MOAR Win10+hard drive issues, FML PLZ HALP

Hardware Hub Storage
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This has been me for about 2 months now. I'm getting really tired of it. IIRC I made a thread about troubleshooting a drive (my video games drive, a WD Green 1TB) when it started doing... weird... things... to my PC.

Long story short, a friend who's been working on the drive and myself have found out it was a master file/filesystem/whatever corruption on the HDD. He still has the drive but he sold me a pair of used drives (1TB Seagate and a 750GB WD Black) on the cheap. I gave the Seagate to my father and took the WD Black for my games so I could get back to kicking ass. I installed half my Steam games and it worked fine for about a week. I managed to play through Portal 1 and 2 and play a good number of hours on a few other games with no problems at all.

Now that WD Black has suddenly started acting similarly to my WD Green when it first started showing signs of corruption. Two days ago it was working perfectly fine. Today... Steam, Battle.net, Nexus Mod Manager... REFUSE to load. I could open the folders and move files around, but couldn't actually get the programs to fully load. They'd hang up for 10 minutes. I thought it might be the mobo's SATA port being wore out. That's not the case; swapping SATA ports, cables, moving drives around, literally every test I could try short of a BIOS flash... it's not the mobo, I'm sure. And that drive is still acting up. So I copied as much data as I could off of it (damn data caps from Suddenlink, I can't redownload games forever in one month) and reformatted the drive again and tried to go back and install Battle.net on it and Steam.

I installed Battle.net and started to install Steam again. After starting the Steam install, I've had time to google search some troubleshooting, think about making this post, write this post, and do some shopping on Newegg for possible replacements AND STEAM IS STILL NOT DONE INSTALLING as of writing this sentence.

I think it's hopeless. I think the drive is physically worn out. That or Steam is just... corrupting everything it touches for some reason. Are there any bright ideas you guys have on the issue?

As for why Win10 is in the title... When I reformatted the drive, that doesn't automatically remove tiles of course. But now I can't get Steam's tile to go away. View this page, this guy had the EXACT same thing happening to him (only he got it fixed somehow): http://www.tenforums.com/general-support/12581-cant-unpin-app-start.html

In the meantime, I really need to back up my data. This whole thing has made me lose countless hours of work because I couldn't find the backups I thought I had. I'm a college student so I keep putting the backups off. But I can't use a tight budget as an excuse anymore; I'm losing too much stuff to HDD failures. Half my drives are old after all; they were gifts from people that didn't need them. Any thoughts on these? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822235009

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Are you using AHCI mode? Switching from IDE to AHCI after windows is installed can make windows crap it pants.

The icon not going away could be antivirus related. Also try pinning it again - that has worked for some.

As far as the new drive goes - that I wouldnt buy for a few reasons

6TB is asking for a drive failure


5400rpm is slow as balls

have a look at this - HGST is rock solid.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145912&cm_re=hgst-_-22-145-912-_-Product

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I've had the BIOS set to AHCI since day one, I believe.

Repinning hasn't made it go away. I'll keep playing with it till I find a way to get rid of it. Strange thing is... I went into the registry. It's not even there. Like... all my other pinned programs are there. The bugged one? Gone.

6TB might have double the failure rate of the 4TBs, but that's not saying much at only 7ish%. I suppose if I had 2 4TBs from WD that'd be a safer way to go altogether. It seems like the 3TBs are what you want to stay away from. 40% failure rate from Seagate in 2014??? WTF are those guys doing??

5400 is fine, regardless of being slow. Backup/duplicate drives don't need to load fast.

Also, those 4TBs are more expensive per TB than that 6TB, which is why I ask in the first place. In total, I have: one SSD (which won't be backed up, all I have on it is easily replaceable utility programs), one 3TB, one 250GB, one 150GB, and that 750GB WD Black that's refusing to work right. That drive is going to be replaced by either the 1TB my friend salvages (if he can) or one I might get from my father. So 4TB isn't quite enough to back up everything in the way that I want to do it.

Honestly, what I need is a NAS so I can one-and-done this BS. But I can't afford that. But a single 6TB at $215 that's just big enough to cover me getting another 1TB and/or replacing those small, old drives I use for music/documents/etc? The reason it's appealing is it covers what I need at a price I can afford right now. And at that point, gambling between a 3% failure rate and a 7% failure rate doesn't bother me that much.

Just some thoughts

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Oh, and I went ahead and tried Steam on another one of my drives. It installed just fine. I'm playing Path of Exile right now. So I'm sure it's that WD drive that's bad.

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...please don't. Future you loves present you for the backup you did just now.
Note bene: just now is perennially applicable :)

Recursive love, not mutually exclusive of free love.
But before you can fully appreciate recursion, you must first understand recursion...

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'pinned' just means a shortcut has been made under %userprofile%\someBSsubdir - it has no functional imapct, except upon the shortcut itself...

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Oh, I know... I know... I have learned. I don't know how many hundreds of hours of work I lost when my games drive got corrupted. I kept my modding files for TES IV: Oblivion organized with the compressed copies of the mods I currently had installed. Those files I DID have a backup to... somehwere... can't find them though. That is why I'm looking to get a backup drive NOW. Not doing this again.

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True - but that has fixed the issue for others.

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Any data you don't have >1 copies of is data you don't care about.

A backup is data that exists in >1 location.
You can put data in >1 location by copying it.
If you get tired of doing the same action over and over, why not automate it?
Repetitive actions, such as copying the same data to the same secondary and tertiary locations over and over and over every time a file changes in x\y\z dir is a perfect candidate for automation.
Automation can be achieveed with freely available free software you can get for free, such as Robocopy.

Hint: Robocopy can be set to watch a source dir for any changes, and then copy those changes to destination dir(s).
Hint: Robocopy is _free_ from M$ & instantly gets 69,000 CoolPoints™ when name dropped as a backup solution amongst peers
Hint: http://ss64.com/ is a cool-ass place to learn about setting Robocopy commands

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20160302_040540.jpg1075x1912 479 KB

Well, here's the problem... The left one is the one that won't go away. The right one is the new installation.

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....ouchieeez....

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i wanted to set up that 6TB drive into 4 or so partitions and have it autocopy each smaller drive in my system once a day or whatever.

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No, no...
Hardware failure == loss of everything on the hardware...

You wanna auto.copy .everythingImportant2u into some other HW...

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What do you mean? Yes, a hardware failure in a HDD usually means you're screwed. But waht I was saying is, the 6TB would be a master backup. So I'd have the used copy on x, y, z drives and then a copy is on the 6TB. So a one time redundancy. Preferably, I'd use a NAS and use 2 time redundancy. But I can't afford that right now.

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What's a new USB HDD worth? Buy a new one every 18 months or so, consider it insurance. Pretty F!'n cheap insurance, eh, EH?

Small drives fail small. Big drives fail big. Difference? How much stake you have in the drive. Please, I've lost sooo much nice art & photography in the era before cheapMassiveSuperFastDrives™ - just use your advantage ;)

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Yeah I see your point there. And I agree. it's just a matter of, how am I going to back up everything I have now within my budget? End goal, like I said, is a NAS. But if i can find a couple of 4ish TB drives that I can afford now and get everything backed up, eh, that'll work.

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'zactly.

I know, Money's Too Tight To Mention, & I credit you with taking the Wizard Skill Tree path (creative skill set, it's sooooo worth it, just don't specialise too hardcore, learn portability, ask @Logan) - it's the path I started on many epochs ago.

Since then I've:

  • Designed t-shirts & skateboards
  • Done multimedia for fortune 500 co's
  • Photographed Beastie Boys, Megadeth, SoaD, Brant Bjork, Satriani, many more
  • Worked in government on Indigenous & Disability Policy issues
  • Conducted overnight sleep analysis of brainwaves & homeostatic function to diagnose a variety of parasomnia
  • Remotely supported and administered entire domains & server pools nation-wide
  • Currently maintain & operate a 3 mile long road tunnel
  • I'm drunk :P (ok, ok, it's after hours & I'm not on call... fuck, I am on call...what's the worst that can happen?)
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The worst that can happen is you run out of drinks.....

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...it's like u know me...

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