Case notes · PCs & notebooks · PLY-2025-0326
Its Own Verdict Is Healthy. The Surface Read Stops.
The IdeaPad had already been sold and its buyer was waiting, so this began life as a clear-out before handover. Before erasing anything he ran Lenovo’s own diagnostics, and got back two verdicts that cannot both be true: it passes the health check, and the long scan errors out every time I run it
. What he made of that was reasonable enough — the laptop itself is fine, so it has to be the disk
— and three folders were all he wanted.
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Why it happens.
SMART is a disk marking its own work. It keeps a short list of counters and measures them against thresholds the manufacturer set with plenty of slack, which is precisely how a badly worn drive can still print the word pass. Something quite different happens in an extended test: it reads across the entire surface and stops dead at whatever it cannot get through. Both can be telling the truth and still disagree, and their disagreement is the useful part. Back whichever test actually put a head over the platters. A great many disks give you nothing in the way of warning. His had been giving one for months.
The kit this job called for.
How the job runs →| The kit | What it did here | Why we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Read out the vendor logs and the defect tables SMART never shows anybody | Drops the disk into its maker's service mode, out of reach over plain ATA |
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Copied in two runs: willing ground to begin with, the slow band afterwards | Scores every head before it starts, works one surface at a time, and holds resets, timeouts and power in check |
| R-Studio Technician | Pulled the three folders out of the image, then opened each file in them | Reads nearly every file system, and rebuilds RAID sets from images |
How it ran.
Read what sits beneath the verdict
Under the verdict the figures were a good deal uglier. Reallocation had risen every month for the best part of a year, another batch of addresses sat pending with no resolution, and one band of platter gave up its contents far more slowly than the ground on either side of it. Not one of those had crossed a threshold, so the drive went on passing itself. Many disks end their lives in that gap.
Three folders were wanted; everything got copied
Fetching three folders on demand would have the heads hopping all over a surface already going, since those files lay scattered over every surface in the unit. A single even sweep, start to finish, is far kinder to the mechanics, and the awkward band can be left for a closing pass. While that goes on, everything else is already secure on the copy, taken during the period the drive was still obliging.
A file listing is not evidence
Photographs, spreadsheets and letters came out of the completed image. Nothing was simply counted. Every file got opened, because a name in a listing tells you very little indeed about the file underneath it. The unreadable addresses were then compared with the file table. Not one belonged to the three folders he had asked about.
How it ended up.
The three folders went back to Plymstock verified, and a complete image of the rest is held here. The old disk came out before the IdeaPad went to its buyer, and an SSD went in. It had been declining rather faster than its own report was willing to admit.
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