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abolibibelot

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Posts posted by abolibibelot

  1. Quote

    I was unable to delete a file in Windows 10 yesterday so I tried a few things at a command prompt including rmdir.

    Chances are, the drive was faulty to begin with and that was the cause of the deletion issue... In which case, chances are you only made it worse with each attempt.

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    Somehow it deleted half the folders in an entirely different directory...

    How the Hell did that happen ? O_o

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    It's an external drive only used for storage - no programs on it or accessing it, and except for a handful of files Recuva said they were all recoverable. So I ran it and got about 100 of them back (I restored from the external D: drive to a folder on the C: drive), but the rest got a drive not ready error.

    Recuva can only assess if files appear to be in good condition from a logical / filesystem standpoint, it can not assess if their sectors are physically accessible.

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    So I ran it again and this time had Windows Explorer open so I could click the external drive every minute or two (for six hours) so it wouldn't go to sleep. It worked!

    And you strained a most likely defective drive a whole lot more...

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    Even worse than that, however, is that all of the files seem to be unreadable... video files can't play the file because it's unsupported, incorrect extension, or is corrupt (for media files); graphic files open to a blank screen; PDF files just say We can't open this file, something went wrong.

    To assess what is actually contained in those files you can open them in a hexadecimal editor — HxD is freeware and sufficient for that purpose, WinHex is not free but is much more complete (merely viewing files is possible with no license though) ; but it requires some experience to instantly see whether a file of a given format appears as it should or not (for instance a JPG picture always begins with "FF D8 FF", an EXE file always begins with "4D 5A 90" and so on) — although, obiously, if it contains only "00" bytes then there's nothing to read whatsoever.

    Now... to assess the physical condition of the drive, run anything that will show you its "SMART" status — free tools like CrystalDiskInfo (be sure to select the right drive based on its brand / model / serial number if you have several connected), or the free version of HDTune (click on the "Health" tab), or better but not free HD Sentinel (which has the advantage of issuing warnings at the first sign of trouble, hopefully letting the user deal with it before it's too late — which is probably where you are right now). If every line has an "OK" status in HDTune, or if every line has a blue dot and the global condition is “Good” in CrystalDiskInfo, then the drive should be physically fine, and the cause lies somewhere else. If there are warnings, especially concerning the lines "Reallocated sector count", "Current pending sector count", "Uncorrectable sector count", then the drive is physically failing. Depending on how many defective sectors it currently has, you may or may not be able to attempt a do-it-yourself recovery (I would say that it's safe if there are less than about 10 bad sectors, tricky but doable if there are up to 100, hazardous if there are up to 1000, and beyond that it's a recipe for disaster). To do that as safely as possible, it is necessary to first perform a clone or image of the whole drive ; tools of choice for this are ddrescue (Linux command line program) and HDDSuperClone (Linux GUI program) ; this ISO (a custom Lubuntu distribution made by the author of HDDSC) contains both, as well as a few complimentary tools to assist with the recovery process. But if you already created a whole other issue when trying to delete that one file from the command prompt, no offense, but you might make it worse again trying to fix this yourself (although there may be an explanation other than a screw-up on your part — see below). Best course of action at this point (if there are signs of physical failure, and if the drive indeed contains valuable and non backed-up data) would be to bring it to a dedicated data recovery company (not a general purpose computer repair shop). It's quite expensive, but it will get you the best possible outcome, and depending of how severely damaged the drive currently is, it may be the only option to get something out of it at all.

    One possibility, to explain why those files were deleted to begin with, is that there are bad sectors located on the crucial $MFT area, which contains allocation information for all files on a NTFS formatted drive. Attempting to delete a file / folder (which means re-writing the corresponding MFT records) could have added some more strain in that already damaged area and rendered a bunch of other MFT records inaccessible. On a commonly organized partition with a nested folders and subfolders hierarchy, if a single MFT record (which is only 1KB) corresponding to a parent folder in the root directory gets wiped or becomes inaccessible because of a defective sector, then the entirety of the files and folders it contains disappear (not 100% sure of this statement but that's what I would expect). If it's a strictly logical issue, running CHKDSK can in some cases fix it and make a folder which disappeared accessible again with all its former content, but it can create a whole new level of mess all of its own — CHKDSK should never be used on a drive with the slightest hint of physical issue, and should never be used without a proper backup.

    I'm only visiting tonight on this forum, and don't come regularly at all (last time was two years ago, to write this — which didn't get a single reply... é_è) so I probably won't see your reply, I hope that you'll get some further feedback, or that I provided enough insight for you to act wisely.

     

  2. @PSUHammer

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    Just out of curiosity, what update are you looking for?   What feature are you missing?

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    I guess what I am asking is what bug are you looking for to be resolved?  What isn't working?  

    This and this for instance — definitely severe issues that definitely need to be fixed.

     

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    Defraggler works fine for me unless I am overlooking something.

    See above. Huge shortcomings with “sparse” files (an issue I experienced and reported in detail two years ago) and with NTFS-compressed files (I didn't experience this one first-hand but it would be consistent with what I observed, and I sure don't want to see the result of such a mess).

     

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    Modern HDDs shouldn't need that unless you are running a FAT file system.  Running every day is probably putting unnecessary strain on your drive.

    One thing that is quite common and that can dramatically increase fragmentation, thus significantly reduce performance, is downloading large files simultaneously. I use a program which allows to download videos from various catch-up TV services, I used to download several such videos simultaneously, until I discovered that it was causing a massive fragmentation, even with a large amount of free space (each file having thousands of fragments — that would be prevented if the program could download one file at a time and queue the others, or pre-allocate the required space, but it currently allows neither), and had a lot of trouble recovering such files after a HDD failure (read the whole story here).

     
     
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  3. No reply in TWO YEARS on such a severe issue, oh well... (And Defraggler hasn't been updated since May 2018, despite this and other serious shortcomings reported on this forum.)

    I was about to defragment a whole 2TB HDD which happens to contain a lot of compressed files, using Defraggler, and while looking for the install file to install it on my older computer (since there's no newer version, I prefer to avoid downloading the same stuff twice, even for such a small file), I stumbled upon saved Web pages from this thread, which I created in June 2019, and the other one about NTFS-compressed files — I had completely forgotten about those SNAFUs.

    So I sure won't be using Defraggler to perform that task. And for once I'm thankful that my main HDD is such a mess (if it had been perfectly sorted I would have found the damn Defraggler install file right away and wouldn't have re-read those threads — and would have ended up with a dreadful mess on that other HDD).

  4. Using Defraggler 2.22.995, I noticed that it has issues dealing with NTFS “sparse” files.

    – When analysing a 931GB partition which contains several complete or partial drive images, including one complete 931GB image file with an actual size of 206GB, and several partial 3TB image files with actual sizes up to 44GB, all created with ddrescue (from a Lubuntu live session) in “sparse” mode (-S switch), Defraggler doesn't list those files (all those with the “P” attribute), and seems to identify their clusters as “free space” (the whole partition is supposed to have 35GB of free space, yet the blue blocks take up about a third of the map's surface.

    https://www.cjoint.com/c/IFrurA1Q5jA

    https://www.cjoint.com/c/IFruXQkfD8A

    – When opening that same partition, Defraggler displayed a notification saying that I could release 16GB by emptying the recycle bin – it turned out that the recycle bin contained a bunch of ”sparse” files, purposely created as almost empty, also using a ddrescue -S command, with a total size of 16GB indeed, but an actual allocated size of only 13MB. Therefore that message is misleading, and again, Defraggler is confused by the “sparse” nature of those files.

    https://www.cjoint.com/c/IFruxyvCRRA

    EDIT : In this particular case, I used Defraggler specifically to determine where the clusters of that 931GB image file were located, which it usually does very well (as I wrote here or here or here). I didn't actually attempt to defragment the partition (which according to this thread would result in quite a bit of a mess).

     

    ST1000DM003 (fichiers “sparse” non répertoriés par Defraggler).png

    Defraggler 2.2.2 ne détecte pas davantage les fichiers “sparse”.png

    Defraggler 2.2.2 notification proposant de libérer 16Go en vidant corbeille -- en fait il s'agit de fichiers compressés, taille effective 13,2Mo.png

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