> defrags a dying disk If you have this HDD error, *dont ever do that.* Save your files first. You might move important files (both important for you or for the OS) into a bad sector and destroy your files and even cause the OS to be unbootable. Here's what to do: 1- backup your files first 2- if you really, really want to still use that windows install, install minitool partition wizard version 10.0 (must be 10.0, some settings are unavaliable for free users past that version) 3- do a surface test for the disk. 4- move/resize everything important off from the damaged area. 5- buy an ssd and move your OS install off from your dying HDD to you brand new SSD. You can do all that via minitool partition wizard 10, free version.
More than that - Those Toshiba 2.5" HDDs have a really nasty way to die. It starts from rather innocent error reading one file. You'll be like okay, one or a few bad blocks, maybe i did hit the drive while it was running. And it will be like that for a few hours. And then suddenly your system crashes and no longer boots, you boot from USB drive and run any software that can do a surface scan and end with a checkerboard pattern of bad blocks. It happens because the heads suddenly failed. And you end with recovering maybe 20Gb out of 1-2Tb. So turn your PC off, boot from external drive, make a backup before doing anything else if there's something important on that laptop. And TBH any disks with bad blocks can be used only as "floppies" to copy something like music or pictures to another PC or again for music or video in a media player. Not in computer you can use for doing important job.
I’ve been there. Both with HDDs and SSDs! The wait times and programs not responding on the hard drives were SO BAD and annoying, and with the SSDs stuff wouldn’t load at all. My failing SSD would try to update windows, then fail, and boot up saying “update failed to install”, then after a while it would blue screen, and then right after I backed up everything I could from it, it died! 😅
I was running a Debian install on a hard drive I didn't know was dying. The whole thing was e weirdly insidious. Writes would appear to be successful, but on a second check the files would fail reading halfway through. Oh, and the bad sectors kinda just... Spread at random. No rhyme or reason! Eventually it corrupted firefox, at which point I already knew the drive was EOL. Ended up installing a sacrificial install of Windows XP TI's stupid calculator emulator.
@@StanleytheCat-v8z Executable corruption has gotta be the worst. It's russain rolluete. On one hand the OS could refuse to even open it. On the other it's very unnoticable or no different that ususal.
@@ltecheroffical Yeah, it's impressive the OS kept working despite everything happening. The weird thing was that firefox just.... Wouldn't fully open. It would just hang for a while and then crash. Don't buy hard drives off eBay folks! Worst purchase I've ever made.
@@StanleytheCat-v8z Because I believe the way the kernel handles it, the writes can be temporarily cached in memory. Try to "sync" command it and it will never complete because it's not able to write to the SSD, SSD's when they "soft brick" the controller in it's own accepts that "I am dead" and goes onto a read-only state. So stuff would weirdly seem to work with some applications bugging out, but it's like a non-persistent system at that nothing can be saved
Reminds me of a story my dad told me, they had a company Thinkpad with a dying hard drive, and the repair person that showed up (I don’t know if they were from Lenovo or still IBM) said, “well technically the drive still works, so I’m not sure if would be covered under warranty and repair”, then proceeded to smack the hard drive on it he table a few times and said “okay, now it should be covered”
most modern drives have accelerometers in them that immediately park the heads as soon as it detects any movement. they also park when unplugged automatically. I've also have had at least 4 toshiba drives fail on me. they seem to be particularly garbage.
I have 3 toshiba drives that failed. Although all 3 have been screwed with force in some way though. Stepper drives back then does not autopark during power loss so it could cause bad sectors.
One time I had a dead laptop drive from the 90's. It appeared to be failing to spin up so I carefully took it apart and gave it some help. It managed to spin up and would spin up every time after that. Worked for 2 years then suffered a head crash which wrecked it. Lasted for quite a bit though.
having a slowly dying hdd was my life for like 2.5 years..... wish more people would know the struggle. the laptop had decent specs but man doing anything was horrible.
Same, I had a old laptop i7-7500U with HDD. I banged it so many times the first year it died one day before its warrenty. then a HGST came, it was so slow but it thought me so much patience. I had to keep it in the COVID era so yeah, it took ages to start up, Teams, and everything else. Memories :')
over the years especially in the early 2010s I used the freezing trick to get a hard drive back to life enough for one last read to recover data it was quite a good way to get one last ready out of a drive but obviously not one that had been opened.
0:39 进网许可 basically means Network Access License, you could see this on old mobile phones, LTE laptops, routers and so on. It’s like the FCC or CE approval in nature. Nowadays the Network Access License stickers don’t usually stick onto the phones, they could be on the protective films that when you peel the films off the stickers come off with them, or on the boxes. iPhones don’t put those stickers on anywhere to my knowledge.
I've got a an old PC. Every time you power it up, after less that a minute it sounds like what I can best describe as a golf ball being dropped into a metal rubbish bin.
Yep I've glad I switched over to SSD and realize they are a lot better. When it comes to regular hard drives I've sometimes use the 7200 RPM ones but mainly as extra storage or onetime I fixed up a HP Elitebook Workstation W8570 and it had 2 hard drive slots for msata and 2.5, sticked in a 7200 RPM and did run suggish with i7 and 16 GB memory. After that I ordered an SSD and M Sata drive it worked a lot better. Except I've still avoid those ADATA branded SSD, installed a 120 GB one to dell optiplex and was getting blue screen errors. You computer tech videos are still my favorie.
I had a few of those messages back in the day... absolutely scared the crap out of me, because I was never sure if I could back up the data in time before it went kaput!! 🤣 I think I might have a nightmare or 2 tonight... thanks Mate! 😂
I wish you actually checked the SMART of the drive to see why it reported imminent failure before killing it off entirely. The most likely reason is that it had many pending or reallocated sectors possibly caused by another physical impact while it was running in the past.
Corrosion under the contacts between the circuit board and hard drive is often to blame for errors. I have already been able to save 3 hard drives by carefully removing rust from the contacts.
That sticker at 0:37 was on pretty much every business Toshiba laptop from that time period. I'm pretty sure it's a Chinese regulation approval sticker although I could be wrong
Yes. It's a compliance certificate issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. I've seen them on units sold in the domestic Chinese market, pretty sure it's the same thing as SSID stickers we see on WiFi cards here.
My first laptop experienced HDD failure after 2 years. It was also a Toshiba HDD. All my friends who have experienced hard disk failure, it's always been on a Toshiba drive. Moral of the story, Toshiba makes unreliable storage!
the blue sticker with Chinese character says ‘‘进网许可’’ which means "approval of accessing the network". this is like a fcc radio compatibility approval. due to some wifi may compromise national security considerations, The Chinese government requires all wifi and cellular data capable devices to pass this test before on the market. and after 2009 or 2010, they canceled the requirements for wifi devices. so when I hunt for a used laptop, finding this sticker is always a good indicator for high spec machines.
Ah yes, my primary school has those Toshiba Tecra laptops (with Windows XP installed) that only teachers there use. As for the laptops that students use? Acer Aspire laptops with Windows XP installed and later Toshiba Satellites with Windows 7 installed.
My current HP laptop and its Toshiba hard drive are a little over 7 years old. I’m concerned one day I’ll get boot errors or the messages found in the beginning of the video.
Good Stuff! I had an 8TB WD external drive that was half full conk out on me. Naturally, I went bananas. Weeks later, after pricing data recovery centers I was quoted an $1100 price to recover everything. Naturally, I went even MORE bananas. One day, out of despair, I plugged in the drive and turned it UPSIDE DOWN................AND IT WORKED! I touched NOTHING, and spent 4 nervous hours copying everything off of the drive. Then, about Two months ago, I was in goodwill and came across a Sabrent SATA HDD flat docking station with everything in the box for $6. Fate?............Who cares! I would have spent $150 for it. Anyway, I now use TWO WD 12TB drives that are BOTH half-Full. I'm Praying, but i'm READY.
@ironfist7789 Thanks. I thought about that to and came to the same conclusion. I'm going to get two more drives and do a deep dive on raid set ups. Hopefully I'll find a suitable solution.
@@pacershark452 maybe check out the zfs file system and mirrors with that also, with openzfs or truenas if you DIY a box. Synology and companies like that have the equivalent of raid 1 mirrors with their 2 bay NAS (~ 300 dollar not including drives). I personally use a zfs raid on one machine (old pc) with 2 vdev mirrors (2x2 drives) and mdadm RAID 1 on another box on Ubuntu, but it is mostly command line and a manual process the way I do it and not necessarily recommended for most people.
I'm old and retired. Software engineer (Prefer the tag Programmer). First 20+ years was with NCR Mainframes. They had 658 drives. I believe 80 MB. Removable and the size of a large birthday cake. The heads would come out of the player like a vinyl record player. When those heads touched the drive platters you could hear the destruction a mile away. The player *can't think of a better name* would be out of commission for awhile. With the mainframes (we had 3), included in the purchase price was 2 NCR employees with their own work room. It could take them all day getting the unit back in service.
You don't have to smash it with a hammer, It's even safer to write it full of zeros, or whatever you want. It's simple, just look it up here on youtube. NEVER do this to a ssd though! There are other programs for solid state drives.
I've heard over the years that defragging a drive on its last legs can also push the hard drive to its demise. Defragging, if there's a lot of gaps really gives a mechanical drive a workout. I've got a maybe 2012? Toshiba that I changed out the drive for a SSD. It sped it up. Biggest issue is the on/off button. It's a lottery. Looked for RUclips vids on that. Saw a couple of vids that pulled the button off and to use wadded up aluminum foil to short the contacts. I really need to dump it or play with it, with a Linux Distro. I turn it on 4-5 times a year at best.
Today I would replace HDD with SSD even if HDD is in good condition in laptop before even turning it on. I'm not a fan of having HDD in laptop, they are too fragile for that there.
If there are slots for 2 Hdd or an m.2 + HDD, I’ll instead just put an ssd as boot drive and a hard drive for mass storage for stuff like games or media. Obviously backup the important stuff but this does allow having more storage for cheap while not being awfully slow. SSDs are great if you can afford them.
SSD if they fail give you less warning before failure from what I understand, but I back mine up to a ZFS enterprise hdd mirrored array in the NAS anyhow.
You could buy a HDD enclosure to continue using your laptop HDD as external drive. I've done this with the original 500GB HDD from my old 2011 Acer Aspire laptop
For personal computers that I use frequently, I would use an SSD except if one cannot be installed (e.g. old IDE drive for Windows XP in a laptop, adapter won't fit) or unless multiple drives can be installed (primary SSD and secondary HDD for data). For laptops I sell on, it depends on the spec and type of the laptop. Cruddy old laptops that are just about hanging on get a hard drive regardless, because a hard drive will still boot an OS (albeit slowly) and is better than nothing.
День назад+1
so on a unrelated note, what watch are you wearing? it looks really nice
I have a 4 year old HDD on my laptop that sounds like a Geiger counter shown in this video, i have diagnosed and scanned the drive multiple times, all the softwares reports it as healthy and can't find any issues with it. Idk if i should actually be worrying about that hard drive
Yeah, when dealing with a damaged hard disk, you want to avoid writing to it as much as possible. I've had drives (yes SSDs too) lose 10-30% health just by doing a bit of writing to the disk. Hard disk sentinel is a nice tool to show you drive info. If Windows was able to complain about the hard disk health, I'd imagine it being in the low double digits.
What a great video! Isn’t it amazing these drives ever worked at all what with how intricate they are and how susceptible they are to vibration yet they can sit spinning undisturbed for years in a dusty old Dell often without issues! I am glad we now have SSDs though! 😅
Sometimes an HDD gives bad SMART data, doing a full Slow Format, writing 0s on the platters fix the error. I have a 16GB IDE HDD from 2001 with more then 20k hours on it, over 7000 spin ups, still works perfectly.
Windows kinda reads SMART data from the hdd. Hdtune 2.55 free will show blocks in red during error scan and/or items in red in the Health tab. You probably murdered that drive with no reason. If the reallocated sector count has red line, you could probably low level format the drive and it would be back to normal... or at least Windows wouldn't bug again because Windows is now gone.
I once had a failing SSD. Yes! SSD. Those can fail too (sadly). It did not warned me about an ssd failure. When i got my laptop, it booted into the unlock screen, but could not get throught. (It would not show the "enter pin code") And after, it went into recovery mode, and could not get out. I thought "someone must have deleted system32 before tossing the laptop out", so i reinstalled Windows 10 on it, and worked for a while. After it made some questionable things, like desktop items moving away, volume button not dissapearing, camera not turning on and many more. Aftet that, i got the "we could not log into windows" error. Had to watch a lot of tutorial to fix it. That error made all of my data go dissapear, but it did not delete the data from the "recycle bin"💀 i was a bit nuts, so i bought an used HDD, and i was using it until i had enough money to buy an SSD.
I still have a Western Digital Black from 2013 in my main system with around 50k power on hours and it's not failing yet, I'm very pleasantly surprised that it's still going and I will use it till it dies. Still like to have atleast one HDD in my systems for storage of games that don't require an SSD and mass storage of files
Remember once we made football with a 1,3 GB HDD in the highschool lobby. Surprise surprise the drive not damaged at all, and still working now in one of my retro laptop. If the drive is off, it can handle high G forces, but if it is powered on, then even 1G can kill it.
I also had a "failing" hard drive in my pc, windows said it so me, not that i used this drive for important data, i used is as a dump drive for downloads anyway, it was a samsung model, a 500gb one, but, when i did a crystaldiskinfo interrogation, the drive appeared to be healthy, i did some endurance tests on it and this drive still works to this day, macos has no problems with it, i don't use it for important files. So i am stunned that this still works, even though windows said that this drive was about to fail!
I had so many uncountable harddisk failures in the 2010s. I switched from WD Failing within half a year to Toshiba drives, which kept 3 years. Now I have SSDs. No more problems.
That CM sticker you hadn't seen is a compliance certificate issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. I've seen them on units sold in the domestic Chinese market, pretty sure it's the same thing as SSID stickers we see on WiFi cards here.
that era of laptops was great... im still using my dell XPS M1710 (its still holding strong). something i found out recently is that the M1710 basicly had RGB before RGB was cool
The physical shocks while operating would have killed any drive, and in a totally different way from the windows warning. That warning happens when the data surface is degrading and becoming unreadable, which is unrelated to physical shocks. Defragging, uninstalling programs, etc were a good way to try and make it worse, but it might take writing a lot more data to get full-on failure. Drives have self-repair mechanisms which are actually what trigger the warning-if self-repair is happening it's time to get out.
I have actually had success reviving a hard drive by opening it myself, and it worked long enough to get the data off of it. Also I use an optane SSD for ZFS slog and it works fine. The insane write endurance makes it a good fit
Ah, spinning rust. Back in the day, Nathan, hard drives actually came with a list of bad sectors (points on the drive that shouldn't be written to, usually because the coating was unreliable at that spot). Most of the time it would be printed on the drive label itself.
3:20 for as much crap as I give Toshiba drives, that one survived much more than a 2TB Seagate Rosewood 2.5” hard drive from 2021 I accidentally dropped onto my desk by like five inches (unplugged of course) and got one of the heads stuck. Guess that’s a modern Seagate L, but also goes to show that hard drives from 16 years ago were typically built better as they were thicker (WD Blacks in particular used thicker platters than average) and still the industry standard in 99% of computers being sold.
little tip.... if this occurs on a desktop(I guess similar can apply with laptops but less common), consider replacing your power supply too(can also be sata cables but I've seen it less)...... the error typically is based on the SMART data, and the smart data is a guestimate that can be thrown off by any electronic issues(bad caps, bad psu, bad cables) with the computer.... if you suspect the drive isn't the direct issue it's possible to run MHDD erase wait and scan, this would give a better reference point to the health of the drive and even sometime clear it out..... noting typically I would still not fully trust drive the drive, but when on a tight budget
actually if the board on the hdd is the failure. thats SIGNIFICANTLY worse. that board is directly tied to the hdd. due to timing, quality control etc. even if you get an identical model replacement part it still might not work and would need parts from the original board to be soldered on. the timings on each drive are all different and those boards hold that data.
And also, I believe that there is a small EEPROM on the board that is paired with the HDD platters, maybe some CRC, security code or something. I never managed to succesfully swap a board from a HDD to another, even if both HDDs worked ok and were the same manufacturer, model and type.
You forgot to mention that if you still wish to use the dying hard drive for whatever reason, you should do a low level format. The low level format will mark bad sectors out and not use them and you will have a better understanding of how usable it actually is, because if it can't do a low level format, it's too far gone to be usable.
That new SSD which is M.2 doesn't have any mechanical moving parts that a hard disk has which is why it is less likely to fail. They read/write in memory. That Smart feature can warn you that your hard drive will be failing soon. It can be turned on/off in the BIOS
I was using my iMac g3 it had its original hard drive and one day stuff started to dissapear and then it would not start up again but I am yet to buy a new one
You should have ran crystal disk info to see what smart value is failing. I'd say it most likely has bad sectors and when you defragged it probably moved some stuff off of the bad sectors to good ones thus speeding it up quite a bit.
Yeah, that failing hard drive was on its last legs, and was going to conk out, even if you didn't put it through its paces. Hopefully that Toshiba laptop got the Crucial MX500 that you say about, to increase its performance! (Also, I think Windows 7 was a good choice, given it shipped with Vista - it probably wouldn't play nicely with 10 or 11.)
I keep three external drives for data backups (currently that's two HDDs and one SSD). I have had backup HDDs that failed on me after several years even though they were only used in terms of hours. The 1TB NVME SSD that I put in my laptop to replace the original 256GB NVME failed after a few years, thankfully it gave me enough warnings before total failure to allow me to clone it to another SSD. I now keep a clone SSD on standby just in case. Fact is, no one knows how long these things last. And yes, I only buy drives from name brand manufacturers.
I used those Optane drives as a Windows installation flash drive. So much faster than a normal USB flash disk. I have 3 units of 16GB for W10, W11 and MacOS. Enclosure is a cheap brand less M.2 SATA to USB 3.0 type bought from AliExpress.
Hi Psivevri! I'm a junior high school student from Taiwan. I'm watching your video about 3 years. And 0:37 is a China network access permit sticker. Our 2010's electronic products all have those stickers.Because it was imported from China. Wish this message will help you. Have a good day! :D
i was JUST about to say the exact same thing... i am a Spanish man that studies in China, and a lot of their older electronics have that stamp. my Galaxy Note3 (model no. SM-N9008V running LineageOS 18.1) has a very similar stamp from a carrier called CMCC (China Mobile CC)
@@EnderKittynet as far as i can see, no. i think they stopped having them in around 2016?... i cant find one anywhere on my ThinkPad and its from 2018 (T480 btw)
I had issues back in 2019 when my dad has 2 ASUS laptops with Failing HDDs, thankfully it can be replaced with SSD for better performance and never fail again. (Although trimming is possible every week)
All I can say is use spin rite and if you can't get it up and running in 24-48 hrs time to replace I've seen less than 5 drives die from 94 to present day and have a box of working drives for when I'm in a pinch or need a quick drive for backup or transfer of user folders or to help out a person with a budget under 15$
Toshiba 2.5inch harddrives are horrible in developing bad sectors. Next time start up hard disk sentinel, it tells you whats wrong with the drive. The clicking noise is the sound of a drive failing to read the service area witch is the part that contains all the drive info.
I use old hard drives for archiving tons of stuff I've downloaded, and while I like the speed of the new SSD drives, I stick to physical disks for long-term storage. I've heard that SSDs have a limited self life, and may not be reliable after say, 10 or 15 years. Has anyone else heard this?
the samsung one I had on an old laptop just stops writing, which makes windows does the blue screen "of death" thing, it's a good thing for me, cuz the previous owner thought it was a junk, even though I took it for a bit expensive of what he thought it costs, but cheap enough to its value in my eyes.
My old Lenovo Yoga 12 went from everythings fine to were's the hard drive at, in the space of an hour. Thankfully it was just used for browsing mainly RUclips so no critiacl data was lost. I always keep some spare SSD's around so it was up and running again the same day.
> defrags a dying disk
If you have this HDD error, *dont ever do that.* Save your files first. You might move important files (both important for you or for the OS) into a bad sector and destroy your files and even cause the OS to be unbootable.
Here's what to do:
1- backup your files first
2- if you really, really want to still use that windows install, install minitool partition wizard version 10.0 (must be 10.0, some settings are unavaliable for free users past that version)
3- do a surface test for the disk.
4- move/resize everything important off from the damaged area.
5- buy an ssd and move your OS install off from your dying HDD to you brand new SSD.
You can do all that via minitool partition wizard 10, free version.
lol yea but this is a test to see what can kill it tbf
More than that - Those Toshiba 2.5" HDDs have a really nasty way to die. It starts from rather innocent error reading one file. You'll be like okay, one or a few bad blocks, maybe i did hit the drive while it was running. And it will be like that for a few hours. And then suddenly your system crashes and no longer boots, you boot from USB drive and run any software that can do a surface scan and end with a checkerboard pattern of bad blocks. It happens because the heads suddenly failed. And you end with recovering maybe 20Gb out of 1-2Tb. So turn your PC off, boot from external drive, make a backup before doing anything else if there's something important on that laptop. And TBH any disks with bad blocks can be used only as "floppies" to copy something like music or pictures to another PC or again for music or video in a media player. Not in computer you can use for doing important job.
step 1- have a backup before this happens
Ah, those type of bait and cripple software, just like capcut
ddrescue
I’ve been there. Both with HDDs and SSDs! The wait times and programs not responding on the hard drives were SO BAD and annoying, and with the SSDs stuff wouldn’t load at all. My failing SSD would try to update windows, then fail, and boot up saying “update failed to install”, then after a while it would blue screen, and then right after I backed up everything I could from it, it died! 😅
You were very lucky to be able to back it up
I was running a Debian install on a hard drive I didn't know was dying.
The whole thing was e
weirdly insidious. Writes would appear to be successful, but on a second check the files would fail reading halfway through.
Oh, and the bad sectors kinda just... Spread at random. No rhyme or reason!
Eventually it corrupted firefox, at which point I already knew the drive was EOL.
Ended up installing a sacrificial install of Windows XP TI's stupid calculator emulator.
@@StanleytheCat-v8z Executable corruption has gotta be the worst. It's russain rolluete. On one hand the OS could refuse to even open it. On the other it's very unnoticable or no different that ususal.
@@ltecheroffical Yeah, it's impressive the OS kept working despite everything happening.
The weird thing was that firefox just.... Wouldn't fully open. It would just hang for a while and then crash.
Don't buy hard drives off eBay folks! Worst purchase I've ever made.
@@StanleytheCat-v8z Because I believe the way the kernel handles it, the writes can be temporarily cached in memory. Try to "sync" command it and it will never complete because it's not able to write to the SSD, SSD's when they "soft brick" the controller in it's own accepts that "I am dead" and goes onto a read-only state.
So stuff would weirdly seem to work with some applications bugging out, but it's like a non-persistent system at that nothing can be saved
Reminds me of a story my dad told me, they had a company Thinkpad with a dying hard drive, and the repair person that showed up (I don’t know if they were from Lenovo or still IBM) said, “well technically the drive still works, so I’m not sure if would be covered under warranty and repair”, then proceeded to smack the hard drive on it he table a few times and said “okay, now it should be covered”
LMAO
That's the kind of person you want. Someone that looks out for the customer's interests.
@@watercannonscollaboration2281 HAHAHAHHA What a King
never faced that windows error, Seagate always ensured the disk outright dying was always a surprise :)
we had a newer, but a similar toshiba, nostalgic. miss those chunky everything
most modern drives have accelerometers in them that immediately park the heads as soon as it detects any movement. they also park when unplugged automatically.
I've also have had at least 4 toshiba drives fail on me. they seem to be particularly garbage.
I have 3 toshiba drives that failed. Although all 3 have been screwed with force in some way though.
Stepper drives back then does not autopark during power loss so it could cause bad sectors.
One time I had a dead laptop drive from the 90's. It appeared to be failing to spin up so I carefully took it apart and gave it some help. It managed to spin up and would spin up every time after that. Worked for 2 years then suffered a head crash which wrecked it. Lasted for quite a bit though.
I once opened a failing HDD that was still working.
Plugged it back in with the cover off, still worked.
That drive probably doesnt need the pressure on the headstack pivot to work. Most hitachi travelstars are the same
I've been lucky as well doing such a thing in the past. The 30 year old laptop's hard disk started working once opened :)
having a slowly dying hdd was my life for like 2.5 years..... wish more people would know the struggle. the laptop had decent specs but man doing anything was horrible.
Same, I had a old laptop i7-7500U with HDD. I banged it so many times the first year it died one day before its warrenty. then a HGST came, it was so slow but it thought me so much patience. I had to keep it in the COVID era so yeah, it took ages to start up, Teams, and everything else. Memories :')
over the years especially in the early 2010s I used the freezing trick to get a hard drive back to life enough for one last read to recover data it was quite a good way to get one last ready out of a drive but obviously not one that had been opened.
The rads counter had me dying
(but not quite as much as the drive)
0:39 进网许可 basically means Network Access License, you could see this on old mobile phones, LTE laptops, routers and so on. It’s like the FCC or CE approval in nature. Nowadays the Network Access License stickers don’t usually stick onto the phones, they could be on the protective films that when you peel the films off the stickers come off with them, or on the boxes. iPhones don’t put those stickers on anywhere to my knowledge.
I've got a an old PC. Every time you power it up, after less that a minute it sounds like what I can best describe as a golf ball being dropped into a metal rubbish bin.
Yep I've glad I switched over to SSD and realize they are a lot better. When it comes to regular hard drives I've sometimes use the 7200 RPM ones but mainly as extra storage or onetime I fixed up a HP Elitebook Workstation W8570 and it had 2 hard drive slots for msata and 2.5, sticked in a 7200 RPM and did run suggish with i7 and 16 GB memory. After that I ordered an SSD and M Sata drive it worked a lot better. Except I've still avoid those ADATA branded SSD, installed a 120 GB one to dell optiplex and was getting blue screen errors. You computer tech videos are still my favorie.
Ah yes, the Toshiba Handi-Book as seen in South Park.
I had a few of those messages back in the day... absolutely scared the crap out of me, because I was never sure if I could back up the data in time before it went kaput!! 🤣 I think I might have a nightmare or 2 tonight... thanks Mate! 😂
Keep your Spinrite and a backup handy !
I wish you actually checked the SMART of the drive to see why it reported imminent failure before killing it off entirely. The most likely reason is that it had many pending or reallocated sectors possibly caused by another physical impact while it was running in the past.
You really think a normal youtuber would do that? Well nah, most tech youtuber nowadays just are SSD warriors
I have a similar machine to this! It‘s a great little thing. Runs windows Vista.
(On an ssd tho) It‘s a really nice machine.
Corrosion under the contacts between the circuit board and hard drive is often to blame for errors. I have already been able to save 3 hard drives by carefully removing rust from the contacts.
6:25 Now that was a smooth transition!
That sticker at 0:37 was on pretty much every business Toshiba laptop from that time period. I'm pretty sure it's a Chinese regulation approval sticker although I could be wrong
using google translate on the chinese words shows the result as network acess permission, so its like some wireless approval sticker
From The Chinese， this will come with almost every mobile phone.
Yes. It's a compliance certificate issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. I've seen them on units sold in the domestic Chinese market, pretty sure it's the same thing as SSID stickers we see on WiFi cards here.
@@CycleWithLiang back then, we got a lot of Xiaomi phones straight from China, with Chinese boxes. There's something like that too.
You are incredible, keep making videos!
why is there a bot in a tech channel?
@@USER9646_YT because they know some of us are desperate
"You're cute!!! Need a friend?"
@@USER9646_YT they're in all channels
My first laptop experienced HDD failure after 2 years. It was also a Toshiba HDD. All my friends who have experienced hard disk failure, it's always been on a Toshiba drive. Moral of the story, Toshiba makes unreliable storage!
My current HP laptop and its Toshiba hard drive are a little over 7 years old. You’re scaring me now.
the blue sticker with Chinese character says ‘‘进网许可’’ which means "approval of accessing the network". this is like a fcc radio compatibility approval. due to some wifi may compromise national security considerations, The Chinese government requires all wifi and cellular data capable devices to pass this test before on the market. and after 2009 or 2010, they canceled the requirements for wifi devices. so when I hunt for a used laptop, finding this sticker is always a good indicator for high spec machines.
Ah yes, my primary school has those Toshiba Tecra laptops (with Windows XP installed) that only teachers there use.
As for the laptops that students use? Acer Aspire laptops with Windows XP installed and later Toshiba Satellites with Windows 7 installed.
dont drop while its running, it will make a high pitched sound
My current HP laptop and its Toshiba hard drive are a little over 7 years old. I’m concerned one day I’ll get boot errors or the messages found in the beginning of the video.
I am literally watching this video with a defective drive
my drive is 14 years old
it's a 250GB WD Blue with a RPM of 5200 😤
@@Sn2pedI’ve never heard of that speed!
Good Stuff!
I had an 8TB WD external drive that was half full conk out on me.
Naturally, I went bananas.
Weeks later, after pricing data recovery centers I was quoted an $1100 price to recover everything.
Naturally, I went even MORE bananas.
One day, out of despair, I plugged in the drive and turned it UPSIDE DOWN................AND IT WORKED!
I touched NOTHING, and spent 4 nervous hours copying everything off of the drive.
Then, about Two months ago, I was in goodwill and came across a Sabrent SATA HDD flat docking station with everything in the box for $6.
Fate?............Who cares! I would have spent $150 for it.
Anyway, I now use TWO WD 12TB drives that are BOTH half-Full.
I'm Praying, but i'm READY.
You could do a RAID 1 mirror with 2 hdd although good to have separate boxes for an actual backup also.
@ironfist7789 Thanks.
I thought about that to and came to the same conclusion. I'm going to get two more drives and do a deep dive on raid set ups. Hopefully I'll find a suitable solution.
@@pacershark452 maybe check out the zfs file system and mirrors with that also, with openzfs or truenas if you DIY a box. Synology and companies like that have the equivalent of raid 1 mirrors with their 2 bay NAS (~ 300 dollar not including drives).
I personally use a zfs raid on one machine (old pc) with 2 vdev mirrors (2x2 drives) and mdadm RAID 1 on another box on Ubuntu, but it is mostly command line and a manual process the way I do it and not necessarily recommended for most people.
I'm old and retired. Software engineer (Prefer the tag Programmer). First 20+ years was with NCR Mainframes. They had 658 drives. I believe 80 MB. Removable and the size of a large birthday cake. The heads would come out of the player like a vinyl record player. When those heads touched the drive platters you could hear the destruction a mile away. The player *can't think of a better name* would be out of commission for awhile. With the mainframes (we had 3), included in the purchase price was 2 NCR employees with their own work room. It could take them all day getting the unit back in service.
You don't have to smash it with a hammer, It's even safer to write it full of zeros, or whatever you want. It's simple, just look it up here on youtube. NEVER do this to a ssd though! There are other programs for solid state drives.
He should just give it to Hillary Clinton. She'll destroy it for him.
I've heard over the years that defragging a drive on its last legs can also push the hard drive to its demise. Defragging, if there's a lot of gaps really gives a mechanical drive a workout. I've got a maybe 2012? Toshiba that I changed out the drive for a SSD. It sped it up. Biggest issue is the on/off button. It's a lottery. Looked for RUclips vids on that. Saw a couple of vids that pulled the button off and to use wadded up aluminum foil to short the contacts. I really need to dump it or play with it, with a Linux Distro. I turn it on 4-5 times a year at best.
What model is your Toshiba? Mine is a A205 from 2007 or 2008.
Today I would replace HDD with SSD even if HDD is in good condition in laptop before even turning it on. I'm not a fan of having HDD in laptop, they are too fragile for that there.
True!!!
If there are slots for 2 Hdd or an m.2 + HDD, I’ll instead just put an ssd as boot drive and a hard drive for mass storage for stuff like games or media.
Obviously backup the important stuff but this does allow having more storage for cheap while not being awfully slow. SSDs are great if you can afford them.
SSD if they fail give you less warning before failure from what I understand, but I back mine up to a ZFS enterprise hdd mirrored array in the NAS anyhow.
You could buy a HDD enclosure to continue using your laptop HDD as external drive. I've done this with the original 500GB HDD from my old 2011 Acer Aspire laptop
For personal computers that I use frequently, I would use an SSD except if one cannot be installed (e.g. old IDE drive for Windows XP in a laptop, adapter won't fit) or unless multiple drives can be installed (primary SSD and secondary HDD for data).
For laptops I sell on, it depends on the spec and type of the laptop. Cruddy old laptops that are just about hanging on get a hard drive regardless, because a hard drive will still boot an OS (albeit slowly) and is better than nothing.
so on a unrelated note, what watch are you wearing? it looks really nice
I have a 4 year old HDD on my laptop that sounds like a Geiger counter shown in this video, i have diagnosed and scanned the drive multiple times, all the softwares reports it as healthy and can't find any issues with it. Idk if i should actually be worrying about that hard drive
That sound is completely normal as far as I’m aware.
Yeah, when dealing with a damaged hard disk, you want to avoid writing to it as much as possible. I've had drives (yes SSDs too) lose 10-30% health just by doing a bit of writing to the disk. Hard disk sentinel is a nice tool to show you drive info. If Windows was able to complain about the hard disk health, I'd imagine it being in the low double digits.
What a great video! Isn’t it amazing these drives ever worked at all what with how intricate they are and how susceptible they are to vibration yet they can sit spinning undisturbed for years in a dusty old Dell often without issues! I am glad we now have SSDs though! 😅
I am in pain watching this
Tiger sus :3
@ChrisTRCB hi lmao
Sometimes an HDD gives bad SMART data, doing a full Slow Format, writing 0s on the platters fix the error. I have a 16GB IDE HDD from 2001 with more then 20k hours on it, over 7000 spin ups, still works perfectly.
Windows kinda reads SMART data from the hdd. Hdtune 2.55 free will show blocks in red during error scan and/or items in red in the Health tab.
You probably murdered that drive with no reason. If the reallocated sector count has red line, you could probably low level format the drive and it would be back to normal... or at least Windows wouldn't bug again because Windows is now gone.
Nope my new computer has an SSD I also have an external one that I use
I once had a failing SSD. Yes! SSD. Those can fail too (sadly). It did not warned me about an ssd failure.
When i got my laptop, it booted into the unlock screen, but could not get throught. (It would not show the "enter pin code")
And after, it went into recovery mode, and could not get out. I thought "someone must have deleted system32 before tossing the laptop out", so i reinstalled Windows 10 on it, and worked for a while.
After it made some questionable things, like desktop items moving away, volume button not dissapearing, camera not turning on and many more.
Aftet that, i got the "we could not log into windows" error. Had to watch a lot of tutorial to fix it. That error made all of my data go dissapear, but it did not delete the data from the "recycle bin"💀
i was a bit nuts, so i bought an used HDD, and i was using it until i had enough money to buy an SSD.
i once had an SSD fail completely, without any warning. all my data was gone. in linux, i could not pull a raw backup, it was completely unreadable.
my phones emmc failed so i had to basically abandon the phone
the phone would just stay in qcom mode all time and kept on blinking (moto g6)
I still have a Western Digital Black from 2013 in my main system with around 50k power on hours and it's not failing yet, I'm very pleasantly surprised that it's still going and I will use it till it dies.
Still like to have atleast one HDD in my systems for storage of games that don't require an SSD and mass storage of files
Remember once we made football with a 1,3 GB HDD in the highschool lobby. Surprise surprise the drive not damaged at all, and still working now in one of my retro laptop. If the drive is off, it can handle high G forces, but if it is powered on, then even 1G can kill it.
I had to use a computer with a failing hard drive for nearly a year. I’ve learned to be very patient
6:31 That looks so satisfactory! :3
Toshiba has a failing company. lol haha jk. but i had one for like 10 years. edit: was my daily driver too. haha
I also had a "failing" hard drive in my pc, windows said it so me, not that i used this drive for important data, i used is as a dump drive for downloads anyway, it was a samsung model, a 500gb one, but, when i did a crystaldiskinfo interrogation, the drive appeared to be healthy, i did some endurance tests on it and this drive still works to this day, macos has no problems with it, i don't use it for important files. So i am stunned that this still works, even though windows said that this drive was about to fail!
I had so many uncountable harddisk failures in the 2010s. I switched from WD Failing within half a year to Toshiba drives, which kept 3 years. Now I have SSDs. No more problems.
That CM sticker you hadn't seen is a compliance certificate issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. I've seen them on units sold in the domestic Chinese market, pretty sure it's the same thing as SSID stickers we see on WiFi cards here.
that era of laptops was great... im still using my dell XPS M1710 (its still holding strong).
something i found out recently is that the M1710 basicly had RGB before RGB was cool
The physical shocks while operating would have killed any drive, and in a totally different way from the windows warning. That warning happens when the data surface is degrading and becoming unreadable, which is unrelated to physical shocks.
Defragging, uninstalling programs, etc were a good way to try and make it worse, but it might take writing a lot more data to get full-on failure. Drives have self-repair mechanisms which are actually what trigger the warning-if self-repair is happening it's time to get out.
After years of I.T, the drops to the HDD caused various flinches and strange noises be manifested by me.
Keep it up! :)
I have actually had success reviving a hard drive by opening it myself, and it worked long enough to get the data off of it. Also I use an optane SSD for ZFS slog and it works fine. The insane write endurance makes it a good fit
The optane thingy is called TIERed storage (fast ter, slow tier, etc)
I had one of these for many years, updated to and SSD and my grandfarther used it for a number more really good machine and great memories
Great vid, mate!
Ah, spinning rust.
Back in the day, Nathan, hard drives actually came with a list of bad sectors (points on the drive that shouldn't be written to, usually because the coating was unreliable at that spot). Most of the time it would be printed on the drive label itself.
3:20 for as much crap as I give Toshiba drives, that one survived much more than a 2TB Seagate Rosewood 2.5” hard drive from 2021 I accidentally dropped onto my desk by like five inches (unplugged of course) and got one of the heads stuck. Guess that’s a modern Seagate L, but also goes to show that hard drives from 16 years ago were typically built better as they were thicker (WD Blacks in particular used thicker platters than average) and still the industry standard in 99% of computers being sold.
little tip.... if this occurs on a desktop(I guess similar can apply with laptops but less common), consider replacing your power supply too(can also be sata cables but I've seen it less)...... the error typically is based on the SMART data, and the smart data is a guestimate that can be thrown off by any electronic issues(bad caps, bad psu, bad cables) with the computer.... if you suspect the drive isn't the direct issue it's possible to run MHDD erase wait and scan, this would give a better reference point to the health of the drive and even sometime clear it out..... noting typically I would still not fully trust drive the drive, but when on a tight budget
2:59 aunty donna reference was funny XD
actually if the board on the hdd is the failure. thats SIGNIFICANTLY worse. that board is directly tied to the hdd. due to timing, quality control etc. even if you get an identical model replacement part it still might not work and would need parts from the original board to be soldered on. the timings on each drive are all different and those boards hold that data.
And also, I believe that there is a small EEPROM on the board that is paired with the HDD platters, maybe some CRC, security code or something. I never managed to succesfully swap a board from a HDD to another, even if both HDDs worked ok and were the same manufacturer, model and type.
@sebastian19745 exactly. could be 2 drives from the same batch and still won't work. crazy complicated
the sign/sticker says "internet permit", it was sold in China at a point.
You forgot to mention that if you still wish to use the dying hard drive for whatever reason, you should do a low level format. The low level format will mark bad sectors out and not use them and you will have a better understanding of how usable it actually is, because if it can't do a low level format, it's too far gone to be usable.
I wish you'd have tried loaded and played games before the physical tests
agreed, it would make the research way more accurate
That's why you should do backups of your stuff.
Data can be easily lost
Optane cache video would be sick would love to see if it works on your classic machines
Great laptop great man well done❤
That new SSD which is M.2 doesn't have any mechanical moving parts that a hard disk has which is why it is less likely to fail. They read/write in memory. That Smart feature can warn you that your hard drive will be failing soon. It can be turned on/off in the BIOS
I was using my iMac g3 it had its original hard drive and one day stuff started to dissapear and then it would not start up again but I am yet to buy a new one
failing hdd can go on for quite some time, just make certain you back up everything before it completely dies
You should have ran crystal disk info to see what smart value is failing. I'd say it most likely has bad sectors and when you defragged it probably moved some stuff off of the bad sectors to good ones thus speeding it up quite a bit.
Yeah, that failing hard drive was on its last legs, and was going to conk out, even if you didn't put it through its paces. Hopefully that Toshiba laptop got the Crucial MX500 that you say about, to increase its performance! (Also, I think Windows 7 was a good choice, given it shipped with Vista - it probably wouldn't play nicely with 10 or 11.)
I keep three external drives for data backups (currently that's two HDDs and one SSD). I have had backup HDDs that failed on me after several years even though they were only used in terms of hours. The 1TB NVME SSD that I put in my laptop to replace the original 256GB NVME failed after a few years, thankfully it gave me enough warnings before total failure to allow me to clone it to another SSD. I now keep a clone SSD on standby just in case. Fact is, no one knows how long these things last. And yes, I only buy drives from name brand manufacturers.
One of my laptops had an Optane stick in it, which I formatted and put recovery media on.
I used those Optane drives as a Windows installation flash drive. So much faster than a normal USB flash disk. I have 3 units of 16GB for W10, W11 and MacOS. Enclosure is a cheap brand less M.2 SATA to USB 3.0 type bought from AliExpress.
Hi Psivevri! I'm a junior high school student from Taiwan. I'm watching your video about 3 years. And 0:37 is a China network access permit sticker. Our 2010's electronic products all have those stickers.Because it was imported from China. Wish this message will help you. Have a good day! :D
i was JUST about to say the exact same thing... i am a Spanish man that studies in China, and a lot of their older electronics have that stamp. my Galaxy Note3 (model no. SM-N9008V running LineageOS 18.1) has a very similar stamp from a carrier called CMCC (China Mobile CC)
@ThosePixelsTho-sx9mg Yes. China products all have those stickers.
do your new electronics still have them?
@@EnderKittynet as far as i can see, no. i think they stopped having them in around 2016?... i cant find one anywhere on my ThinkPad and its from 2018 (T480 btw)
Ah the sounds of are tech past. I swear I still have that 2400 baud modem noise imprinted in my brain. ;-)
I think I actually saw this warning in-person when I was using Windows 8.1 on my first laptop, the Dell Latitude D630.
Why you don't use Hard Disk Sentinel that software can detect hard disk health
Now let’s see him destroy a HDD by constantly installing/downloading/deleting things and viruses. That could be a fun video.
If you are using HDD right now, transfer the data to an SSD. SSDs are gonna work perfectly if its even dropped, it is also faster.
Still not too economical for large storage drives, but the prices will keep dropping over time.
Thank you!
I remember this laptop from an older video!
I had issues back in 2019 when my dad has 2 ASUS laptops with Failing HDDs, thankfully it can be replaced with SSD for better performance and never fail again. (Although trimming is possible every week)
The whacking and dropping of the hard drive caused me psychic damage even though I know the drive was garbage already.
love your vids
Linus from LTT feeling a disturbance in the force from you dropping the Hard Drive
I was a computer tech at Staples, and I have seen HDDs die many times.
All I can say is use spin rite and if you can't get it up and running in 24-48 hrs time to replace I've seen less than 5 drives die from 94 to present day and have a box of working drives for when I'm in a pinch or need a quick drive for backup or transfer of user folders or to help out a person with a budget under 15$
Toshiba 2.5inch harddrives are horrible in developing bad sectors.
Next time start up hard disk sentinel, it tells you whats wrong with the drive.
The clicking noise is the sound of a drive failing to read the service area witch is the part that contains all the drive info.
I use old hard drives for archiving tons of stuff I've downloaded, and while I like the speed of the new SSD drives, I stick to physical disks for long-term storage. I've heard that SSDs have a limited self life, and may not be reliable after say, 10 or 15 years. Has anyone else heard this?
MY HEART
THAT HARD DROPS
IM GONNA CRY
It would be interesting to look at the smart data with something like gsmart control
I'm early! I found your channel a few weeks ago and have just been absolutely smashing through your video catalogue. Keep up the great work :)
the samsung one I had on an old laptop just stops writing, which makes windows does the blue screen "of death" thing, it's a good thing for me, cuz the previous owner thought it was a junk, even though I took it for a bit expensive of what he thought it costs, but cheap enough to its value in my eyes.
My old Lenovo Yoga 12 went from everythings fine to were's the hard drive at, in the space of an hour. Thankfully it was just used for browsing mainly RUclips so no critiacl data was lost. I always keep some spare SSD's around so it was up and running again the same day.
What's the eucalyptus solution you used in this video? I noticed you didn't use the oil spray from other videos
Make a clock form the hard drive. It is prettz cool and fairlz easy.
Dumb me decades ago. I bought one of those Compact Flash Micro Drives. 1 inch Hard Drives It failed. Of course it did.