Incremental Speed Really Slow

florida guy,

Since you are having bad sector problems with this drive, I would further Mark's recommendation in that you should run chkdsk /r several times (a least three times). If the repeat passes don't show new errors, then run it every other day for a week and see if new errors show up. If they do, don't wait. Replace the drive.

If chkdsk corrects the errors, rerun the TI backup and get a good image (one without "ignore" errors in it).

And, if you want my professional opinion, I would recommend you replace the drive now. I've worked on too many computers were the hard drive fails extremely quickly once it has reached the point where yours is at.

 

Now that's more like it!

Ran chkdsk /r
Full backup 10 files 42 GB 52 minutes 36 seconds
Immediate incremental 56,051 KB 5 minutes 23 seconds
Another Immediate incremental 26,287 KB 5 minutes 10 seconds

Where do I find that?


One thing that I am not liking is that when I put a comment on my incremental it over writes the previous comments. I'd like to be able to this.

Full before installing new programs
Incremental after installing program one
Incremental after installing program two
Incremental after doing a bunch of work
etc.

Is there any way to accomplish that aside from doing separate full backups?

 

Those times are very good.

Note that TI doesn't "overwrite" the previous comments. They are still in the individual files. If you run TI, go to Restore and select the .TIB file you want, you should see the comment for that file (this may work in Explore also). Normally, TI just shows the comments for the last backup added to the set.

The Event View can be accessed by Start->Control Panel->Performance and Maintenance->Adiministrative Tools->Event Viewer

 

I must be doing something wrong. I'm looking at it in my other monitor right now. No matter what file I click on I only see the last comment I entered.

The first logged "disk" error was at 6:19 am this morning. The last one at 5:08 pm this evening. It doesn't appear there were any on previous days.

 

To view the comments you have to go one step further into the Restore or Mount Wizard. Here is a sample screenshot showing the comment for the FULL backup.



Now, when I click on the INCREMENTAL backup in the list, it shows the comment for the INCREMENTAL.

 

I see them now. That's what I was hoping for. Thanks again!

 

I was just rereading this thread to make sure I hadn't missed anything. There have been lots of great tidbits of information like learning about the event log which is cool and I will check frequently from now on for hints when I am having computer problems.

It turns out I had missed something important. I didn't see the message quoted above.

I was thinking along the lines of replacing it myself. I don't really want to wait until the thing dies completely and I have no computer at all, to deal with this. Since you tell me this is likely to happen I definitely want to be proactive about it.

That leads to a few questions...

1) Which drive to buy? SATA or ATA? Which brand? etc.

2) One of my monitors is also dying. When this issue came up I was in the process of researching what to replace it with. Since I now have two things wearing out and the system is four years old maybe it's time to replace the whole thing?

3) If I do replace the whole thing is it too early to switch to Vista?

Any thoughts are welcome.

One more thing. When I ran chkdsk /r it told me that it would do it on the next reboot. I went for my daily run while it ran. When I came back it had rebooted back to Windows. Is there a way to see the errors it corrected without watching it run?

 

An answer to your last para. Start/Admin tools/Event Viewer/Application. Look through the list for LOGON and double click. All will then be revealed

Xpilot

 

Could you post the text of these error events? And also the results of running chkdsk/r?

 

From what I've read about your computer, it supports both. I would probably go with SATA-I as it's faster than IDE/ATA. Of course, you then have to make sure TI can see the SATA drive okay. It works with the current IDE drives, but the SATA will be running off a different controller.

This is up to you. Your system is older, but still not too bad for XP. If you buy a monitor now, you can always buy just the computer later. It doesn't have to be a "package" deal.

There are a lot of different opinions on this. I would recommend you check your software. Is it Vista compatible? If not, how much is it going to cost to get Vista compatible versions? Vista is still quite "green" and it will be a while before it get more stabilized.

If you decide to use Vista (which I like, but haven't fully converted to yet...), make sure to get a Dual-Core or Quad-Core CPU computer (like the E6600 or higher). It runs a lot smoother. Also get 2GB or more of RAM (not more than 3GB, unless you're going to be running the 64-bit version).

 

Is there more than one variety of SATA? These are the two I'm looking at. Long term the first one seems to be the wisest buy. Will they work on my current system and be transportable if I buy a Vista capable machine down the road?

http://www.compusa.com/products/pro...N=200112 502485&Ne=500955&product_code=333926

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?pfp=cat3&product_code=346445

 

SATA has two "standards" out now. SATA was the original (now known as SATA-I or SATA-150). SATA-II is has twice the throughput potential and is known as SATA-II and SATA-300.

Your computer only supports SATA-150/SATA-I drives. Most (if not all) SATA-II drives will work in SATA-I mode, so that shouldn't be a problem. Some drives detect automatically and some have a jumper that defaults to SATA-150 mode (you have to remove it to get SATA-300 speeds).

Most new computers have SATA-II drives in them so you'll be able to add the drive easily to a different computer. IDE is being phased out. Some newer motherboards don't even have IDE ports and if they do you can't boot from them (they're more for supporting CD/DVD drives).

Either of the drives should work as long as your computer's BIOS will support the large drive size. I would problem check with Dell on the 500GB drive. You might need a BIOS update. (My Dell 8100 is a little older than your 8300 and it required a BIOS update to support larger drives.)

I usually use Seagate drives. I like the five year warranty. The Maxtor drives only have a one year warranty. Both are now made by Seagate.

 

There are 2 "types" of SATA with the principal difference being the maximum transfer rate. What is called SATA or SATA1 is 1.5Gbps theoretical transfer and SATA2 is 3.0Gbps theoretical transfer. SATA2 drives will work on a SATA1 machine because the spec is backwards compatible. They sometimes have a jumper on the back of the drive which can be inserted to definitely back off the transfer rate.
The above definition of SATA1 and SATA2 are how the terms get kicked around in daily use.

Either one will work with your system and SATA(both) drives are the new standard. IDE drives are on the way out so if your board supports SATA go with SATA not IDE. Vista has no problem supporting either interface.

While the SATA2 spec of 3Gbps looks way faster than the SATA1 spec, in practical terms because of other limitations the actual performance improvement ranges from zero to very little.

 

Personally, I'm a big fan of the Samsung "SpinPoint" series. Theoretically they're not the fastest but they have excellent real-world large/small file read/write transfer rates, are very quiet and run comparatively cool.

Regards

Menorcaman

 

The TI log says at 6:19:47 and 6:24:54 "Failed to read data from the disk. Failed to read from the sector 37,950,101 of the hard disk: Retry/Ignore/Ignore All/Cancel"

Here is the text from the event log for the three chkdsk /r that I did per MudCrab's suggestion.

8/9/2007 6:50:15 PM
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is XP_APPS.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 95 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 95 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 95 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
Read failure with status 0xc000009c at offset 0x483b12000 for 0x10000 bytes.
Read failure with status 0xc000009c at offset 0x483b1a000 for 0x1000 bytes.
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 58852
of name \PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\OFFICE11\OWSCLT.DLL.
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
Adding 1 bad clusters to the Bad Clusters File.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

78083932 KB total disk space.
34834076 KB in 107042 files.
35944 KB in 9043 indexes.
4 KB in bad sectors.
195004 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
43018904 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
19520983 total allocation units on disk.
10754726 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
00 c8 01 00 80 c5 01 00 15 8b 02 00 00 00 00 00 ................
d7 01 00 00 01 00 00 00 6e 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........n.......
b0 37 4a 05 00 00 00 00 a4 27 0c 78 00 00 00 00 .7J......'.x....
e8 1c e6 14 00 00 00 00 92 ce e5 d7 04 00 00 00 ................
4a 45 cd 41 02 00 00 00 c0 eb d8 af 07 00 00 00 JE.A............
a0 47 96 9a 00 00 00 00 d0 3b 07 00 22 a2 01 00 .G.......;.."...
00 00 00 00 00 70 1a 4e 08 00 00 00 53 23 00 00 .....p.N....S#..

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.

8/10/2007 6:43:11 AM
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is XP_APPS.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 1 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 1 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 1 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.

78083932 KB total disk space.
34858892 KB in 107048 files.
35972 KB in 9047 indexes.
4 KB in bad sectors.
195148 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
42993916 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
19520983 total allocation units on disk.
10748479 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
50 c8 01 00 8a c5 01 00 f5 8a 02 00 00 00 00 00 P...............
d8 01 00 00 01 00 00 00 11 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
e8 d3 66 05 00 00 00 00 9a 6e b5 78 00 00 00 00 ..f......n.x....
aa 81 5e 11 00 00 00 00 26 9c d3 ce 04 00 00 00 ..^.....&.......
6c 0b b3 41 02 00 00 00 f2 20 01 a3 07 00 00 00 l..A..... ......
90 20 96 9a 00 00 00 00 d0 3b 07 00 28 a2 01 00 . .......;..(...
00 00 00 00 00 30 9e 4f 08 00 00 00 57 23 00 00 .....0.O....W#..

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.

8/10/2007 6:50:12 PM
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is XP_APPS.
Cleaning up 2 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 2 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 2 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.

78083932 KB total disk space.
34869608 KB in 107154 files.
35988 KB in 9054 indexes.
4 KB in bad sectors.
194652 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
42983680 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
19520983 total allocation units on disk.
10745920 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
60 c8 01 00 fb c5 01 00 bc 8b 02 00 00 00 00 00 `...............
d8 01 00 00 01 00 00 00 11 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
82 81 b5 05 00 00 00 00 28 d2 f2 76 00 00 00 00 ........(..v....
bc bc b3 0f 00 00 00 00 4a c6 42 d0 04 00 00 00 ........J.B.....
18 21 88 41 02 00 00 00 6a ae 07 a1 07 00 00 00 .!.A....j.......
b0 6e 96 9a 00 00 00 00 d0 3b 07 00 92 a2 01 00 .n.......;......
00 00 00 00 00 a0 45 50 08 00 00 00 5e 23 00 00 ......EP....^#..

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.

 

I called Dell and they said my computer would work with a 500 GB drive with no BIOS update. Ironically my support ends tomorrow.

I went to CompUSA and the price for the Seagate was only good Online. The Maxtor now has a warranty of 3 years. So they had the Seagate side by side for the same $109.99. The Seagate was 320GB with 5 year warranty and the Maxtor was 500 GB with 3 year warranty.

I went with the extra size over the extra warranty. It's still in the box if you want to talk me out of it. I won't get around to installing it until the morning. The log seems to indicate I fixed the problem but you seem to think it is likely only temporary.

 

Well you definitely had some bad sectors on the drive and as you can see from the output of the chkdsk program, Windows took one full cluster (4 kB) and marked it as bad.

So that was indeed the root cause of your problem. Whether you replace the drive or not is up to you but personally I would recommend replacement.

I used to use Maxtor drives all of the time but switched to Seagate a couple of years ago because of their 5-year warranty. I've never had a problem with either brand.

 

Well I guess I must have been just plain unlucky!! Bought a new SATA Seagate Barracuda 250GB last year and it went belly-up on me almost immediately after installation. Obtained a replacement from my local supplier and that also failed after just one day. Needless to say I refused a third Seagate and settled for a Samsung SP instead. My second internal HD is now also a Samsung SP and they are both wisper quiet and cool(ish) running in comparison to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 that I took out and installed in an external enclosure.

Regards

Menorcaman

 

Tom:

Ouch! Yes; we all have our horror stories to tell. The hard disk manufacturers claim that their annualized failure rates are 0.88% but in this famous study by Google the rates are found to be 2 - 4%, or even higher for older drives; see the figure on page 4.

I saw another study last year that compared annualized failure rates between all of the popular brands of hard disks and found very little difference. There was no standout brand that had significantly better reliability. But any one person can certainly point to bad experiences that they have had with a particular manufacturer's drives. One thing that you can probably say with a high degree of confidence is that any hard disk from any manufacturer will eventually fail.

 

Hi Mark,

True indeed!! Although, having said that, apart from those two Seagates, I've never suffered a physical hard drive failure in over 20 years of computer experience. However, that doesn't stop me making regular backups though.

By the way, I guess most people are aware that Maxtor are now owned by Seagate. Now I wonder whether Maxtor will increase its warranty to 5 years or whether Seagate will reduce theirs to 3 years?

Regards

Tom

 

My experience is similar, the rare failures I've had have been a few bad clusters that kept growing which gave lots of warning.

Of course, you know that drives only die when you don't have a good backup, so your preventive measures are working well.

Your experience with the Seagates is not unknown to me, not because of the brand but because of how it unfolded. I would speculate that perhaps a case of them fell off a truck and were severly shocked and your dealer got that case. Another possibility, from my days in the PC world I have seen several instances where disk manufacturers have received an run of inferior parts from a supplier or in-house causing a batch of poor drives from that manufacturer to hit the market.

 

Well, I am now happily running my new SATA drive jumpered to 150 mode as my main drive. It was a bit of a problem getting the system to recognize it. I needed to call Dell Tech support to figure it out. Funny how things work out. Today is the last day of the support period that came with my system. If this problem had cropped up a week later I wouldn't have had that resource.

In order to get the system to see it at all I had to reset my BIOS with Alt-E Alt-F and then it did an auto configuration that recognized it. Then it wouldn't recognize it as the master drive. It turns out that only one of the two SATA ports on my motherboard will recognize the new drive as the master.

Prior to swapping out the drive I created a new boot disk with the latest build of TI. I tried the same thing with Disk Director but there is no option to put that on the disk. Fortunately I bought it in a store and had the CD which was bootable. Do I have to copy the store CD to have a backup or is there a way to create one within Disk Director.

 

If you have the latest builds of TI (4942) and DD (2160) installed on the same machine then running the Bootable Media Builder program will allow you to put both products on the same CD.

 

Well, that was a tad frustrating. I thought I had the latest build of Disk Director but apparently I didn't and getting there was difficult. It appears that they didn't update the build number in the help screen. Because of that I thought ithe update wasn't working and completely uninstalled and reinstalled. Still the old build in the help screen. However, I tried the media builder and now both programs show up in there so I must have updated because it wasn't there before.

 

Nothing is ever easy.

Now that I have a much bigger main drive I want to move two of my partitions off of my remaining ATA internal drive onto the new SATA drive. I move them in Disk Director and it tells me I must reboot. I do and I get an error message "can not find partition". I tried three times. Once only moving one partition. All with the same result. When I boot back to XP nothing has changed.

What should I try? I just recently acquired Disk Director and this is the first time I've tried to change partitions with it. I used to use Partition Magic.