# Question about Hard Drive Surface Test



## durikaj (Feb 16, 2012)

I'm currently running a HDSurface Test due to issues with recording playback. It's been running for about 15 hours now, and for the past hour it's said 100% complete, although the errors found and errors corrected numbers keep going up.

Any idea about why it would read 100% complete, and how much longer it might take to actually complete?

Thanks.


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## litzdog911 (Jun 23, 2004)

If it's finding errors then your hard drive is defective. Call DirecTV to request a replacement Receiver/DVR. It's free if you have their Equipment Protection Plan, or within 90-days of installation. Otherwise ~$20 for shipping. Or ~$50 to have a tech come replace it for you.


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## durikaj (Feb 16, 2012)

litzdog911 said:


> If it's finding errors then your hard drive is defective. Call DirecTV to request a replacement Receiver/DVR. It's free if you have their Equipment Protection Plan, or within 90-days of installation. Otherwise ~$20 for shipping. Or ~$50 to have a tech come replace it for you.


It's finding errors, but it's saying that all errors found have been corrected thus far...


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## simtra (Jan 31, 2008)

Once a drive starts to report surface errors, it normally is not long until the drive just dies totally. If you think about why there are surface errors (like dirt or scratches) it is normally safe to assume that the problem will show up on other areas of the drive.

I don't know if DirecTV will replace it since it is still working and users are not supposed to be inside the DVR to do a surface test but I would not record any shows I don't want to miss on it.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

simtra said:


> I don't know if DirecTV will replace it since it is still working and users are not supposed to be inside the DVR to do a surface test but I would not record any shows I don't want to miss on it.


"Users" aren't inside the DVR, as this is a diagnostic menu found through the front panel.


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## allenn (Nov 19, 2005)

litzdog911 said:


> If it's finding errors then your hard drive is defective. Call DirecTV to request a replacement Receiver/DVR. It's free if you have their Equipment Protection Plan, or within 90-days of installation. Otherwise ~$20 for shipping. Or ~$50 to have a tech come replace it for you.


Best advise all day! Do what Litzdog said.

I had an owned HR21-700 which had a D* HDD error. I pulled the drive, and I ran multiple HDD diagnostic programs which reported the HDD problem had been corrected. Well, I wasted a lot of time, because I had to replace the DVR. Yes, I could have purchased a new HDD; but the price of a multi-media HDD is very high, and now there is a shortage of HDDs. Best wishes!


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## jdspencer (Nov 8, 2003)

Early last year my HR20 started to do this. It would report that things were fixed and then do another test.
I finally replaced it with an HR24


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## kevinturcotte (Dec 19, 2006)

How do you launch the test? How long does it take (500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB)?


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## Wilhite (May 5, 2004)

kevinturcotte said:


> How do you launch the test? How long does it take (500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB)?


My external 2TB drive would take over 24 hours to run the test. It always launched itself when the unit would reboot.


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## Go Beavs (Nov 18, 2008)

kevinturcotte said:


> How do you launch the test? How long does it take (500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB)?


Press 'Select' during reboot when the "receiver self check" message is on the screen. You'll get into the diagnostic menus. There are all sorts of tests you can run including the hard drive tests.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

Go Beavs said:


> Press 'Select' during reboot when the "receiver self check" message is on the screen. You'll get into the diagnostic menus. There are all sorts of tests you can run including the hard drive tests.


the old 300 GB Seagates took 90 min.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

simtra said:


> Once a drive starts to report surface errors, it normally is not long until the drive just dies totally. If you think about why there are surface errors (like dirt or scratches) it is normally safe to assume that the problem will show up on other areas of the drive...


I am not sure I can totally buy that assumption. HDDs all have surface errors from the beginning. The original full scan done before you purchase it sectors out the errors that are there. The surface scan in the DVR does the same thing.

"Repaired" is a misnomer; no potholes are filled by this process. Instead, a map of where the potholes are is kept by the drive and it is instructed to simply not write there. Depending on how the surface scan routine is written, it may be also recounting errors that were sectored out during production along with new errors. This means counting them is a fairly inaccurate path to drawing a conclusion about that.

It is not unusual for surface errors to appear on a HDD after it is in use, but if you are seeing a lot of them (which is hard to judge from the test) it could mean it is failing, yes. There is just no true connection between reported surface errors and a failing drive that is a reliable indication of that.

A new drive has surface errors pretty early on, and will have more as it is used. This explains why on a PC drive files will become fragmented even if there is contiguous space for a file (it writes, sees errors, and continues writing somewhere else). Since drives are built in clean rooms, there is not much chance of dirt of debris, and the head does not ever (hopefully) touch the surface; if it ever did you would have much more severe problems to worry about. So "scratches" is also pretty much a misnomer.

Surface errors, once the original ones are sectored out, are the surface flaking off. Yes, that causes debris, but the flakes are small enough to not get between the surface and the head, and are usually forced to the edge of the housing just due to the centrifugal force of the air movement over the surface, meaning the odds of minor flaking causing more problems are small, and major flaking means you already have a serious issue anyway. The flaking is aggravated by expansion and contraction, which is one of the reasons why heat is not good for longevity, and also contributes to the theory that a drive that spins up and down will fail earlier than one that spins continuously (which is of course just the opposite if it is the bearing that fails).

The correlation is not between surface errors and failure, as much as it is between suspecting HDD problems and finding them (suspected drives are often bad drives, while those not suspected often are not). The surface errors it finds may or may not have anything to do with the actual health of the drive; you would have to know how many any what that amount actually means to draw a correlation.


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## TBoneit (Jul 27, 2006)

Once a drive has used up all the spare sectors it has reached the end IMO.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

TBoneit said:


> Once a drive has used up all the spare sectors it has reached the end IMO.


"Spare" sectors. Hmmm. That's interesting; I had not heard about that. Can you enlighten us a bit?

It would not make much sense that running out of them would be the death knell for a HDD; though it might mean the surface scan would then be less effective I guess. But the drive would still work, wouldn't it?


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## Drucifer (Feb 12, 2009)

Go Beavs said:


> Press 'Select' during reboot when the "receiver self check" message is on the screen. You'll get into the diagnostic menus. There are all sorts of tests you can run including the hard drive tests.


Could of used that knowledge a few weeks ago when my HR21-100 started randomly rebooting. Apparently, it didn't recover from its last reboot as I found it dead when I went to check why it was missing from Whole-Home/Status again. It was so dead, even a RBR wouldn't wake it. Had to pull the plug from the electric outlet.

It got as far the Receiver Self-Check screen when it switched over to scanning disk which ran for over a hour. It then reported a diagnostic code 15.

It just so damn annoying thinking of all the wasted time I spent with a DirecTV on the phone over the last few weeks telling me to check this connection and those lights, when I knew and they probably knew the drive was failing.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

TBoneit said:


> Once a drive has used up all the spare sectors it has reached the end IMO.


Sometimes bad power (noise, ripples, glitches) could produce 'soft' error during writing. There is methods to erase internal "G" list of bad sectors and run new scan with remapping what would recover these 'soft' bad sectors, also it would find and remap really weak/bad sectors to spare area. So far I saw in Seagates the limit is 4096.
About DVR utils - they are pretty easy and while developers keep silence about its algos, judging by results and spent time I would say these are not that comprehensive as should be.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Drucifer said:


> Could of used that knowledge a few weeks ago when my HR21-100 started randomly rebooting. Apparently, it didn't recover from its last reboot as I found it dead when I went to check why it was missing from Whole-Home/Status again. It was so dead, even a RBR wouldn't wake it. Had to pull the plug from the electric outlet.
> 
> It got as far the Receiver Self-Check screen when it switched over to scanning disk which ran for over a hour. It then reported a diagnostic code 15.
> 
> It just so damn annoying thinking of all the wasted time I spent with a DirecTV on the phone over the last few weeks telling me to check this connection and those lights, when I knew and they probably knew the drive was failing.


If you could take out the drive and run some program (MHDD from a CD), then we could know its health [SMART] and by scanning - how many bad sectors it will develop by one pass.


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## nsolot (Nov 25, 2009)

P Smith said:


> Sometimes bad power (noise, ripples, glitches) could produce 'soft' error during writing. There is methods to erase internal "G" list of bad sectors and run new scan with remapping what would recover these 'soft' bad sectors, also it would find and remap really weak/bad sectors to spare area. So far I saw in Seagates the limit is 4096.
> About DVR utils - they are pretty easy and while developers keep silence about its algos, judging by results and spent time I would say these are not that comprehensive as should be.


IME, "bad power" will most definitely reduce the lifespan of hard drives. All my computers are hooked up to APC UPS, and 2 of 3 HR24 DVRs are on UPS also. We live in an area of Los Angeles with usually good and reliable power, but occasionally during a summer heatwave or winter T-storms, the UPS will start beeping to indicate a power condition (brown out I suspect) and about 50% of the time, we loose power after the UPS has "warned us".



P Smith said:


> If you could take out the drive and run some program (MHDD from a CD), then we could know its health [SMART] and by scanning - how many bad sectors it will develop by one pass.


One of the biggest advantages to running an external eSata setup is the ability to take it off the HR and put it on a PC for diagnostics. Lately I use the Western Digital software. At an old job, we used to use software called SpinRite, and on the deepest level of testing it claimed it could test and return good sectors back into use that had been marked bad. I don't recall seeing this happen, but I do recall many times it would test and remove bad sectors, and if it was more than a handful, we would replace that hard drive. If you smell smoke, there is probably a fire nearby.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Probably someone starting BBQ .

Not always, it all depend; I understand, for regular J6P it would be overkill, but for a person who making a _decision_, the full knowledge is paramount.
SpinRite is good, but as mentioned many times, the free MHDD will make your day with same results: taking SMART before/after these scans/tests, it will give much better understanding of whole picture and tendencies.
I don't like those proprietary programs (Seatools, etc and DVR utils) what giving you meaningless error code number, it keep you practically uninformed.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

nsolot said:


> IME, "bad power" will most definitely reduce the lifespan of hard drives. All my computers are hooked up to APC UPS...


Can't imagine why. It's not as if the drive starts to dig the actuator into the platters when the voltage drops or anything else that would portend a catastrophic failure. About all that happens when a HDD loses power unexpectedly is that part of whatever data is in the buffer can spew across adjacent sectors as the actuator arm moves where it shouldn't. That will not cause disk errors, but it could corrupt data, and if that data is part of the OS, buh-bye OS.

The voltage regulator in modern power supplies usually keeps the DC at proper levels even if AC fluctuates somewhat. If AC falls enough to cause the HDD to not be able to spin at proper speed, another problem happens that is worse, which is that DC ripple increases, and that can corrupt data as read or written for that point in time. A UPS can come in handy for that, but again, this will not damage the drive, only the existing data written on the drive.

DC ripple can also happen as a common soft failure of a PS, and this can cause random reboots for the same above reason. No UPS in the world can help you then, because DC ripple is generated downstream of the AC power.



> ...we used to use software called SpinRite, and on the deepest level of testing it claimed it could test and return good sectors back into use that had been marked bad. I don't recall seeing this happen, but I do recall many times it would test and remove bad sectors...


SpinRite does not work that way.

When your PC tries to read the HDD, it tries over and over again until it reads the data (some data is harder to read if there are soft errors in the magnetic medium). It usually tries about 10 times or so, and if it hasn't got it by then, it gives up.

SpinRite does the exact same thing, except it virtually "never" gives up. It will keep trying for days to read data from bad sectors before giving up, and if if is successful it moves that data to a known good area on the drive. Then it moves on to the next sector and the next until it finds another problem, and keeps repeating that process until it has read every sector it can read on the drive that has data on it.

But again, there is no actual repair of the medium going on here. There is a DB with a map of where the known bad sectors are, and the drive uses that map to avoid those sectors. It's like a permanent no-fly zone for the actuator. SpinRite recreates and updates that DB. It's just that simple. No repair, no magic.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

P Smith said:


> ...taking SMART before/after these scans/tests, it will give much better understanding of whole picture and tendencies.
> I don't like those proprietary programs (Seatools, etc and DVR utils) what giving you meaningless error code number, it keep you practically uninformed.


There is a school of thought that lumps SMART into that same category. Lots of folks consider it practically worthless.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

Drucifer said:


> ...It just so damn annoying thinking of all the wasted time I spent with a DirecTV on the phone over the last few weeks telling me to check this connection and those lights, when I knew and they probably knew the drive was failing.


Regardless of what the actual problem may be or how it manifests, I have found that if you are to the point where you have lost faith in the drive and are willing to move forward, simply call them and tell them the DVR keeps rebooting on its own (even if that might be bending the truth ever so slightly). Bingo, replacement already on the way.


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## Drucifer (Feb 12, 2009)

TomCat said:


> Regardless of what the actual problem may be or how it manifests, I have found that if you are to the point where you have lost faith in the drive and are willing to move forward, simply call them and tell them the DVR* keeps rebooting on its own* (even if that might be bending the truth ever so slightly). Bingo, replacement already on the way.


 Bending? That what it was doing. Started almost two months with an occasional to working up to a few times a week. I would call about once a week and do their waltz.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

> But again, there is no actual repair of the medium going on here. There is a DB with a map of where the known bad sectors are, and the drive uses that map to avoid those sectors. It's like a permanent no-fly zone for the actuator. SpinRite recreates and updates that DB. It's just that simple. No repair, no magic.


There is misconception (actually more then one) - HDD internal FW (it very complicated matter, so will keep it easy) has internal tables what describe geometry of all tracks/platters by design, tables what initial [manufacturing] scan created (bad spots/sectors), G-list what is populating during 'life' of the drive, etc. Using word "DB" is exaggeration, it shouldn't be used because these are just simple tables.

Each track is 'covered' by series of recorded signals what will constitute headers and data, in case of bad spot (these header preface the spot) consist re-map address, pointing to reserved tracks. So, it cannot be described as "no fly zone' - it's just area where signals not treated as data and heads moving (by FW) to spare track to that sector(s) what is good for reading/writing.

Also SpinRite doesn't create/recreate/update those internal tables/lists. It's a strict prerogative of FW.

Repair: yes, no repair could be done by software (perhaps at factory), but the process of eliminating bad sectors have a name - re-mapping.
This task executing by drive's FW by triggering it externally, usually reaching a threshold of retries for writing.

SMART is valuable tool ( for those who taking time to understand it). It could help to diagnose some issues non-related to guts of the drive and to internals too.


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

For how Spinrite works, episode #336 (questions and answers 135) of Security Now with Leo LaPorte and Steve Gibson goes into detail. He also is working on a new version.

http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Most accurate part of it is


> "and *induce* it to relocate sectors to safety".


The program cannot relocate sectors by itself, period. The time of such action gone long time ago.
He is just selling the program for regular ppl using plain English.

For those who know just a little about internal FW, it would be inaccurate to claim direct re-mappring capability of the (or such) program.

BTW, the market if full with other HDD 'repair' programs - they need to fight for customers...


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## bobcamp1 (Nov 8, 2007)

TomCat said:


> There is a school of thought that lumps SMART into that same category. Lots of folks consider it practically worthless.


That's me. SMART detects less than half of the problems a drive could have. It does just the most basic of tests. A real test would take approx. 3 weeks per 200 GB, and most users aren't willing to wait that long.

What Spinrite does is greatly increase the chance of inducing the move of bad sectors.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Same result you cam make in one hour per terabyte by free programs like MHDD.
You don't need to make 2000 attempts to read each one bad sector to save your data and spent weeks.

If your experience giving you 50% importance of info by obtaining SMART data (not sure if you in those SMART internal routines, judging by your verbiage) then it's far from "consider it practically worthless". 
Especially making such valuable statement without verification. Do you have links to read what "Lots of folks consider" ?

Also, I don't understand the imperative of your - spinrite, only spinrite on whole planet Earth...


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## rinnersan (May 27, 2009)

Help! I pushed select during receiver self check on my HR20-700 and nothing happened. I suspect I have hard drive problems on my WD external hard drive.


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## peds48 (Jan 11, 2008)

rinnersan said:


> Help! I pushed select during receiver self check on my HR20-700 and nothing happened. I suspect I have hard drive problems on my WD external hard drive.


press EXIT or do a red button reset

Sent from my iPad Pro using Tapatalk


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