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Well, 3 days later and USN completed overnight. Stalled at 21% for almost 2 days on then finished in less than 8 hours.

As I feared, another step in stage 3. See below.

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Paul T

I think we’ve scared everyone else out of the topic. oops And yes for SES. I’m still not doing much with this new install, but will have to get those sorted before plugging in the repaired drive.  Windows was unable to locate anything so your suggestion to uninstall and reinstall anything WD related will have to be my recourse. So much for a clean install. I’m almost tempted to start over from scratch.

Regarding system restore, yes I actually placed it in the screen shot intentionally to remind me about the roll back to before installing the ASmedia usb drivers. Seems to have removed them fine. I checked the drivers affected before and after. Although no, I did not know that it did not roll back 3rd party software. I thought it just did not do an automatic restore point before installing 3rd party software.

Finally I just hooked the keyboard into the USB port that can be used to flash the BIOS while powered down. That seems to have worked like a charm, so no more need for the ASmedia drivers. I would have said that I will have to remember that, but this will be my last ASUS board I think. I’m no longer infatuated with all the bells and whistles. I’m more interested in board stability now.  I originally purchased the asus premium board since it sort of straddled the line between work station and mainstream board.

Yours is quite and interesting little board. The internal wires to the external antenna connectors look like a bit of an afterthought.  I’m assuming that was to make it a bit modular so you could change out the radio in the future with a faster radio? It looks like the wires are attached to a removable card. Interesting Or maybe just because it is a small form factor board.

I’ve never used a Mini-ITX board before.  What was your original intended use for that little powerhouse. Xeon processor makes me think some kind of workstation, but I’m curious what your actual purpose for it was.

Sorry everyone. Just passing time. My repair is still stuck at 21 %

If I’m reading that screenshot correctly, it looks like you have a z77 generation motherboard there?  Same gen as the one I’m experiencing all this trouble on (Asus P8z77 premium).  Mine’s getting a bit long in the tooth.

I assume you added that 3.1 usb controller as a card?

Mine looks a little bit like the screenshot below. You can see I’ve left quite a few drivers uninstalled. The only one I’m still iffy about is the Marvel controler, although I seem to recall it was pretty buggy as well. I do have SATA drives plugged into those 6gb sata ports, but seem to have less trouble without the drivers than with. Maybe I’m not getting top speeds, but that’s okay. There are another 2 6gb sata ports that have drivers installed.

As a point of interest, I’ve also avoided installing the Intel management engine since I understand it’s only useful for some remote bios control, and I also saw recently that without an update it is a vector for attack.

satrow wrote:

A USB chipset driver install/upgrade isn’t likely, imo, to trigger a reset/redirect of devices unless shared drivers were in use, maybe something like a reconfiguration of sleep/wake timers/settings caused a momentary loss of voltage to the USB buses? Difficult to be sure without knowing the exact install routines and having access to all the logs.

I look on my ASMedia USB3 as an overflow, it’s rarely used, not been updated since the last OS install, over 2.5 years ago. I try to keep to a lean and mean, drivers only routine – currently only 15 3rd party drivers are loaded, 5 of which are security related and one of those is due for removal at the next reboot/restart – which might be 3-4 months away yet.

Yes, I am of the same mindset. I wasn’t going to even enable those ports, even though that left me with only two intel usb3 ports, until on reboot my computer would not recognise the keyboard, even though all handoffs were enabled in the bios.  Knowing from the past troubleshooting that the number 1 usb port has the best chance of firing up the keyboard during boot/post, I switched the keyboard to the ASmedia ports which for some reason ASUS decided to make the number 1 and 2 ports.  While that worked for post, as soon as I entered the windows environment I was forced to install the drivers as a necessary evil if I wanted a working keyboard during and after post.

P.S.: found the resolution that lead me down the chkdsk path:

https://community.wd.com/t/its-asking-me-to-re-format-and-i-dont-want-to/8284/7

Took a while to find. One problem leads to another.  When did firefox start restricting history to 7 days???  Miss the days when one device was enough and syncing was something spies did to their watches. In fact, lately, missing the days of typewriters. Letter jams weren’t too difficult to troubleshoot.

Yes, that probably would have been a more prudent course of action. I guess the initial panic clouded my judgement on steps I should have taken.  And I should mention that I never imagined that chkdsk would take this long.

The action I did take was to try the drive on several different computers. The behavior of how windows recognized the drive was the same on all computers. And these other computers did not have the same SES issues that my new win 7 install was having.  I did quickly investigate the SES issues, but it was generally taking me down dead ends.

I don’t recall exactly, but it may have been that SES research that lead me to the chkdsk resolution. I came across a post from someone that was having the exact same issues as me and it was completely resolved with a relatively quick chkdsk in their case.  If I still have the tab open, I will try and post a link to that resolution here.

I’m curious satrow, what are your thoughts on the ASmedia USB driver installation deleteriously affecting a drive plugged plugged into the Intel usb ports. Wish  I never installed those darn ASMedia drivers. I think they’ve been the cause of some really aberrant behaviour on my past windows 7 installs. Or maybe it’s just the ASUS board itself.  Going to try an EVGA x299 dark next time which seems to keep all usb native.

[DaveYVR]

This thread is getting a little long and easy to miss. Flattened out the conversation:

-see the quote at August 20, 2019 at 7:40 am for continuation of this thread.

Edit: I didn’t add that bbs code above. Not sure why that got plugged in automatically.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by DaveYVR.

[DaveYVR]

satrow wrote:

So you’ve never had SmartWare installed?

Just trying to troubleshoot the problem – which might just vanish if all it needs is a reinstall of the ‘missing’ software to rejoin the dots.

Hmmm, I almost missed this.  I haven’t seen nested forums for a while. Oh well, still better than the current trend of doing all this on facebook.  But I think I’ll flatten this out a bit using a quote since that thread above was getting a bit distant, and a bit narrow.

So I looked up Smartware’s description, and see that it is a backup software package. Unless it has another function I may have needed in the past, I don’t believe I would have ever intentionally installed it.  Look how well that worked out for me .

Edit: I almost forgot to mention that I was also seeing some missing SES drivers for the drive after I plugged it in again.

The info below is just chatter. No important info, so feel free to skip it:

My more sensitive / important data I keep on a dropbox directory, so no desperate need for back up.  In this case, this was a relatively new drive, with semi-important information (old projects and such) that I had hoped to backup.  My pattern is to wait a couple years for a new larger hard drives to come down in price and copy the data over, retire the smaller drive as backup, and continue forward with the larger drive.  Murphy’s law, I was just pricing out some new drives.

I used to have a nice backup program that just did a straight copy of files over to the backup location. I should really get that back up and running again, but really haven’t used it since 2007 or so.  It had a lot of the same design philosophy as macrium with iterative, full, etc.  And like so many of the backup programs, didn’t rely on creating packs or volumes that could only be read by the backup software that created them,  and make finding older files cumbersome.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by DaveYVR.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by DaveYVR.

Hi Bertram,

I took a look at the drive in Disk Management under windows. If I recall correctly, I do believe it was showing as RAW.  But I imagine this is likely due to corruption in the sensitive bits of the drive (file allocation table and such) since EaseUS could see the data and chkdsk sees files.

Does anyone have any alternatives to EaseUS that they prefer? I might as well research them while I wait for chkdsk to finish. It hasn’t moved since yesterday morning. Still at 21% of “resetting the USN information” . I’m crossing my toes that this is the last phase of stage-3!

Patience.

 

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Bertram Pincus

Hi Bluetrix,

I took a look at the link you provided. I had read that before but too early in my research to understand the relevance of it. After clicking your link and reading it a second time it is more clear that they still haven’t released version 6.1 which would officially support SATA. This was written by them in 2011:

Since this is a rapidly growing problem for SpinRite, due to the market’s rapid success and uptake of of SATA drives, we are considering the development and release of v6.1, which will cure this problem, sooner rather than later. The upgrade to v6.1 (and any other “dot releases”) of SpinRite will be no-charge and all registered owners of SpinRite will be informed as soon as v6.1 is available. This is not something we have started work on, but it has a high and growing priority.

Given that it is 8 years later, and they are still at version 6.0, it looks like something prevented them from taking their plans forward. In any case, if I understand it correctly, the problem only affects older mother boards (older in 2011).  The laptop I would use for the correction must be less than 10 years old, or a relatively new computer in 2011.

I wonder if Steve Gibson is still alive? Sounded like he was semi-retired in 1998

Okay, so GRC are the developers of SpinRite which bbearren and I were talking about earlier.  Thanks for the link and clearing me up on that.

Yes, I have heard good things about that and it’s ability to really strengthen a drive and improve the data fidelity of already stored data.  But as mentioned earlier, it would probably be my last resort since it sounds like it can take a very long time even on drives less than 1TB. I can’t imagine how long my external 8TB would take.  $89 dollars puts it in that area where I would really have to need it.  Not terribly expensive, but I prefer in the $30 or less territory for software that gets infrequent use.  For professionals though, that $89 is a steal.

It might be interesting to try on some of my older failed drives however.

One question about SpinRite: I have been reading that it occasionally has trouble with non-IDE drives depending on the motherboard. Would you know of the top of your head if they have updated and resolved these issues?

 

satrow, I have installed the the WD drive utilities program.  This is what I did the quick scan with.

At this point I am not trying to trouble shoot the original cause of the issue since I think that’s a rabbit hole I don’t have the time to go down, but for your interest, I suspect it has something to do with the ASmedia USB 3 drivers I installed on my fresh windows 7 install.

Or it may have also been something to do with the dual boot environment I had with windows 10 and windows 7. I forgot to disable the quick start in windows 10 which was leaving the disks mounted (if I recall the behavior correctly). However, since I ran several restarts in dual booting with the quick start active, I don’t believe it was this.

More likely culprit, or just pure coincidence, are the ASMedia usb drivers. The problem occurred immediately after installing the ASMedia drivers. I’m still not sure if that could have affected my WD MyBook which was plugged into the already functioning Intel USB ports at the time.  Those drivers were already installed before plugging in the WD MyBook.

Hi Bertram,

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m not familiar at all with GRC and Steve, but will look them up if chkdsk doesn’t resolve the issue.

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Bertram Pincus

satrow wrote:

Dave, list the WD software installed, please.

I’m not working from that computer at the moment so I’m not sure off the top of my head all the different WD utilities I have installed. I do recall the one utility WD has that does a quick health check of the drive. Oddly enough I used that utility in the week leading up to the failure and it detected no issues.

Would you mind me asking what you’re thinking about? Is there a particular WD driver or software that may be causing the issue?

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Bertram Pincus

That’s very good to know about the time it took. I will definitely only go down that road as a last resort then.

Thank you!

Thanks bbearren as well for your suggestion. I was replying to the others when you wrote.  I didn’t run /r since I knew it was likely going to take quite a while just for /f and that /r would increase that time several fold. I decided to just get it readable, recover as much data as possible, and then run /r  on the drive after to get an idea how much is affected by bad sectors. Then I can decide if the drive was just corrupted by windows or if it is actually failing. If /r comes up with a lot of issues I would just retire the drive.