Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Scary Driveby Attack / Mysterious failure / Other
Stoic Joker:
Only after these more pedestrian causes have been eliminated should we start looking for signs of Ziggy Stardust's Uber hacker spiders from Mars.
-Stoic Joker (April 17, 2014, 07:30 AM)
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But doesn't everybody do those first before running over to the PC security blogs?
And yes indeed, it does sound a lot like a HD just might be starting to go...
-40hz (April 17, 2014, 07:46 AM)
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Well, not that I ran to a blog - it was more an off the cuff question based on general confusion. So if a couple of opinions are coming in re hardware failure, maybe that's "the lesser evil" but it's also where my skillset drops off a cliff. Meanwhile it's still okay as of today. I'll try a couple of those checks to see what's up. Maybe a defrag will move stuff off a bad sector too.-TaoPhoenix (April 17, 2014, 09:52 AM)
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Hardware is not in the center of my skillset either, but as an Admin I spend a great deal of my time with a mental coin spinning in the air trying to decide if the sad faced user before me clicked on something foolishly (heads)...or if the machine for some reason is having an anthropomorphically malevolent episode (tails).
Most people - statisticians/accountants/etc. - you see would assume and cling to the commonly held belief that the odds of a coin landing on any given side are at all points 50/50. Admins however know that that notion - generally speaking - is complete bullshit. :D Things that can, will, and do influence the coins inclination one way of the other are the users own aptitude score, the age of the machine, my mood, the day of the week, and of course - most importantly - the time of day... As one must always, and in all things account for and defer to the will of Murphy's Law lest they risk incurring the wrath of the fates.
...So after weighing your score against the fact that malware "attacks" are never really "sudden" if one knows what to look for (and I get the impression you do). Also none of the tell tail signs of user guilt - they always tell on themselves if you know what to look for - appeared in the description of the issue. Hence it - the cause - had to be a hardware issue. ;)
Shades:
As far as I know, a defrag will not do much for you with regards to bad blocks. Checkdisk does move blocks of data around after it cannot repair bad blocks on your disk and marks these so the filesystem will not use them anymore.
That is at least the concept behind it. But often the capabilities of the software falls short and you have to resort to 3rd party software. HDSentinel, HDDscan (and for real pro's: MHDD) come to mind.
TaoPhoenix:
As far as I know, a defrag will not do much for you with regards to bad blocks. Checkdisk does move blocks of data around after it cannot repair bad blocks on your disk and marks these so the filesystem will not use them anymore.
That is at least the concept behind it. But often the capabilities of the software falls short and you have to resort to 3rd party software. HDSentinel, HDDscan (and for real pro's: MHDD) come to mind.
-Shades (April 17, 2014, 12:16 PM)
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I ran part of a chkdsk and it did delete one bad index entry. But for the full scan I think the file check will take a long time "step 4 of 5" so I'll try to remember to run it all again before bed one of these days.
Stoic Joker:
As far as I know, a defrag will not do much for you with regards to bad blocks. Checkdisk does move blocks of data around after it cannot repair bad blocks on your disk and marks these so the filesystem will not use them anymore.
That is at least the concept behind it. But often the capabilities of the software falls short and you have to resort to 3rd party software. HDSentinel, HDDscan (and for real pro's: MHDD) come to mind.
-Shades (April 17, 2014, 12:16 PM)
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I ran part of a chkdsk and it did delete one bad index entry. But for the full scan I think the file check will take a long time "step 4 of 5" so I'll try to remember to run it all again before bed one of these days.-TaoPhoenix (April 17, 2014, 01:25 PM)
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Actually defrag will probably try to move more data into a bad sector in an effort to align the data in a organized and contiguous fashion. That's why the old defrag utility would generally refuse to run if the disk was marked dirty.
Please ... Take the time to run chkdsk C: /R completely (Don't make me beg damn it!). Because there is almost never only one error - there may only be one bad sector ... But there will be quite a bit of stuff riding on it.
Iceberg tips should not be ignored.
-Titanic.
Stoic Joker:
On the odd chance that some of you may be wondering - I haven't had a cigarette since about noon Tuesday - So basically yes, I have completely snapped.
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