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Win10 "scanning and repairing" woes

tipc

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Attempting to scan a 4tb WD Mybook, after about 15 hours some activity was seen on the status bar. And it was moving fairly quickly. Then a message eas displayed an error was encountered, windows can't repair or can't proceed, so try again. Which I am doing. Barring any success this time, do I wipe the drive and start over? I have that whole drive backed up on another external drive. I could just reformat and restore the data.

It turns out this drive may be heavily fragmented. No good reason why that I know of. As the backup takes up about 2tb, but the original is nearly full (???). Anyone have a clue what's going on? Could there be a problem with the drive? Afaict the drive works normally otherwise, files are accessible.
 
I suggest downloading WD's tools and seeing what they show. SMART readings may indicate a drive that is running out of spare sectors or otherwise starting to fail. Easier to check now instead of formatting and then discovering the drive fails completely in a few weeks.

Out of room: By default, Windows keeps the older versions of file that gets modified. That can use up a lot of disk space. It can also be a warning of ransomware since the encryption process makes a second copy of everything.
 
Scanning the drive with what? Chkdsk?

A 4Tb drive with 2Tb of data on it would take quite a bit of time to scan with Chkdsk, even longer if you have it set to fix. IMO if you have a good copy of the data, then I'd just format it and then copy it back on, this would probably save a ton of time.

Do you suspect that the drive is defective and that is why you are scanning it?
 
I don't have any specific reason to believe it's defective. I just never scanned it to completion prior.

I keep 2 copies of everything I have (rather 1 copy and the original). Got to maintain your backups. But as to the specifics of the drive, as I've stated when I dumped everything on to another drive, I noticed it didn't take up anywhere near the amount of space. I may have tried checkdisk or defrag once before, and had similar results (never had it on for 15 hours though).

I bought an 8tb 2nd drive to backup the.Mybook and a 1tb Seagate. What I want to do is have 2 identical drives, and use the Mybook drive in a desktop say. But it turns out I may not have anywhere near the 5tb of crappola I thought I had. And I don't save movies or much other then homemade videos. What could be the point?
 
I want to say ntfs. Whatever the mybook was supplied as. The 8tb Seagate back up hub was originally for a mac that, unless I'm punchy, I reformatted as ntfs.

And as to the issue of ransomware, not likely. My laptop has never been on the internet. There's tons of other things from old computers. Except for a few things I've downloaded to phones or tablets and transferred to the lt, everything else is kind of old. At least 5 years old.
 
The Mybook was on clearance, sealed, presumably not repackaged. I paid about 40$ @ Target. It happens, around these parts they blow things out from time to time. All I know is I've transferred a lot of stuff to the 8tb Seagate, so even if it bites the dust, it was 40$ well spent. Personally I don't like WD, I prefer Seagate. And the Seagate was less then 120$. Which is why I want another one. As soon as I can get another deal.
 
The same data on exFAT will more than likely take up more space than when stored on NTFS, especially on multi TB drives. So I'd guess that the drive which uses more space for the same data is either exFat or FAT32 and the other is NTFS. The default for most externals is exFAT.
 
I haven't seen a WD external hard drive formatted in ExFAT; the 8 TB and 3 TB drives I picked up recently were NTFS.

ExFAT will use more space if the drive has many small files. The 128 GB SD card I have was formatted with 128 kB clusters. Don't put email on an ExFAT drive.
 
Why? Is that their way of making you buy more?

No, it has to do with filesystem overhead. If you right click on any file or folder, there will be a reported size and size on disk, which will probably be different. This has to do with how the files are stored in sectors. If your sector size is 4k then a 2k file will take up 4k on disk, now expand that out to hundreds and thousands of files, that "missing" 2k per file can really add up. Defrag is one way to fix this.

exFAT and FAT32 are known to have larger sector sizes than NTFS, which is why I asked what file system was on each drive, but it could just as easily have to do with how the files were copied from one drive to the other.
 
I agree with krebizfan, check the disk with a SMART tool to get an indication of whether it's starting to fail. If so, reformatting is probably only going to delay an eventual failure. There is lots of info on SMART tools eg https://superuser.com/questions/148...-of-checking-smart-status-for-your-hard-drive
Windows 10 periodically defrags anyway, so unless you have a real lot of file activity with deletions and the like I would not presume that fragmentation is your main problem as you mention you're just adding images from time to time. Windows does run poorly with limited disk space.
 
If your sector size is 4k then a 2k file will take up 4k on disk, now expand that out to hundreds and thousands of files, that "missing" 2k per file can really add up. Defrag is one way to fix this.
If you have hundreds and thousands of 2k files on a partition with 4k clusters defrag can't do anything to help. :)
 
Well whatever the case I'm going to eventually replace this with an identical Seagate drive. Would the wd be suitable as the main or sole hd in a desktop? Someone told me years ago that the.drives inside these external bricks aren't suitable for such. Iow they're only good for backing up and not constant use. I've been told numerous times that this.isn't so. But hearing it long ago gives me the willies.
 
Call me silly, but if it Windows or Linux, I keep my personal data on a different partition. (e.g. /home for linux). Saves a bit of grief. Even when I was using XP, I'd modify my installation to put "Documents and Settings" on a different partition.
 
(Late to the party, sorry.) My suggestion: Try to read everything off of it onto a temporary 3rd location, then wipe and reformat it, then perform a check including bad cluster search, then copy your data back to it.

I meant to ask: If the drive is USB 3.0 compatible, do you have it hooked up via USB 3.0? Hope so, otherwise the drive is going to be painfully slow during these scans.
 
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