That command!!

[dwynnehugh]

It’s been some 5 years since I built my last PC so I’m very rusty if not corroded solid.  A friend has asked me to have a look at his W10 PC – it seems to be unable to repair itself – I have removed the HDD and using Sharkoon have attempted to connect to my PC so that I can read the HDD. I can’t on the face of it.

I seem to remember many years ago being told a command that allowed you to look at the storage on the PC – what drives etc., formatting – I’ve simply forgotten it.  Can anyone help me – the old grey matter ain’t what it used to be.  Thanks,  Dave

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[Ed P]

System info (‘systeminfo’) on Windows command line?

[dwynnehugh]

Thank EdP but it’s not that.  I’m still on W7 though do have a W10 m/c that needs building.  Using this ‘particular’ command after initialising it via Return, it eventually fgot you to a position where you had 3 options – one of which was storage on your system.

Selecting storage gave you a block of disks on the LHS and then a larger block which gave you info about them etc. – format etc. etc. As I said not been active on PCs for quite a while but many thanks for your response.  Dave

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[Ed P]

msinfo32 – maybe? It is a long time since I used it, but I vaguely remember it being something like your description. Alternately perhaps go to the Control Panel and look at System., the other way was to right-click on the ‘your computer’ icon and that throws up various properties which may be what you need.

Blind leading the blind on this one!

[dwynnehugh]

Thanks once again, I seem to remember it was just one word you entered on the Search progs etc.  I did think of making a note of it but us men as my wife would say!!

What I have done is to connect the suspect HDD to another W10 PC and it’s taking ages to read it – on another known ‘good’ drive it was seconds – so money’s on duff HDD.  See if I can get anything off it with a Linux distro.  Dave

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[JayCeeDee]

Ed P wrote:

the other way was to right-click on the ‘your computer’ icon and that throws up various properties which may be what you need.

Disk Management??

[dwynnehugh]

That’s it – but not the way I used to get there. Am reading the HDD via another W10 PC and getting there slowly. Suspect my Sharkoon may be dead anyway – another job for tomorrow.  Thank you one and all,  Dave

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[JayCeeDee]

👍🏻👍🏻 Glad to find out you’re still with us. Good luck, stay safe and come back soon.

[dwynnehugh]

JCD – Many thanks – come here quite often, just not posted in a long time.   Will be building a new W10 PC soon – got the stuff 4 months ago still in boxes – will more then likely need assistance – as I said no just rusty but corroded by now!!

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[JayCeeDee]

You may or may not have seen, I built my last PC just before Christmas last year as a 70th present to myself. Family and friends contributed to the pot and I got stuck in.
The brain still worked, the fingers less so!! But I took my time, researched the hell out of the best way to go. PC architecture has changed massively in the past 5 years. Who would have thought about having NVME drives for the OS and 500GB – 1TB SSD’s as data drives on a basic mid-level PC??

I thought about my day to day usage and typically I would have between 6 and 10 browser pages open at any one time – I did say I did an awful lot of research – with typically 10 to 20 tabs open. Looking at Task Manager showed me where I was short on resources, in my case CPU and memory.

I got a mid – upper range CPU ( i5 10500 ) with 6 cores and 12 threads, with 32 GB Dual Channel DDR4 from Corsair. Currently sat at 5% CPU usage and 48% Memory usage – 8 x browsers and 122 x tabs. Fans hardly heard and temps at 25 – 28C. Very pleased all round. Details of the components etc from DaveR’s answers to JohnBarry’s POST .

[dwynnehugh]

I’m back like an old bad smell – I suspected the HDD on this PC – using WD Utilities (it’s a WD 1TB Black HDD) I am now told that WD U will only support this if it was formatted via their Utilities – grrrrrr – it wasn’t!  Looked on ‘tinternet and found that I can ask W10 to check each drive in the system – when I initially did this it said the drive was OK, anyway I asked it to check the HDD and it now tells me that it will take at least 13 hours – is this reasonable? Is there another drive checking utility that is less user-unfriendly than the WDU one?  Thanks,  Dave

 

PS I should have added that it took about 18hours to copy across about 9GB of files from this HDD to my known good one in the W10 computer that i am using – does this also seem to be a very long time?

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[Ed P]

Seems like a long time for any of those operations.

Assuming the hdd is not ancient try a SMART check first. e.g. wmic diskdrive get status from an elevated command line

This works on Win10 but I really do not know if it was on Win7. A predicted fail means the drive is probably toast or pretty heavily singed.

If it passes then I’d start to blame a corrupt partition table (normally caused by someone yanking out the power lead rather than carrying out a proper shutdown – good luck in ever getting anyone to admit that!

Check using the old DOS command chkdsk. OnWin10 you can most safely do it from the file explorer. Right click on  This PC,  and the duff drive, select properties, tools, and error checking. This will check if you REALLY need to run chkdsk via the Scan Drive command.

If you remember chkdsk/f supposedly  fixes the drive but what it normally did was to present you with a pile of orphan links! I think it might be better to use one of these.

 

 

 

[dwynnehugh]

Sorry should have said it was 24.1GB of data transferred in the specified time.  The W10 HDD check on the suspect drive has just come back as – all good – just as it showed initially. I think that the OS system has been knackered somehow or other and there doesn’t seem to be anyway of repairing it as far as I can see.

Format and re-install seems appropriate?

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[Ed P]

Unusual for Windows to fail on its own assuming no virus etc – what is the problem you are trying to fix?

Registry corruption through improper shutdown (write-behind problems) used to be common on Windows 7 and earlier maybe it is the registry that has been zapped..

IF it is a registry problem – this link might help.

[dwynnehugh]

Thanks, it was a PC I built for him about 4 years ago – this is always left ON!  He phoned me to say that having come home one day and tried to get onto his PC he was greeted with a message that he was being logged in as a temporary user profile, with comments that the PC may be able to configure correctly but starting and shutting down, then ‘repairing the ‘C’ drive then eventually nothing!!

I looked at the problem of ‘Windows Temporary User Profile (TEMP) Issue’ which seemed to be the problem – their initial suggestions did not work and it became a case of possibly editing the Registry – we didn’t get that far as the HDD either gave up the ghost or something else happened – it just seemed to be in a loop – repairing – can’t repair etc. Fortunately I have been able to read the HDD via another PC and recovered what he needs off it – however when accessed via another PC (as a slave) I can ‘see’ all of it – the problem seems to be at boot up time in his PC.  I strongly suspect that W10 has been somehow or other damaged.  Format and clean install may be on the cards especially as W10 has given the HDD a clean bill of health.

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[Dave Rice]

Hi Dave,

I was up in July for Harriets graduation, I could have given you a hand with the new PC 🙂

As for the busted drive, the temporary profile is easily fixed with the registry hack, works every time, but the question is why did it happen? It is possible it just needs the bootloader fixing, instructions are here but I suspect there’s a hardware problem with the drive that’s also caused the profile issue. I feel you should check that first.

The drive manufacturers drive diagnostics are what you need but IIRC WD Lifeguard isn’t fussy about working with other drives besides WD.

If you need a new docking station, I’ve been using one of the dual bay jobs £26. I’d never heard of Fideco before, but on the back of it I now have some USB NVMe drive caddies by them, all good.

 

[dwynnehugh]

Thanks Dave, Harriet graduation – tell her congrats from me and Emma (now in Sheffield) – is it 3 years already?  Time flies.  Right the PC – he leaves it on virtually all the time and when he comes back to it on very many occasions he hits the mouse or keyboard and nothing happens – he has to switch it off at the PSU, also happens quite often when updating.

OK so I now have the PC up and running with a clean install of W10 and currently updating the OS. When I initially completed the OS install, the PC booted up and then commenced to ‘repair errors on the HDD’ – last night W10 told me that the HDD was OK!! Who do I believe??  Even now the system when switched on will not always get the monitor out of standby mode and this has to be achieved by switching off at the PSU and restarting – can’t see any reason for this in the BIOS – but these new ones are a complete horror to me.  The system is 2017 era and I am starting to suspect something is not right in the m/board as it fails to initiate the monitor.  I haven’t built PC for some years but the caddy seems a good investment even if for only reading old HDDs from my old systems. Thanks,  Dave

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[dwynnehugh]

Dave – I should also have added that the Reg hack would have been the next port of call but the BSOD took priority – the PC simply went into a blue screen loop and that was that.

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[dwynnehugh]

Sorry but I’ve only been back a few days and I’ve hogged this place!  Sorry.

Current sit rep – W10 loaded and when switched on – says ‘Repairing C’, WD Lifeguard says too many duff sectors on the HDD – well seems we’re getting somewhere.

The more you meet people the more you understand why Noah took animals instead of humans

[Ed P]

Sounds like the time has come for a £75 1TB SSD replacement, or £50 hdd if funds are tight. Once you get those sorts of messages then the end is near for an hdd.  However, your friend should remember that ssd drives fail hard and backups are an essential part of better performance.

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