Posts by Jack Cook7

vividstag16 said:I installed it and the drive shows up, but whenever I try running any tests (short, long, whatever), it just hangs after a bit and spits out "Aborted" or "Failed!" It's like Windows isn't even talking to it properly.
I feel like I'm totally stuck here.
Do you think a repair tech could actually fix this?

So, basically, that's the deal. If there's zero noise coming from the drive, the main motor controller or the head actuator probably just kicked the bucket. Most likely, the electronics on the PCB fried, and that SATA to USB external enclosure is just tricking your PC into thinking the drive is still alive.

Like I said, your best bet is to pop the drive out of the enclosure and plug it directly into a 2.5" SATA port. It’s not rocket science—if you have a decent little Phillips screwdriver, you can do it. Just do it to rule out the enclosure being the culprit.

Honestly, I doubt a pro could do much more than that without charging you like $100 to $83 just for a diagnostic. Swapping out the PCB or whatever else is broken is gonna cost way more than that.

If the enclosure itself is fine, you could just grab a cheap 2.5" HDD and swap it in. That'll end up being about $100-$67 cheaper than buying a whole new external hard drive. Just make sure you double-check the SATA and USB versions first.

vividstag16 said:The disk manager sees it though! It shows up as "Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)

The only weird thing is the name "Seagate" is gone—it just shows up as E:

So, basically, the drive is getting power at Layer 1, but whatever "logic" needs to identify it over the SATA protocol is just totally bunk for some reason.

Check out this Seagate test utility.
https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/suppor...oads/seatools/
along with: https://helpdeskgeek.com/free-tools-...stic-software/

That tool might actually pin down what's going wrong. It works for other brands too, so you could even run it on your main C: drive just to see how it behaves compared to the broken one.

Not 100% sure if it plays nice with external USB drives, though. Those can be a bit finicky.

vividstag16 said:But the LED on the drive is actually lit up.

When I run "wmic diskdrive get status" in Command Prompt, it shows OK twice, which tells me both my internal and external drives are good to go.🤔

Oook... that's a start, but honestly, it doesn't guarantee the drive is actually healthy.

1. What's the word from the BIOS? Does it pick up the ext.disk during POST?

2. What does disk manager say—is it showing up there at all?

vividstag16 said:I tried every single USB port on my laptop and my desktop, but I get the exact same result everywhere.

Man, at that point, your only move left is to pull that Seagate out of the enclosure and plug it directly into a 2.5" SATA connector inside your PC or laptop.

If even that fails—like, if the drive light won't even flicker or the BIOS doesn't see it at all—then you're probably looking at a fried motherboard.

If there's some super critical data on there, you could try swapping the controller board with one from an identical drive, but honestly, we're talking a couple hundred bucks once you factor in everything.

vividstag16 said:Just one single USB cable.

So we're probably looking at a 2.5" HDD then. Have you tried plugging it into a different machine? Might be that the whole USB hub on your PCu is just totally fried.

vividstag16 said:My Seagate 2 TB Seagate external drive just randomly died on me. It didn't take a tumble or anything, no physical damage at all. Every time I try to mount it, I get hit with some message like "Fatal device error!"
The drive is over 5 years old and I mostly use it for movies and shows. Definitely hasn't been dropped.
Tried swapping out the cable and plugging it into different USB ports, but nothing works.

Any chance I can save this thing, or is it headed for the Mississippi...

What kind of power setup does the external enclosure have? Is it just a single USB data cable, two USB cables, or does it use an AC adapter?

If you're feeling brave, you could try popping the drive out of its casing and plugging it directly into a SATA port on your PC. That way, you can rule out the enclosure, the USB connection, or the AC adapter as the culprit.

Check out these ready-to-go setups with RFID readers paired with Bluetooth transmitters:
https://gaorfid.com/devices/readers-...-rfid-readers/
https://gaorfid.com/product/reader-t...-125-khz-rfid/

David Gomez6 said:Man, forget about a phone... if the whole point is to optimize this thing and keep production costs super low.

I just need something cheap where a 4-inch range is plenty. The tag or card needs to be a passive element—meaning zero batteries involved.

An RFID card or tag is almost always passive. Now, RFID readers can be either passive or active. An active one blasts out a signal to find the tag, while a passive one just sits there waiting for a tag to wander into its EM field.

A passive 125/128KHz RFID reader should do the trick for you.

By the way, I had no clue an Arduino Nano even existed for $2... honestly, that’s the kind of optimization I need right now. I was totally assuming they were like $10 each.😵

Things are getting way simpler now... I basically have everything I need, except I'm still scratching my head over which wireless module I'll need to link the device to a phone and send data. 🤔

You can grab ready-made WiFi or Bluetooth modules with standard interfaces like USB-C for a PC, plus RFID readers; the real headache is the smartphone authentication part. Bluetooth is definitely the easier route there.

One more thing... like I mentioned earlier:

The device should stay powered off most of the time to save battery. But here's the catch... every time it wakes up, it needs to know exactly what time it is...

So, a few questions popped into my head:
- If the Arduino is physically turned off, can it still know the time? Like, could it have some secondary power source just to keep the clock ticking?
- If the Arduino is completely disconnected from power, can it react fast enough to a button press to boot up and read a card? It needs to be responsive within at least 2 seconds.
- I'm asking all this assuming the Arduino would drain the battery significantly in a standby mode... but what if it can sit in standby with negligible power draw? That would solve everything. (By negligible, I mean something like a wristwatch... since its only job in standby would be counting time. It doesn't even need to detect the card itself—the button press would wake it up to read the card.)

Most PCs have a real-time clock and a CMOS battery inside, which is usually independent of the main power supply (it has its own little coin cell or built-in battery). You can actually get ready-made chips with a built-in battery, like those from Dallas. (And no, you can't swap the battery out.)
https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/d...otes/5/52.html

Does Arduino Nano have a real-time clock?
These little things come with their own clock and a tiny battery, so even if you unplug your Arduino, they won't lose track of the real time. In this Instructable, i will show you How Easy IT is to connect DS1307 I2C RTC to Arduino, and then we'll grab that time data using Visuino.

Basically, most of your gear can be totally powered down (S5), or just chilling in standby or sleep mode (S1-3). Even in S4 (hibernate), that RTC is still hanging in there keeping time and counting down. Just a heads up—jumping from an S1 standby mode back up to S0 active mode takes about 2 seconds max.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...leeping-states

The whole "waking up" thing—like going from S1 to S0—really comes down to how you trigger the event. Since you're working with a passive RFID reader, the voltage or current spike on the reader's interface after someone waves a card has to be set up so that
a) the RFID reader stays powered up the whole time
b) the RFID reader buffers the data once the card hits it
c) the RFID reader triggers a wake-up sensor on the other side of the interface

Bottom line? That RFID needs to stay powered up constantly.
To make option (c) work, you've gotta keep that sensor at a minimum voltage level.

If you can't hit those three requirements, or if the power draw is just too much for your setup, you might have to settle for a physical button to wake everything up.

Bluetooth SoC
https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en...SAAEgJSA_D_BwE

RFID for Arduino with 1KB RAM:
https://www.aliexpress.com/premium/b...c30517b3afc35c

Using the RFID Card Memory
Like I was saying earlier, the RFID card that comes with this has 1 KB of memory. You can actually use that extra space to write your own data directly onto the card!

Bluetooth with an I2C interface:
https://www.i2cchip.com/pdfs/I2C2PC_Bluetooth.pdf

I2C RFID reader:
https://www.teachmemicro.com/arduino...c522-tutorial/

What you actually need is basically a smartphone equipped with an RFID reader.
https://www.rfidjournal.com/question...read-rfid-tags
https://www.rfid-wiot-search.com/pro...erminal-reader
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesa...id-reader.html

Oh, and don't forget to toss in a micro SD card so you can actually store all that data.

There’s a massive variety of RFID tags and readers out there. You've got the standard LF stuff, like 128kHz, which gets you about 4 inches of range. Then there's HF/NFC at 13.56MHz that can reach out to maybe 3 feet. If you want to go big, you've got UHF around 900MHz reaching up to 40 feet. You even have passive and active readers—those active ones send out their own signal to wake up the tag—which can hit distances up to 330 feet!

Besides just using a phone, you can grab some "out-of-the-box" solutions that are about the size of a pack of cigarettes if you want to install them. Most of them come with Ethernet, RS232, RS485, or USB ports, so you can power them directly if they're being mounted in a fixed spot. They can work totally online or stay offline—meaning they aren't tethered to a constant connection because they can just save everything locally onto a SmartDisc.

Patrick Martin said:something to eat?

I mean, sure, you *could* eat it. But honestly? It's more like something you should steer clear of. You know it's out there, so just don't go near it. You really don't need that kind of trouble in your life.

I haven't even seen the movie yet.

But seriously, does anyone here actually know what a Marilyn is?

fadedmarlin13 said:I was trying to wipe my USB drive, but I accidentally hit "quick format" on my main hard drive partition instead. Obviously, everything is gone now. Is there anything I can actually do to fix this?

Basically, your FAT table (or the MFT if you're on NTFS) just got wiped out, but don't panic—the actual files and data are likely still sitting right where they were on the physical drive.

You could give Windows file Recovery a shot if you're running Win 10 +, though honestly, I'm not totally sure how well it handles thumb drives.
https://www.ubackup.com/data-recover...rmat-0616.html

There’s a ton of free tools out there that scan your disk or stick to pull those files back. Usually, you just have to manually hunt through and rename the files once they show up.

For example: EaseUS is free if you're looking to grab up to 2GB.
https://www.easeus.com/datarecoveryw...SAAEgKqiPD_BwE

https://www.jihosoft.com/recover-dat...-recovery.html

Dude, it's a 1TB drive (so about 931GB actual usable space), not 1000MB.

Check out these steps if you're trying to shrink that C: partition. Honestly, Disk Management can be super flaky sometimes and just won't cooperate.
https://superuser.com/questions/1017...s-10-partition
https://www.download3k.com/articles/...-located-00432

If you want to go the 3rd party route:
https://www.easeus.com/partition-man...partition.html

Eh, whatever, I’m just flexing a little. 🕺

But hey, I actually know how to fix up a Harley-Davidson 5. 🕺

shadowlynx102 said:Well, you could've spotted that right away from this:

Not necessarily though:

What is failing attribute #05?
Attribute #05 is the Reallocated Sector Count. The drive has too many bad sectors, probably more than 500.

Look, every single hard drive (and even SSDs) uses an ECC mechanism—basically software built right into the drive's controller—to fix one or two bits within a 512-byte sector (if you're dealing with those older small-sector standards). That’s why the actual physical sector size is always bigger than 512 bytes, sometimes hitting 700+!

When drives leave the factory, they go through intense "burn-in" testing. Any data about bad sectors that ECC can't fix, plus the info on sectors that *did* need fixing, gets logged into a special "hidden" table stored directly on the HDD or flash drive's firmware.

It’s basically the modern version of the old-school low-level formatting that users used to do back in the day before everyone stopped doing it. Where that table lives depends on how the drive organizes its data—like where the servo data for head positioning is tucked away, whether it's embedded in the sector, the servo cylinder, or the servo plate. All of that plays a massive role in how fast you can actually grab your data.

And hey, those "bad" sectors can't go on forever; there's a limit to how big that table can get for a bunch of different reasons. It gets even messier because there's this whole process of translating physical sectors (you know, Cylinder/Head/Sector) into logical ones. This is all optimized to speed up sequential access and help multi-disk or multi-head systems work in parallel, which is way harder than it sounds—especially when bad sectors start messing things up.

Usually, the drive's internal OS just reallocates a bad sector to a "healthy" one, unless it's one of those super critical ones (like how back in the day, if sector 1 on head 0, cylinder 0 got hit, it was game over for the whole drive—same goes for things like the FAT or MFT, though most of that's been fixed now). A "Low Level Format" basically wipes that table clean and scans the whole thing from scratch, but honestly, that doesn't always work great. Some sectors are just flaky—they look fine during one pass and then totally fail the next, just being unstable. Manufacturers handle this using huge statistical samples of identical drives. I’ve personally run tests for ten days straight without getting a clear answer, and that was just on relatively small drives.

While it's running, the drive's internal OS monitors things via ECC. If it sees a sector is acting up—meaning it constantly has to use software to patch the data—it'll run "scrubbing" (that's a periodic background refresh of the physical sectors) and after a few failed attempts, it'll finally kill off or reallocate that sector. That’s essentially what SMART is doing, among other things.

On top of all that, you've got the actual OS file system organization that hits the disk from the moment you boot up, but I won't bore you with all the details. I used to be able to "hide" a certain number of bad sectors myself, as long as nobody messed with the formatting or partitioning, regardless of what the factory tables said. The real question is just at which level you're going to deal with the table.

Basically, on a standard PC, you're dealing with two layers of operating systems:

- The OS living on the HDD/SSD itself
- Your standard OS (Windows/macOS/Linux)

And don't forget the BIOS/POST, which is really just a primitive OS in its own right. These days, it’s mostly replaced by UEFI, which is much more versatile, so you've basically got:

- OS at the HDD/SSD level
- UEFI OS
- Standard OS

If you’re running a SCSI/SAS setup or a RAID controller, you’ve basically got an extra layer stuck in the middle.

- OS at the HDD/SSD level
- RAID controller OS
- UEFI OS
- Standard OS

And then you throw disk storage on top of all that, and man, things get interesting.

Basically—asking "is this drive actually dying?" is way more complicated than it looks.

PS: if you're feeling adventurous and have some free time, check out Spinrite.

A virus?

Don't even think about it.

Sam Peterson6 said:So, if you're trying to figure out if your DVD drive is actually busted or just being a pain, here’s what I did. I hooked up an external DVD drive and tried running an installation to see if it would actually work:
Windows 7
Windows 8... man, what a ride. Just thinking about that OS brings back some serious memories. It was definitely a choice, wasn't it? A bold, confusing, "what were they thinking?" kind of choice. Still, we all lived through it!
Windows 10
Ugh, man, I’m getting the exact same headache on all three machines. Every single time I restart the laptop, I just get stuck staring at a black screen with that annoying error message popping up. Total nightmare! Ugh, the classic "NTLDR is missing" nightmare. Seriously? Just hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot and see if that clears the cobwebs.
And just like that, stuck in the same spot again. Not moving an inch.
But then I popped in that "Hirens Boot 15.2" DVD, and man, everything just works! You get the list with Mini WinXP, Linux, DOS, and it all boots up smooth without any drama at all.

So, look, that external DVD drive is plugging into a USB port, which eventually talks to the SATA controller. That means we could still be looking at a glitchy controller itself, or maybe just some annoying SATA collision between the DVD and the HDD. But hey, at least we're narrowing things down!

Look, you could try getting a little "MacGyver" with it using some of those basic tools on a Hiren’s BootCD drive. Like, maybe try to create some non-boot partitions—set up a C: and a D: drive both formatted to NTFS. Then, you could just dump the installation files, say for Windows 7, onto that D: drive. From there, you might be able to kick off the installation from D: directly onto C: as your main boot drive. It's a bit of a workaround, but hey, why not give it a shot?

It sounds like a total headache, honestly, but the whole point is just to stop that SATA traffic from crashing into the DVD drive and the HDD at the same time.

Look, obviously this doesn't fix the actual headache, but it totally points you toward where the real trouble is hiding. It’s almost certainly a SATA controller issue or some funky driver acting up.

So, this thing is an old-school 2008 model. I’m pretty sure it's running 32-bit, even though it claims to be 64-bit or whatever. Honestly? You aren't getting anything to work on it if you're trying to use Windows 7. Total dead end.
Check out this spec sheet for the HP EliteBook! It’s got some decent bones, but you know how these things go—sometimes the numbers look great on paper until you actually try to get things running. Just a heads-up if anyone's looking at picking one up.
Wait, are you sure you aren't trying to force a 64-bit OS onto it? Usually, the installation starts up in 32-bit mode first, and then the whole thing tries to switch over to 64-bit during the boot process. That might be where things are getting messy!

fadedorca66 said:An HDD can totally kick the bucket without even having bad sectors...

Try running a low level format.

Honestly, doing a low level format is pretty much pointless these days (it just fakes the signal), especially since we moved past the old IDEdiskov era and started using SMART. Besides, even if it actually worked, you'd just wipe out the factory bad sector map, and then you're really stuck with no way to fix it.

You could maybe try some deep (destructive) HDD test instead. It’ll take forever—literally days—but it really puts the drive through its paces. If there's any weakness hiding in that disk, it'll show up after a few days of testing.

Maybe the issue is with the controller, or it only pops up during boot, which you might be able to catch by repeatedly cycling the power or running tests over and over.

Or hey, maybe the DVD drive is busted, or the problem only happens when the DVD and HDD are working at the same time. You could try using some fresh media or just stick to a USB drive.

Either way, you've gotta force that error to happen so you can see what's actually going on.

I’m not totally sure about that specific model, but most laptops run dual graphics—one built-in for your everyday stuff and an add-on specifically for 3D work. In my case, the NVIDIA GeForce kicks in whenever I fire up a heavy app.

Go ahead and check what you're actually running in your Device Drivers

Also, make sure you've got the latest drivers installed for both of them.

Another thing: sometimes things just look blurry at certain resolutions or refresh rates, especially when you're trying to read text on a laptop screen. Try finding a lower resolution/refresh rate where everything looks "crisp," then slowly bump the settings up until you hit that sweet spot. Once you find it, give Gandalf another shot.