Solved HDD errors

Asus S200E notebook Hitachi HTS545050A7E380 500GB HD, Win 8Pro, GPT, UEFI.


My neighbor picked up this laptop last year. It was used. He just wanted me to clean it up. While I had it, there seemed to be an issue with an update that resulted in a stop error. I don’t think it’s connected, but just in case it is, the thread is here.

Now to the relevant issue:

Once I cleared pending updates and got the system up and running, I decided to image the disk with ATIH Premium 2014 . This was a normal image, not sector by sector. Not far into the process, the following error occurred:



Chkdsk from the cmd prompt showed no errors.
So, I thought, I'll try with Free Macrium. Disk errors. So then I booted into win 8 and tried to create a system image. Win 8 declared there were disk errors on C: (OS). I allowed win 8 to scan the drive. It found no errors. Still, any attempt to create a system image returned disk errors. Win 8 also found errors on the D:\ partition (data).

So the update blue screen and the disk errors don't seem to be connected.

I'm wondering if maybe whoever had the laptop before my neighbor played around with the partitions.

Below are screenshots of disk management and diskpart:





There seems to be an extra partition in the diskpart list!

The errors don't seem to create any problems unit a disk image is created.

Thanks for any help.

You need to run offline: chkdsk /r /f C: from admin coammnd prompt

topgundcp said:

You need to run offline: chkdsk /r /f C: from admin coammnd prompt

Click to expand...

Hi topgun. I did run chkdsk multiple times. Without switches and with the /f switch. I ran it from Advanced options command prompt, not windows. I also ran it from Winpe. No errors were ever found. Only the imaging process produced errors.

There seems to be an extra partition in the diskpart list!

Click to expand...

This is normal, the 128MB unallocated partition is MSR and won't show up in Disk Management.
Try to run 2 commands from Admin Prompt:

1. Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
2. sfc /scannow
3. Try Macrium again

Thanks for the direction. Just an update. sfc@40% and taking its time. DISM stayed @20% for a good while, then failed with error 0x8024402c. In DSIM.log, there are around 4 warning lines, about the same error lines and one failed line.

Verification 100% complete. SFC found corrupt files, but was unable to fix some of them. cbs log is 3.5 mb.

You might need to run sfc multiple times until you get a message: Windows did not find any integrity violation.

NOTE: you can also delete C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log before running sfc to get a fresh and smaller log file.

Thanks. Good tip. I'm actually about to run it for the 3rd time. I'll delete the log first.

Wow! I just checked it. It's 60 MB this time! I'll move it to another location.

Hi topgun, and thanks for all of your help.

SFC never could repair the corrupt files it found, although removing some updates that I found were problematic did help with the speed (and it stopped returning error 0x8024402c after the scan...link to that article can be found here ).

What I'd really like to do is find and correct the problem, as it could help me as I look at more and more problem machines. But, between the original blue screen, the inability to create images and other various issues, I think I may just have to start over...do a clean all to wipe the disk completely clean of any issues (including alignment) and start again.

So my only question now is this:

The only way I could get the product key from this machine was to use JB keyfinder, which worked fine (as seen below). But this laptop is Win 8 Pro with Media Center. The machine owner has no disks. Will my win 8 pro CD install with his (OEM, I would guess) key? I don't guess he'll really miss Media Center, but I'd hate to wipe the disk clean only to find that his key won't work. What's the best way to handle this? Either win 8 pro or win8.1 using the tut found here with his key?

JB KF results:

Windows 8 Pro with Media Center
Product Part No.: X18-19671
Installed from 'Compliance Checked Product' media.
Product ID: xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx match to CD Key data - redacted
CD Key: xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx - redacted
Computer Name: redacted
Registered Owner: redacted
Registered Organization:

Check if you have the 2 following files in:
C:\Windows\WinSXS\pending.xml
C:\Windows\WinSXS\reboot.xml
If so, move them to somewhere else then retry sfc.

I am not sure if key for Windows 8 pro will work with Windows 8 Pro WMC, maybe someone can chip in and give you advice on it.

EDIT: From the screen shot posted above, the PC has a recovery partition of ~ 20GB, I think this is the factory image that allows you to restore Windows 8 as if you just bought the notebook. For ASUS, I think <ESC> key will display the Boot Menu where you can select to restore the PC back to the factory. However before doing so, make sure to backup the personal data first.

Actually, at the moment, I'm re-running RestoreHealth. I wound up tracking down and removing the updates that were preventing sfc from repairing and achieved success, i.e., the scan then completed with no corrupted files to repair.

Then I ran scanhealth and it returned 'component stores repairable'.

After that, I ran RestoreHealth, but wasn't connected to my NW (the scan returned an 0x8024001F error, nw connection unavailable).

So now I'm running restorehealth again (connected to NW). It's at 40%.

I'll wait until the scan is finished to check on the files you mention (if there's still an issue, that is). But I already renamed pending.xml to pending.old when I was having startup problems.

I'll post back with my results. Thanks for hanging in there. Much, much appreciated!

topgundcp said:

EDIT: From the screen shot posted above, the PC has a recovery partition of ~ 20GB, I think this is the factory image that allows you to restore Windows 8 as if you just bought the notebook. For ASUS, I think <ESC> key will display the Boot Menu where you can select to restore the PC back to the factory. However before doing so, make sure to backup the personal data first.

Click to expand...

That's really one of the problems I'm trying to resolve. I can't make a system image (see OP). I've tried Acronis and Macrium boot cds and windows recovery with no luck. But hopefully, I'm getting closer. I'd really like to be able to image or clone the disk before anything else.

I overlooked the chkdsk command that you've used. If I understood correctly, you did run chkdsk C: /f . If so, you need to run with /r switch also. /r will take a while to run which it will mark all the bad sectors so Windows will avoid using it.
You can also download: CrystalDiskInfo5_6_2Shizuku.zip and have a look at the HD to see if there's no bad sectors.

Just checking in...my week has taken over so time is limited at the moment, but wanted to say: Good call on the /f /r and the crystaldisk. Turns out the drive does have errors which were repaired, but Crystal sees the disk as caution do to the bad sectors. After allowing chkdsk to repair, I am able to image the disk.

So I have another drive coming in and will clone and replace it. But I think there are still issues with the update situation, which I'll check after the new disk is in (along with sfc and more chkdsk). I'll post back after. Just wanted to say thanks for your suggestions and help.

Yes, CrystaldiskInfo will give caution if it found bad sectors. You can retry to run sfc again a few more times, maybe it will fix the problem.
BTW, thanks for thr rep.

Update: I received the new drive and after running chkdsk /f /r multiple times (on old disk), I was able to successfully clone the old disk to the new disk (i.e., without cloning interruption due to Disk I/O errors). So all is well there (I ran chkdsk and sfc /scannow again on the new drive).

I still have component store corruption errors. Restorehealth won't complete due to source errors. I've edited GPedit to hardwire WU as the source and disabled windows firewall to ensure there are no connection issues (I'm behind a hardware firewall).

If I have any further problems, I'll start a new thread in the WU forum.

Thanks for your help, topgun. Having multiple issues muddied the waters and your input helped me to cut through that. Your suggestion to run chkdsk with the fix and repair switches were dead on, and the link to the (malwareless!) crystaldiskinfo were exactly what I needed to identify, correct and move on to the next issue. This experience and your help has taught me a lot.

Thanks!

Great. I am glad you got it sorted

A followup issue here:

I wound up getting several chkdsk errors on this new drive. CrystalDiskInfo found no issues with the drive, so I assumed that the Acronis image I was restoring may have been corrupt (or rather, the ATIH imaged install was corrupt due to the filesystem errors). I did a reset (not refresh) and that seems to have corrected that problem, but after upgrading to 8.1, action center threw out a "possible drive errors', "this disk needs to be checked" messages.

So I let it check the disk, and Event Log shows that no errors were found. This hasn't happened in the last 24 hrs, however.

And one other bothersome element. I've been running DISM..../restorehealth before and after every update cluster. Every single time it returns this result:

"...completed successfuly. The component store corruption was repaired."

It seems like the DISM process is regularly dispensed around the internet. I almost feel like I should create a .bat file on the desktop so that it can be regularaly run.

Is this expected behavior?

Thanks,
Salt

And one other bothersome element. I've been running DISM..../restorehealth before and after every update cluster. Every single time it returns this result:

"...completed successfuly. The component store corruption was repaired."

Click to expand...

This message is normal after every dism run. Nothing to concern.
FYI, I always run dism, sfc before any backup to ensure that the backup image is all good.
Create a simple bat file as follows:
dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
sfc /scannow
pause
right click->run as Admin.