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Malwarebytes self-start problem

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bit:
Here's a bit more elucidation about 'short stroking' a hard drive:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/255224/how_to_partition_your_hard_drive_to_optimize_performance.html

bit:
Here's a more current article on short stroking a hard drive, with a link to a product for doing it;
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-short-stroke-your-hard-drive-for-optimal-speed-1598306074
"How to Short-Stroke Your Hard Drive for Optimal Speed"; dated 07-01-14 which is pretty up-to-date.
It contains a sub-link to HD TUNE, which has a less-options freebie or a 'pro' version for $34.95 .
I'm airing this here, altho it almost deserves a new thread for itself, b/c I'm curious what cheaper but comparable alternative programs to the payware 'HD TUNE' Pro might be around?

I'm also curious what anyone thinks of using HD Tune to short stroke a Western Digital 750GB 7200rpm drive down to about 200 or 250GB.

Here's the Western Digital drive, and I see they discontinued the 750 size;
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Desktop-WD1002FAEX/dp/B0036Q7MV0/ref=pd_cp_e_1
The specs say it has 'an integrated dual processor, and dual actuator technology'.
I'm not sure what 'dual actuator' means, but the 'dual processor' sounds way cool.

One of the reasons I originally got the WD 750GB was b/c it had a 64MB cache which when repartitioned down to 250GB gave me a larger cache plus the on-board dual processor on a resized smaller drive partition.  :)
But now with 'short stroking' as an option, I could do even more with it.

tomos:
I didnt get a chance to read any of those^ links yet, but I remember when 2TB drives came out, reading an article saying that if you made a smallish partition, say 150GB, that the speed of that partition would be a lot faster - the claim was along the lines of: the bigger the drive, the faster that partition would be. But I dont know how multiple platters fit into that.

I have two internal  drives on my desktop - the OS on the first drive has about a 150GB partition, the remainder is used for backup of data from the second drive - which means it gets used very seldom. I'm happy with the setup, but I've never compared it to any other setup in the same machine.

Will look for that article - I may have saved it on that machine.

Shades:
S.M.A.R.T. technology that comes with every hard disk is used by software to indicate if the drive is healthy or not. I have here several drives that are perfect according to S.M.A.R.T., but in practice make your PC slow down to a crawl. I have learned to take any "advice" from HD health monitoring software with a grain of salt.

If the drive starts generating a lot of IRQ's...it is dying and definitely not to be trusted with important information.. Whether it is the drive (platters) itself or its electronics, it is dying. Time to get a new drive, clone the content from the failing one and when that's finished successfully, take it out and smash it to pieces/use it for target practice, squash it with your truck or whatever. It's not worth your time and you will be really miserable when spending hours trying to recover data from an almost dead drive...the proverbial sh?t and a fan.

For fun, you should download the MHDD iso, make a bootable disk/pendrive from it and use it to really verify the state of the hard disk. This software is very low level, it forgoes almost all hardware layers, the software allows just the BIOS to connect to the drive and takes over from that point.

Depending on the speed, size and health of the disk, a full check-up can take some time, but its results are brutally honest.

bit:
^Yes, many tnx, I've already taken your advice and migrated from the BSOD-prone 750GB Western Digital to the 10,000 rpm 250GB WD.
I will have to see about downloading MHDD and checking out the 750GB HD.

I do all my HD disk cloning now with EaseUS Todo Backup Free 4.0, whether copying the active HD to a backup HD, or restoring a goofed-up active HD from a backup HD.
And I use freeware EaseUS Partition Master 9.1.1 Home Edition for HD partitioning.
Both work great and are free for home use.

Every time I run a backup restore from my reserve IDE Maxtor HD back to either my 750GB 7200 rpm WD (Western Ditigal) or my 250GB 10K rpm WD SATA HD, Win7 makes me put in my installation disk to fix the boot files, which it always does and then boots up successfully.

But when I try to do a backup restore and boot with my 500GB 7200 rpm WD, even with the Win7 install disk, it fails to boot now.
It used to succeed when I first bought it and did an original scratch install of Win7 to it.
It's a good drive, and makes a good reserve OS backup unit, but there seems to be some kind of problem generating a viable MBR for it.

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