Windows 10: Bad blocks on Toshiba HDD & Win10 OS probs

And do be aware that a reference to a drive could simply be a partition on the HDD, some will have drive letters assigned to partition and some will not in Disk Management. All HDDs need at least 1 partition for the OS, usually lettered as C:.

 

If you dont want to spend the money on a SSD, or need a larger drive than you can afford as an SSD, go with an SSHD such as a Seagate Firecuda. Not as fast as a pure SSD, but faster than a standard HDD.

 

Wow. I hadn't noticed this thread spilled over to a 2nd page. Thanks everyone for the feedback on this

@Samuria You say don't even try to clone the drive Samuria. But I got feedback on the hddguru forums that suggested that Windows may be able to repair a corrupted OS that's been cloned to a 2nd drive. I'm probably just going to be picking up a 'cheap' 1TB SATA II 7200 RPM drive for $59 along with a $40 hardware HDD docking station / duplicator. I'd need a 2.5" USB drive enclosure anyway if I want to clone anyway. The docking station is capable of handing up to 4 drives, 2 2.5" and 2 3.5" HDDs. That'd be handy to have around for a number of reasons.

@Helmut As for drivers, when I upgraded my last Toshiba from Vista to Windows 7 I found as you mentioned that Windows supplied all that were needed. If not this time I'll have a look on the Toshiba support site. And oh! I just remember yesterday that I'd imaged this notebook when I 1st got it. It was the 1st time I'd used that particular imaging software that handles the new partitions Win10 creates, So I'm not sure if restoring it will succeed. Hope so.

@ArazelEternal @NavyLCDR A SSD or SSHD would be nice, but I really don't do much with the notebook that requires speed. It may be nice for transferring large files to another system. But none of the the drives on my other systems are very fast.

@Berton The only visable partition on this drive is C: But looking at it in GParted I noticed 2 or 3 others
and seem to recall mention of the ability of this notebook to reinstall Windows 10 again somehow.

@NavyLCDR AHCI is new to me. I'll look into that. Thanks.

 

There are a couple of other advantages to an SSD in a laptop besides just speed.

It consumes less power so your battery will last longet.

It is less susceptible to shock and movement damage.

 

Ah yes indeed @NavyLCDR Dropping it is the big one for me there. I'll be glad when the day comes when SSDs are as cheap as mechanical drives. I'm hoping to clone my 1TB, and those SSDs are pricey. One of the reasons I bought a bigger notebook last time was for the bigger battery.

Am back from the store with a $60 1TB SATA II 7200 RPM HGST HDD and a Sabrient dual drive docking / cloning device. There's nothing in its specs about cloning exact sector by sector copies though as someone at the store pointed out. I can return it and look for another if cloning fails though.

 

I have had some success cloning and recovering failing drives, but it is a bit complicated, to be successful. And, I was only going for data - not the entire OS. You might want to read this thread thoroughly:
Best method/tool for cloning a failing HDD for Data Recovery? Solved - Page 9 - Windows 7 Help Forums
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They mention ddrescue in that 7 thread.. Folks over at hddguru suggested starting with either that or hddsuperclone to do an identical sector by sector clone for drives that exhibit evidence of hardware failure. I've just finished 2 & 1/2 hours of cloning the notebook's internal HDD minus all it's bad blocks to the new drive connected to the notebook via this Sabrent docking station, with the notebook booted into Linux Mint off an USB stick. So far so good.

Tomorrow I'll see if I can pull the Toshiba case apart, swap drives, run the Windows 10 installer from a flash drive, select the Repair option and see if the installer can repair the cloned copy of 10.

Someone also reminded me that Toshibas have a keyboard shortcut that can restore the notebook to its factory fresh software condition using system recovery I think from a hidden partition.

How to restore your Toshiba computer/tablet to its factory fresh software condition using system recovery

That may be another option if the W10 installer can't repair the HDD clone.

Data recovery I've dealt with a bit in the past using various software. The "magical' one was Testdisk that was able to recover a deleted NTFS partition table from a backup few seem to be aware exists at the very end of the drive. I'd mistakenly deleted the drive's one primary partition with the wrong diskpart command. But after hours of deep scanning, Testdisk fixed the useless drive in a second by copying the backup table back to the beginning of the drive.

 

You could use Macrium Reflect to make backup and if it verifies than you can just restore image to new drive and it will be just as good as cloning if not better. MR rescue disk/USB contains programs for dealing with bad BOOT and other problems and can also optimize for SSD if you use it.

 

Good luck and let us know how it goes. *Thumbs

 

It's all fixed *Smile
@Samuria - Other methods of cloning corrupted HDDs might not have been successful, but the Linux hddsuperclone folks on hddguru suggested did the trick. Last night I booted the Toshiba to Linux Mint from a flash drive, and ran hddsuperclone to clone the internal HDD to a new one in a USB connected docking station. Tonight I cracked the case open and dropped in the clone. After that it was pretty simple. Booted Windows 10, and ran Check Now from the C: drive's Properties > Tools menu. It had me reboot to run chkdsk I assume it was, found and fixed system file errors, and finally booted to a working desktop after repairs.

I'm glad it was that quick and easy. But now I still don't know if my old Acronis True Image backups could have been restored successfully. I am tempted though to delete hundreds of gigabytes worth of backed up video & audio files and run Acronis to image the new drive. And maybe look the free Macrium Reflect program @CountMike mentioned for imaging.

 

That's great news! I'll second the Macrium recommendation. Cheers! *Thumbs

 

Indeed @simrick - I want to thank you and everyone who took some time to contribute their thoughts on this issue. I learned a lot along the way. It's really great that support forums like these are still chocked full of knowledgeable folks willing to help work out other peoples' issues... just like the pre-www gui days.

Happy to have my lappy no longer so wacky. *Wink

Cheers all!

 

Glad we could be of help.

 

I'm still in need of help on this issue folks. After cloning this drive to a new HDD and successfully booting the working clone, I later ran sfc /scannow. It found and repaired corrupted files, but reported it was not able to fix some. I ran it a second time the next day with the same message at the end of the scan. The cbs.log is over 31000 lines and is a bit beyond me. Here's most of the error I can spot:

* 12 instances: .... - ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND
* 25 instances: 0000xxxx - Couldn't mark for pending delete:
* Many: 0000xxxx - Error - Overlap: Duplicate ownership for directory
* Many: [Path to file] is not owned but specifies SDDL in component in component [Component]
* Very many: 0000xxxx Error - Overlap: Duplicate ownership for directory [Path to directory]
* Many: Cannot repair member file [File info] in the store, file is missing
* 4 instances: Could not reproject corrupted file [File info] source file in store is also corrupted
* Several: Warning - Overlap: Directory [Path] is owned twice or has its security set twice

The system hasn't given me any problems. But it's been suggested that I download the latest ISO of 1703 (I'm still on 1607 build 14393.1715), install Windows 10 over the existing one, and the installer ought to repair the existing file issues. Does this sound like the best path forward? I can upload the cbs.log if it's of any help.

Last night I got an Windows Update alert saying the new creators update has been downloaded and is ready to install. I opted to delay the update for a week, and am wondering if there might be any conflicts with this if I go ahead and run a full re-installation of Windows 10 & update to 1703 from a flash drive.

Thanks for any input on all this. *Smile

 

When scannow is unable to complete or displays that it found integrity violations that it was unable to fix the next step that typically fixes what scannow could not fix are the dism commands.

Run these commands using administrative command prompt:
dism /online /cleanup-image /checkhealth
dism /online /cleanup-image /scanhealth
dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

Sometimes the dism commands above fail. An if the above commands fail there are additional dism commands:
Use DISM to Repair Windows 10 Image Windows 10 Performance Maintenance Tutorials

Create a bootable windows 10 iso:
Download Windows 10