions.

Both make backup images with about 50% compression - but you can vary the amount of compression in both softwares.

Keep one thing in mind if you make a backup and need to restore the image ....than if you are using the Ghost Windows based program you will get stuck till you have access to another HDD with Windows installed on it. With a DOS based backup program you can just BOOT off a floppy or CD and you can run a restore of the backup image.

I am not mentioning the built in Backup of Windows itself as I have no experience with it and I feel it may not allow a restore from DOS. Maybe someone else here can advise you better on this.

Acronis images are common to Windows and DOS versions of the program. But Ghost 9 for Windows and Ghost 8.xx do not use the same images.
 
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@anish: Hehe thats what speedfan shows for all seagate hard drives whether perfect or nearly dying. All my seagate drives show the exact same reliability and fitness and error rates. Its a problem of the drive misreporting the smart default values. I had posted about this long back in some thread. Search and dig it up if u wanna know more!
 
Chaos said:
Hehe thats what speedfan shows for all seagate hard drives whether perfect or nearly dying.
Click to expand...

Does only Speedfan do this or will all HDD checking programs show the same ?
 
yup, thanks to speedfan, i got really worried about my hdd more than a year back...the fitness bar went barely halfway....the same hdd is till today, fully alive & kicking, and speedfan still showss nearly the same values...
 
Chaos said:
Same with all progs that read smart data off the drive.
Click to expand...

The reason I asked is that in Jan 2005 I bought 2 Seagate SATA drives 200GB each - formatted them installed XP and immediately ran Diskcheckup and it showed over 1000 million (one thousand million) read errors on each drive - I nearly had a heart attack as I thought that it could not be that both drives were bad off the self it must be the controller on the MoBo !!

I immediately withing hours of buying them returned them and as there were no other drives available I bought the DEADLY Maxtors 250Gb and 160GB - why deadly because they have the worst rep of instant DEATH for no reason at all - 2 of my Maxtor 120GB SATA drives died on me a few months back - at night perfect - on morning boot instant paperweights !!
 
Whoa ! This is scaring me Eazy !!!

I can't comprehend the results from Disk-Checkup so I have attached the .txt file, please read it and let me know :(

Also, as for the backups, if my drive dies (god forbid) then I'll get a replacement (5 year warranty), do a clean Windows install and then backup.

That essentially means I need a Windows-based image software.

Suppose, I install windows on my new HDD and then try to backup from a saved Ghost image from a DVD, will it backup properly ?

Also whats the size of these images ? Will they fit on a single DVD ?

Thanks for the help Eazy and Chaos :D
 
anishcool said:
Whoa ! This is scaring me Eazy !!!

I can't comprehend the results from Disk-Checkup so I have attached the .txt file, please read it and let me know :(

Also, as for the backups, if my drive dies (god forbid) then I'll get a replacement (5 year warranty), do a clean Windows install and then backup.

That essentially means I need a Windows-based image software.

Suppose, I install windows on my new HDD and then try to backup from a saved Ghost image from a DVD, will it backup properly ?

Also whats the size of these images ? Will they fit on a single DVD ?

Thanks for the help Eazy and Chaos :D
Click to expand...

No need to be scared.... I learned later that these 1,000,000,000 errors adding up on every boot are normal for Seagates and they show up because Seagates reports these non-important errors which other drives hide - it seems all drives have these errors but others hide these so people will not panic like I did :D

Hey !! you cannot restore a backup image to the Windows which is running - a restore is going to wipe out all data on the drive so it has to be done from another drive or partition. You can backup to and restore from another partition on the same drive but the destination cannot be the same partition from where Windows is operating. A full restore formats the drive without exception - you can also do just a file or directory restore.

The size of the image depends on the file types and a normal HDD gets compressed about 50% . If you back up to a DVD how will you restore ? you cannot do it from within the Windows which has been backed up and which is the destinaltion partition - you need to do it from another HDD after booting into Windows or from a DOS based backup program.
 
Hmm, ok I understand what you mean Eazy...

Thanks for the help ! I have attached a Disk-Checkup report, please analyzse that for me ;)

Ok, then I think I should get a 80GB drive just for backups, and then save Ghost images to it...
 

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anishcool said:
Hmm, ok I understand what you mean Eazy...

Thanks for the help ! I have attached a Disk-Checkup report, please analyzse that for me ;)

Ok, then I think I should get a 80GB drive just for backups, and then save Ghost images to it...
Click to expand...

There you go - your Seagate reports 203,117,498 raw read errors for ID1 . My Maxtors dont show this ID1 in the report - this is supressed by the drive itself. I dont think these ID1 errors are important - only scary.

Your drive seems fine to me there are 0 errors shown for Reallocated Sector Count as well as Ultra ATA CRC Error Count and Write error count. Your drive looks fine to me. But please wait for another opinion on these readings as I am no expert on interpreting them.

Your drives temp is shown as 38C which is perfectly fine.
 
Hmm, cooling wont be much of a problem as the AC is on mostly and the weather is quite good now...

Ok, then I think that clarifies a lot of stuff, thanks for the help Eazy !

Also, if someone could elborate further on the report (Read:Chaos :D)) it'll be great ;) !
 
This is reading those things from smart as well. Hence you get those wierd values. Unless the drive is clicking or feels slow in copying, it is fine! Those smart values are useless... atleast for seagate drives.
 
Nopes the fact was that, its lagging a bit, just a bit and GTA:SA freezed ONCE and has lagged a bit sometimes...

Everything is fine now, but what could be the cause of the lagging ???
 
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