MyDefrag Messed my Drive Badly!

[ben480]

Ok, I know this is not the kind of post the owner likes to read, but I thought it was important enough so the developer could investigate this further...

Heres what happenned in a nutshell and thats with the latest version of MyDefrag... I start defragging my D drive which I barely ever use which contains about 60 Gigs of stuff down from 80G. I used the Slow Optimize and would of used the Fast Update once a week on my NTFS formatted drives, but I never got to that. As soon as Mydefrag finished the job, my OS started acting weird a few minutes later... Everything finally  freezed up and cold reboot was required. What the heck , I said to myself... could it be? hmm, no... can't be... not my favorite defrag tool I been using for so many years... No!!...

Well Yes, MyDefrag beleive it or not for some unknown odd reason seems to have created Bad Sectors on my drive and not just a few! Like Around 10's of thousands of them! I am now using HDD Regenerator to get it back in shape.

Could the Developers look into this. I for one have a hard time to beleive this was done by MyDefrag, and bias towards the old age drive but is it really just a coincidence that I download the latest version and after a defrag, my disk is just a big bunch of unreadeable  Sectors??

Seems to me, that the latest version should be brought back to the lab for further investigation...


UPDATE: After doing some research online, MyDefrag would of messed up the bad parity checking bits thus resulting as to Windows in real Bad Sectors on 95% of the drive. It will take 3 weeks 24/7 to fix every 160 million sectors! Was this a Beta release?

[poutnik]

In general, coincidence is not itself an evidence of the cause.
When I am coughing and see the airplane to fall, I am probably not the reason.
( unless a pilot spotted me and wanted to act as kamikaze to me )

If a disk gets corrupted (D), there is high probability,
that it occurs at switching(C3) on/off, or at heavy load (C).
Defragmentation (B) makes heavy disk load.
Mydefrag (A) uses Defrag API as all other SW of this kind.
And, disk can be about to go corrupted. (C2)

The probably causality scenario is

              C2
               |
A -> B -> C -> D
               |
              C3

Should we still think A(Mydefrag) -> D(corruption)  relation is so obvious ?

            C2
             |
       C3 -> D
           

In easy 2nd scenario i see a disk corrupts when PC is switched on.
Does switching corrupt the disk ? Yes and no.

That all does not mean
we should never switch PC off
or use MyDefrag,
because the disk got bad when we did it.

[poutnik]

UPDATE: After doing some research online, MyDefrag would of messed up the bad parity checking bits thus resulting as to Windows in real Bad Sectors on 95% of the drive. It will take 3 weeks 24/7 to fix every 160 million sectors! Was this a Beta release?

MyDefrag does not work with disk at so low level to care of about parity checking.
And , AFAIK ( but can be wrong ), even low IO operations do not do that,
but it is in competency of disk firmware.

Yes, it is as all other MyDefrag versions beta release, as stated many times at many places.   
When downloading SW, it is often useful to read the info about it.

[quanthero]

As poutnik said, MyDefrag uses Defrag API built into Windows and simply sends commands to the OS to move the file move the file. In this respect, MyDefrag is not different from other defragmenters (99.9% of defragmenters work this way). So, the problem described is most likely caused by something else like faulty hardware or overheating hard drive. Since the slow optimize is really disk intensive (rewrites all the data on the drive), the disk overheating may happen.

[ben480]

In general, coincidence is not itself an evidence of the cause.
When I am coughing and see the airplane to fall, I am probably not the reason.
( unless a pilot spotted me and wanted to act as kamikaze to me )

If a disk gets corrupted (D), there is high probability,
that it occurs at switching(C3) on/off, or at heavy load (C).
Defragmentation (B) makes heavy disk load.
Mydefrag (A) uses Defrag API as all other SW of this kind.
And, disk can be about to go corrupted. (C2)

The probably causality scenario is

              C2
               |
A -> B -> C -> D
               |
              C3

Should we still think A(Mydefrag) -> D(corruption)  relation is so obvious ?

            C2
             |
       C3 -> D
           

In easy 2nd scenario i see a disk corrupts when PC is switched on.
Does switching corrupt the disk ? Yes and no.

That all does not mean
we should never switch PC off
or use MyDefrag,
because the disk got bad when we did it.

How about you calculate us the Probable causality of this:

I never had any issues with that drive, nothing at all since I bought it a few years ago and I would occasionally defrag it with JKDefrag, and a few days ago, I download MyDefrag, install it, do a defrag of the drive and end up with not 2 or 3 bad sectors but 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands! Every 10000 sectors there are 1000 Bad sectors! What does that tell you?

These are fixeable Bad Sectors with the right tool but its going to take a while with a PC working on it 24/7 to regenerate it all at only 5 million sectors scanned per day on average... by my calculations, its going to take over 30 days! Even if drive fell from an 86th story window would not yield so many bad sectors...LOL. I really don't want to blame MyDefrag but I cannot dismiss the possibility and let this happen to others because I didn't report it. I'm ready to supply more info of my hardware and run any tests developer wants or do some debugging, and if its not MyDefrag, Great! I would actually be quite happy about it!

[Joren]

...just out of morbid curiousity, have you been able to recover the log file?

-- Joren

[poutnik]

How about you calculate us the Probable causality of this:

I never had any issues with that drive, nothing at all since I bought it a few years ago and I would occasionally defrag it with JKDefrag, and a few days ago, I download MyDefrag, install it, do a defrag of the drive and end up with not 2 or 3 bad sectors but 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands! Every 10000 sectors there are 1000 Bad sectors! What does that tell you?

It tells me you have 100/1000 bad sectors and you used MyDefrag before it occurs.
Nothing more, nothing less.
It does not say Mydrag is directly manipulating sectors in addition to API calls.
It does not say there is no other process performing low level IO operations.
It does not say what was physically happening to disk.

Well, I had no issues with 1 year old SATA disk, with great S.M.A.R.T. status.
Then I have lost it in few hours.
Unless you or Jeroen have an idea, how Mydefrag could do it,
coincidence is not enough to claim there is a  bug inside MyDefrag causing this.

[Leolo]

Ben480,

Could you tell us who is the manufacturer of your hard drive?

I can give you the links for the official diagnostics tool of your drive, and you'll be able to tell whether it was a hardware failure or not.

(Judging by your description, it sure does sound like a hardware failure)

Regards.

[ben480]

Ben480,

Could you tell us who is the manufacturer of your hard drive?

I can give you the links for the official diagnostics tool of your drive, and you'll be able to tell whether it was a hardware failure or not.

(Judging by your description, it sure does sound like a hardware failure)

Regards.

Maxtor, now Seagate, and that gives me an idea, I'll pop in Seatools which I already have and see what it will find...

[Leolo]

Here's the link for the latest version:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/

Use always the DOS version if you can, it's more thorough and gives more information than the windows version.

Regards.

[jeroen]

I'm ready to supply more info of my hardware and run any tests developer wants or do some debugging

I am sorry to hear about your trouble, but CRC errors are always caused by hardware, never software. Your problem cannot possibly have been caused by a bug in MyDefrag, even though it is still in beta. As others have said, MyDefrag is based on the standard defragmentation API by Microsoft, a system library that is included in Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, and 2008. Most defragmenters are based on this API, including commercial defragmenters. Basically all MyDefrag does is send "move this file to that location" commands to the API. It does not touch the disk by itself. The heavy use of the harddisk must have triggered a hardware fault, probably overheating (could be the harddisk itself, but also the harddisk controller, the motherboard, or the power supply).

My advise is to copy everything you can from the harddisk, and then replace the disk. Do not try to repair (the data on) the harddisk, that may very likely cause more damage. I have good experiences with the software from Active@ File Recovery and Runtime GetDataBack.

[ben480]

I'm ready to supply more info of my hardware and run any tests developer wants or do some debugging

I am sorry to hear about your trouble, but CRC errors are always caused by hardware, never software. Your problem cannot possibly have been caused by a bug in MyDefrag, even though it is still in beta. As others have said, MyDefrag is based on the standard defragmentation API by Microsoft, a system library that is included in Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, and 2008. Most defragmenters are based on this API, including commercial defragmenters. Basically all MyDefrag does is send "move this file to that location" commands to the API. It does not touch the disk by itself. The heavy use of the harddisk must have triggered a hardware fault, probably overheating (could be the harddisk itself, but also the harddisk controller, the motherboard, or the power supply).

My advise is to copy everything you can from the harddisk, and then replace the disk. Do not try to repair (the data on) the harddisk, that may very likely cause more damage. I have good experiences with the software from Active@ File Recovery and Runtime GetDataBack.

Ok, so Slow optimize someone said earlier it is a very intensive task, but I found it gives the best defragment I ever saw and I bought several commercial Packages. Is it really too intensive on a drive? I doubt also my bad sectors was caused by Mydefrag. I repaired all the bad sectors with HDD Regenerator and repartitioned to reset the allocation table. I'll give MyDefrag another shot as for some reason,I trust your expertise that MyDefrag can't be responsible.

[gerdb]

Is it really too intensive on a drive?

No, not in general. But if the drive already has weaknesses or if it receives an insufficient airflow, an intensive task like slow optimize may trigger faults. There are many tools out there to monitor disk temperatures. During normal operation (mostly idle), disk temperature should stay below 40° Celsius and should not rise much above even during intensive tasks. If it does, try to improve airflow around your disk. Consumer-grade drives suffer from drastically reduced lifespan if the are regularly operated above 50° Celsius.

[schitzn]

Im sorry, but I couldnt help comment.

Seeming Im no longer a regular, Im going to do the honours...

Your ranting and its oozing too much over confident cockiness.   Bad Sectors are that, areas of the disk that are NOT repairable, sure you can remove the flag that classifies it as a bad sector, but its still physically faulting in that area of the platter.  I say you don't have bad sectors at all, rather file system corruption.  If you truely have bad sectors and hundres of thousands of them, and they appeared out of no where, then you better rap your hard disk in ice, and do what Jeroen said and use GetDataBack, or failing that SpinRite for reading the damaged sectors by moving the head in particular motions to increase the likihood of reading the magnetic data correctly, cause your disk is on its last legs.

In your instance, bad sectors in your quantity will certain produce 'grown defects' rapidly.

By the way, that clicking sound is not a feature.

[jeroen]

Consumer-grade drives suffer from drastically reduced lifespan if the are regularly operated above 50° Celsius.

I agree that harddisk temperature should be kept as low as possible, definitely. But harddisks are constructed for different operating temperatures, so it's not correct to say that all harddisks should run below 50° Celsius. The maximum depends on the disk.