Tried almost everything on these forums - please help

[TwinHeadedEagle]

Pick option 2.

 

It will install some components, don't touch anything until you get blue windows with ViVARD starting like I showed in my instructions.

 

I don't think you can get report like this, because you're running it from CD, not from USB. Anyway, let me know how many bad sectors did if found and was it able to remap them.

[lucalvo]

Hi Eagle,

 

I ran it again and still can't find the report.txt.  I still have one bad sector that Vivard was not able to fix and gave me an NRDY on it.  I was looking for a solution and came up with a few options.  Have you used any of them?

 

SpinRite (http://spinrite.com/) does nondestructive sector remapping.
At level 4 and above, it reads each sector in and then writes it back
out to the drive. Because remapping is silent, it's possible for it to
appear to do nothing, yet improve data integrity by bringing dodgy
sectors to the drive's attention.

If a sector can't be read without error, SpinRite forces the drive to
ignore the CRC and return the data anyway, retrying many times, then
making a statistical guess about the most likely contents of the sector.
(Reading a bad sector won't necessarily give the same value each try.)
Then on writing the reconstructed data back out, the drive
automatically remaps the sector, repairing it.

 

and this:

 

Another option -- which I didn't mention because it probably isn't an
option for the original poster, but which may work with your servers --
is that some high-end RAID systems can do something like SpinRite at
level 4+, as can ZFS. They call it resilvering. I don't think these
systems do statistical reconstruction, but periodic read-then-rewrite
can stave off the need to reconstruct.

 

and this:

 

fsck -cc is a read-only scan, bad blocks are then added to the bad block

inode (which smart knows nothing about), and this might not be enough
for the disk to hide the blocks (which should satisfy smart).
Maybe try fsck -cc for a non-destructive read-write test.

 

Try fsck -cc first. (Or badblocks -n) These do part of what SR does
already, so if they work, that's all you need. Step up only when you
need something that tries harder.

and this:

 

smartd is supposed to do that. The number of reallocated sectors is a prefailure SMART attribute. If it goes up in a short time your disk is failing. You can use the -I option in smartd.conf to ignore certain attributes. See man smartd.

 

Thanks for continuing to help me.

[TwinHeadedEagle]

If ViVARD found one sector that cannot be remapped, then it means you should start backing up your data and look for hard drive replacement. ViVARD is currently the best tool to test your hard drive for bad sectors.

[lucalvo]

Hi TwinHeadedEagle,

 

I agree that I need to change the hard drive.  I confirmed it by running MHDD.  Now that the problem solving is over, I want to thank you for your help.  I have dedicated a week straight, and almost 100 hours, to this problem and have learned a lot from researching every stumbling block along the way.  I haven't worked this hard on a computer since I was writing in Assembly, Fortran, and Pascal thirty years ago.  Now it's time to get back to doing something else.  I think it's great that you volunteer to help so many people with malware and other issues.  The Malwarebytes rep who emailed me far less than you did had me send him the FRST log but didn't realize that the problem wasn't malware but instead was the hard drive.  I hope you don't mind me saying that your English is very good!  At least once each day, I would stop to think in amazement, "There's a guy in Serbia who is helping me fix my computer!"  Thanks again!  A donation is on its way.

[AdvancedSetup]

Glad we could help.

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