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Disk @ 100%

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Breelander
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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165541

Postby Breelander » September 10th, 2018, 6:19 pm

BobbyD wrote:I'd start with reinstalling windows. You can spend weeks looking for the problem, ruling out this and investigating that or do a quick reinstall, which is good to do occasionally anyway...


I find that the upgrade process is virtually as good as a clean reinstall. An upgrade resets many of the registry settings that cause these types of problem back to their defaults. As MS now issue new versions of W10 every six months you machine will get a 'spring clean' twice a year. My main machine has never needed a clean install since it upgraded from W7 to W10 in Aug. 2015.

An 'upgrade' to the same version you currently have as I described earlier is a good way to fix many problems without the need to reinstall all your apps as you would have to after a clean install.

bungeejumper
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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165612

Postby bungeejumper » September 11th, 2018, 8:09 am

Very many thanks, all, and sorry to be trying your patience in this way. :)

The plot thickens. My Acer computer comes with a maintenance suite called Acer Care Center, which I finally persuaded to run yesterday (it only took an hour and a half to load!). And when I ran the system checkup, it declared a physical fault in my hard drive and advised me to copy all my data out.

Well, at least I've done the safety copy already. I guess it's chkdsk time, then?

Followed probably by a disk cloning and replacement?

Cheers, and thanks

BJ

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165709

Postby Breelander » September 11th, 2018, 5:36 pm

bungeejumper wrote:when I ran the system checkup, it declared a physical fault in my hard drive and advised me to copy all my data out.
Well, at least I've done the safety copy already. I guess it's chkdsk time, then?
Followed probably by a disk cloning and replacement?


I think the very first thing I'd try to do is make a system image before it's too late.

People use the terms 'clone' and 'image' interchangeably, but it's important to know the difference. A clone is an exact sector-for-sector copy of the original, an image contains just the active data from the original. Both can be used to create a working system with the same partitions as the original, but an image is smaller because it doesn't contain any of the unused sectors.

Windows has it's own built-in system imaging. It's a bit cranky and there are other better ways to make images (Macrium Reflect Free being one of the best) but the advantage of using the Microsoft one is that it is already installed, nothing new needs to be written to this (potentially failing) disk.

You'll need an external usb HDD to put the image on and either a CD/DVD drive or a USB stick to make the boot media to perform the restore.

Make the system image from Control Panel > Backup & Restore (Windows 7) > Create a system image. When done, it offers to make the system repair disk on a CD/DVD. If you don't have a DVD drive, or you do but would prefer to boot from USB then skip this.

The USB boot disk can be made Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Recovery > Create a recovery drive. You do not need to 'include system files' if you just want to use it to restore an image. With system files included it becomes capable of clean installing Windows on a blank drive. As this is an Acer OEM install, the 'system files' will also include all the Acer custom drivers and utilities - it will be the 'Factory Reset' drive for your specific model - well worth making in any case.

The next thing I'd do is replace the HDD. Then I'd restore the system image to that before working on repairing the damage (if any) the system had suffered while on the old drive.


Edit: on reflection making a recovery drive including system files is the VERY first thing I would do. If all else fails, you would at least be able to create a clean 'Factory reset' install on a new drive.

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165716

Postby bungeejumper » September 11th, 2018, 6:26 pm

Breelander wrote:
bungeejumper wrote:when I ran the system checkup, it declared a physical fault in my hard drive and advised me to copy all my data out.
Well, at least I've done the safety copy already. I guess it's chkdsk time, then?
Followed probably by a disk cloning and replacement?

The next thing I'd do is replace the HDD. Then I'd restore the system image to that before working on repairing the damage (if any) the system had suffered while on the old drive.

Edit: on reflection making a recovery drive including system files is the VERY first thing I would do. If all else fails, you would at least be able to create a clean 'Factory reset' install on a new drive.

Thank you Bree, you've been in my thoughts all day. LOL, it's taken me eight attempts and about ten very slow reboots to get CHKDSK running today, and I finally managed it at 4 pm. Yay!!!! Don't even ask what the problems were - I kept on getting notifications that I didn't have the administrator rights to be managing my own computer, and all sorts of other things as well. Apparently there are about nine ways of getting to the command line, and I reckon I've tried most of them, and failed. (The one that succeeded was through Task Manager, which has a Run facility that will let you pretend that you're the administrator even if you're not. ;)

Anyway, so I finally managed to get CHKDSK running from a reboot, and it's been going for two hours now and it's only 10% finished - there's an awful lot of chuntering going on, so I suspect it's having to move a lot of stuff from bad sectors. Still, it's a lot better than sitting swearing at the machine. I may at last be getting somewhere. Your very good health, sir. :D

BJ (Will almost certainly be replacing this drive if it survives the experience.)

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165740

Postby Breelander » September 11th, 2018, 7:43 pm

bungeejumper wrote:Thank you Bree, you've been in my thoughts all day...


Just sorry I didn't respond to your post sooner, but I'm something of a 'night owl' and was fast asleep when you posted at 8:09 am :D

Top priority - make a 'Recovery Drive including system files' ASAP so you can at least 'Factory Reset' the much-needed new drive.

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165795

Postby bungeejumper » September 12th, 2018, 8:32 am

Breelander wrote:Top priority - make a 'Recovery Drive including system files' ASAP so you can at least 'Factory Reset' the much-needed new drive.

I'm on it, Bree. Computer is now back to normal, and everything is happening at the speed of light again. Life is good. :D Going to order a new disk today, and then get Macrium Reflect (I gather the freebie version is OK?)

I certainly did learn some interesting techie terminology along the way, though. An "elevated request" was required for some tasks, and apparently that didn't mean shouting at the computer from the top of a ladder. :lol: And apparently it's a bad thing if your drive is not locked. (Which seemed to mean that it was still in use, which was hardly surprising in a computer that was still switched on and running. ;) )

No matter. At the ninth (or maybe tenth?) attempt to get CHKDSK to run, it finally relented (for no apparent reason) and offered me the option of running the disk check routine at the next boot-up. And once it had done that, I was home and dry.

Cheers again

BJ

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165827

Postby Breelander » September 12th, 2018, 10:41 am

bungeejumper wrote:I'm on it, Bree. Computer is now back to normal, and everything is happening at the speed of light again. Life is good. :D Going to order a new disk today, and then get Macrium Reflect (I gather the freebie version is OK?)


Yes, the free version is all you need (and all I use, come to that). The extra features in the paid for version allow things like restoring to dissimilar hardware (say you want to put the system from your laptop onto a desktop). They are not needed by most people.

But don't neglect making making a Recovery Drive including system files first. As I said, that would let you do a Factory Reset back to Acer's 'as it came out of the box' condition. Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Recovery > Create a recovery drive (or just click on Start and type 'recovery drive'). You'll need a usb of at least 8GB.

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165844

Postby bungeejumper » September 12th, 2018, 11:31 am

Breelander wrote:But don't neglect making making a Recovery Drive including system files first. As I said, that would let you do a Factory Reset back to Acer's 'as it came out of the box' condition. Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Recovery > Create a recovery drive (or just click on Start and type 'recovery drive'). You'll need a usb of at least 8GB.

Urghh, that's been the next challenge. I've had four goes at making the recovery disk (with a brand new 32 GB USB drive), and each time it stops and fails in mid-task. It's a very well-known problem, apparently. I've tried turning off the sleep/power function, disabling the antivirus and all the other magic spells and incantations that are supposed to fix it. Will try a reboot.

Ho hum, these things are sent to try us. What a pity that they so often succeed. ;)

BJ

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#165928

Postby twotwo22 » September 12th, 2018, 4:28 pm

If you know where 'your stuff' is you are probably just as well copying it off to a USB drive, with drag and drop or control C and control V.
I am talking about your documents and where you keep them and your photos and stuff like that. Just copy them off while you can.

If you have not yet ordered a drive then consider an SSD, much much faster.

bungeejumper
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Re: Disk @ 100%

#166024

Postby bungeejumper » September 13th, 2018, 9:27 am

twotwo22 wrote:If you know where 'your stuff' is you are probably just as well copying it off to a USB drive, with drag and drop or control C and control V.
I am talking about your documents and where you keep them and your photos and stuff like that. Just copy them off while you can.

If you have not yet ordered a drive then consider an SSD, much much faster.

Thanks 2222. I agree that simply copying stuff out and copying it back seems like the simplest and unfussiest way to proceed. That's all copied out and secure now. :)

I'd have tried an SSD, but bothered about the cost. At present I have a 3 terabyte WDC drive (although actually I could have managed with 1 terabyte), and I'd understood that replacing like-with-like in SSD would have cost me the thick end of £1,000. And that I would indeed need an identically sized 3 tb drive to get the Macrium transfer done. Maybe that's wrong, though? Either way, I've ordered another 3tb WDC drive.

BJ

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#166025

Postby bungeejumper » September 13th, 2018, 9:35 am

Speaking of which, here's a funny thing.....

I noticed yesterday that my copy of Microsoft Edge wasn't loading websites at all. I hate Edge with a vengeance, not least because of the useless Bing, so I only use it perhaps once a week and I hadn't noticed the prob till today.

Having tried (and failed) to either Repair or Reset using the supplied tools, I decided to sideline it, by setting all my program defaults so that they used IE instead.

And whaddaya know? My 100% HDD overload has vanished. Disappeared. Gone. Not even 50%, even under extreme load.

I hate Edge even more now. :lol:

BJ

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#166060

Postby mc2fool » September 13th, 2018, 11:45 am

bungeejumper wrote:I'd have tried an SSD, but bothered about the cost. At present I have a 3 terabyte WDC drive (although actually I could have managed with 1 terabyte), and I'd understood that replacing like-with-like in SSD would have cost me the thick end of £1,000. And that I would indeed need an identically sized 3 tb drive to get the Macrium transfer done. Maybe that's wrong, though? Either way, I've ordered another 3tb WDC drive.

The Macrium system image only saves the data used (and not the unused space), and the backup is compressed. My Macrium full images are about 55% of the used space, so if you're only using 1TB you might be able to get away with, say, a 600GB drive ... although I wouldn't recommend trying it that tight, but certainly a 1TB drive would be more than enough.

You don't say what form your computer is (laptop, desktop, all-in-one: I see Acer make Aspire models of all of those), but if it's a desktop you may consider also buying an SSD and putting the Windows system on that and your data on the 3TB. A 120GB SSD would do, although I'd recommend one twice that size. You'll definitely notice the difference. :D

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#166091

Postby Infrasonic » September 13th, 2018, 1:54 pm

Other drive stuff to consider.

SSHD's are worth looking at if you want the cheaper high capacity of a traditional HDD with some of the SSD low latency benefits, most SSHD's auto cache the SSD bit with a learning algorithm.

You can get them as 2.5" or 3.5", one of the advantages of the smaller form factor is if you want to put it into a USB caddy or SATA/USB adapter (to run as an external) then it should be able to run off the USB juice (USB 3.0 and up...), whereas most 3.5" will need an external PSU.

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#166140

Postby Breelander » September 13th, 2018, 7:17 pm

mc2fool wrote:
bungeejumper wrote:...And that I would indeed need an identically sized 3 tb drive to get the Macrium transfer done...

The Macrium system image only saves the data used (and not the unused space), and the backup is compressed. My Macrium full images are about 55% of the used space, so if you're only using 1TB you might be able to get away with, say, a 600GB drive ... although I wouldn't recommend trying it that tight, but certainly a 1TB drive would be more than enough.


My Macrium images are kept on a 1TB drive, using its slowest 'High compression' to save on space. It currently holds images of five different PCs, three with (nearly full) 500GB drives and two with 320GB drives.

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#166218

Postby twotwo22 » September 14th, 2018, 8:41 am

Had it in mind this was a laptop..appears not. You can still have an SSD.
256GB as drive C for you Boot operating system drive and then a large capacity drive for storing your files, media etc. This is what I have done. Something to consider for the future. The performance benefits of SSD are well worth having.

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#166222

Postby Infrasonic » September 14th, 2018, 9:19 am

Even laptops these days often come with an M.2 SSD boot drive (SATA or NVMe on higher spec machines) and a separate data drive.

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#166333

Postby BobbyD » September 14th, 2018, 2:17 pm

bungeejumper wrote:I'd have tried an SSD, but bothered about the cost. At present I have a 3 terabyte WDC drive (although actually I could have managed with 1 terabyte), and I'd understood that replacing like-with-like in SSD would have cost me the thick end of £1,000. And that I would indeed need an identically sized 3 tb drive to get the Macrium transfer done. Maybe that's wrong, though? Either way, I've ordered another 3tb WDC drive.

BJ


No idea if you are right about Macrium, but different software which can resotre to differently sized disks might have been cheaper...

Trueimage is £35, assuming you can't do what you want off the demo, which used to be possible.

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Re: Disk @ 100%

#180285

Postby GrandOiseau » November 14th, 2018, 4:01 pm

Do you run Glary, Malwarebytes Revo Unistaller?

Sorry if I missed it but aside from performance are there any actual errors/diagnostics that show a problem?


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