T61 Blinking cursor top left, when cleared repeated F4 BSODs

[cadillacmike68]

Hi, Wife's primary T61 8897-03U with a T7700 CPU, 8GB RAM, Win 7 Pro 64 usually in an advanced dock with a Hitachi TravelStar 500 HDD and a 2nd HDD (Hitachi TravelStar 100GB) in the ThinkPad and a DVD-Multi in the dock's bay, two external Dell U2124M monitors. No recent SW additions, but a "windows critical update" on the morning of the 28th. I like how winblows shoves an update in when I have it set to tell me but to NOT DL or install any updates.

She doesn't beat on the system but she has basically LEFT IT ON ALMOST CONSTANTLY SINCE EARLY 2015!!!. And she DOESN'T LISTEN TO ME.

It had a blinking cursor top left yesterday afternoon. I know what that means . OS / HDD couldn't even begin to get started - possible parturition table foul up. I cleared it by removing the batt and holding power.

It started up with the usual windows was not shut down properly. I just restarted normally. It finished startup and in less than 10 minuted it gave me a BSOD ox000000F4. FAILED to dump physical memory.

I restarted and immediately went into system restore and noticed the Aug 28 "critical" update that I did not authorize (it was an MSE update). So I restored to an Aug 23 restore point. That worked, but again after a restart there was another BSOD F4. And then another after another restart, again 0x000000F4. All with failed dumps.

This machine has never had a BSOD that I can remember and it's been running this W7Pro64 since early 2015 or so.

Today I've been researching, and this is usually a HW issue, possibly bad memory or HDD.

I have a USB with MEMTEST86 but It failed to boot. It might not be bootable. I thought it was bootable. I might have to check that on her other T61.

I'm transferring a number of disk utils to try and check the HDD if it passes memtest.

It's more or less ed - I got all her mydocs backed up but she put a lot of files directly on the desktop and more that she left in downloads. Again Not listening to me..... I'll have to try to copy those to an external drive. As far as the system backup. It's a twin of her T61 6463-WTL, so I can just get that one updated, back it up and restore it to the 8897. I can even swap the HDDs. but I (she) needs both machines working.

I can try to back up the possibly bad HDD, but not sure if that will carry over the problem.

More fun than I want to deal with at present.

Any other ideas? And link to a good drive test? I have Hitachi DFT and a link to another version of DFT.

[cadillacmike68]

Forgot to note: I got a blinking cursor upper left when trying to boot the memtest USB the first time. Cleared the system by holding down power with the batt off and it booted and is testing. Two passes so far with no errors. After 5 passes, I assume the RAM is Ok and will try and test the HDD. I hope there are no RAM errors, those 4GB sticks are getting more expensive every day.

[atagunov]

Hallo there, you probably got more experience than me.. but why not get a 2.5" Samsung EVO 860 250Gb, put it into a set of 7mm->9mm rails and install Windows anew? Of course you'd need to connect the old HDD somehow as a 2nd HDD to copy stuff over.. If that HDD still works of course. Think I managed to get a couple of those SSD-s around £35 each delivered in the UK from ebay. Or else head straight to Amazon and grab the most reasonably priced new one with warrantly, 250Gb or 500Gb whichever makes more sense.

[cadillacmike68]

^^
Eventually I'll move to SSDs but NO WAY I'm re-installing from scratch. There's 10 years of winblows updates if you do that. I spent a lot of time getting a Lenovo factory install of W7 with all my utility and application SW installed as well as years of tax & accounting apps, etc. I can restore from her T61 6463 which I'm doing now. I can put any of my working T61 HDDs in any T61 or T500 and they will work (after a bit of display driver sorting out if the graphics is different), so I will NOT be re-installing windows from scratch on a T61 or T500 ever again.

Memtest ran for over an hour - no errors

The ThinkPad built in BIOS HDD test ran for a half hour - no errors- but at 1 min per GB it would take 500 minutes to run through. Stopped that. Ran FDISK / MBR from an old startup disk. That didn't help, it might have hurt. Ran Hitachi's DFT. It saw the drive but could not test it. Ran a windows 7 retail install DVD and got the normal welcome and country screens. Selected Repair your system, and it found the "system" partition but could not do anything useful. At this point I booted up her T61 6463 (we each have a T61 type 6463 both with WSXGA+, but mine is faster), and updated winblows, re-synched her docs and started an Acronis TI Backup. It took longer than I expected, but it's recovering now.

Note: I put the FUBAR'd HDD in an adapter tray in my 6463's ultrabay and I can see ALL the files. I copied the ones she dumped on DESKTOP and DOWNLOADS to a USB so I can copy those onto the restored drive. Only issue: I had no spare 500GB 7200RPM drives, so I'm restoring to a 320GB 7200RPm. There was only 100GB or so in use so that won't be an issue. I'm getting some more 500GB Hitachi 7200RPM drives.

Once it's done, I'll try to run Hitachi's DFT again, If I can get it to open. Else I'll hard format the entire disk and restore an image to it and see what happens.

[kfzhu1229]

Have you tried seeing the smart values of the hdd? Software like crystaldiskinfo and hdtune can reveal that.
See for bad things like currently pending sectors and reallocated sectors count

[cadillacmike68]

Have you tried seeing the smart values of the hdd? Software like crystaldiskinfo and hdtune can reveal that.
See for bad things like currently pending sectors and reallocated sectors count

Thanks, I'll try those.

Her system is running with the new image from her T61 6463. Lots of bookmarks (and saved PWs) missing but those can be added. I got all her user files that she had scattered all over the old HDD and put them on the 8897. I wish I could dig out the old firefox bookmarks. I don't know where it keeps them.

I can see everything on the main drive, but something must have happened to the MBR or boot partition on that drive. Now that it's just another drive, Hitachi DFT for windows can have a go at it as well.

[RealBlackStuff]

Bookmarks in Firefox are stored in:
C:\Users\[your-name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxx.default\places.sqlite
Automatic backups can be found in \xxxxx.default\bookmarkbackups

[cadillacmike68]

Thanks, RBS. They had to be hiding somewhere.

I back up my bookmarks, but she never does...

[cadillacmike68]

The problems with the original HDD are getting worse. It took several minutes just to display the root directory. trying to access the Users directory is the same, several minutes with the scrolling circle. I might not be able to get anything more out of it. No worries. I'll push my bookmarks onto the system.

I'll back up the system and re-visit getting some info off the old drive later.

[atagunov]

Eventually I'll move to SSDs but NO WAY I'm re-installing from scratch. There's 10 years of winblows updates if you do that. I spent a lot of time getting a Lenovo factory install of W7 with all my utility and application SW installed as well as years of tax & accounting apps, etc

For what it's worth I think I installed Win7 in a virtual machine on Linux (probably VirtualBox from Oracle) on a T520 running Ubuntu 18.04 with an SSD in it less than a year ago. Yes it did take a bit of time to fetch the updates but if I remember correctly it took less than half a day and didn't require that much attention. Installing updates on a SSD is faster than on a HDD

If I had a half-dead HDD that I wanted to salvage information from.. What would I do?... I probably would have tried to clone all sectors on a healthy drive.. I used to play with it ages ago but don't remember much.. Maybe used Ubuntu CD + "dd" back then.. Probably wouldn't use "dd" today. Can Clonezilla do it for you?.. That's the open-source tool that you install to a USB stick and then you need both disks connected, target disk needs to be no smaller than source disk..

Ah! There's also "ntfsclone", that should be available on Ubuntu installation images. I certainly did use ntfsclone in the past and it probably has some options to skip sectors that can't be copied. To be honest I find it hard to say which one has a better chance of success Clonezilla (more automated solution) or booting into Ubuntu from a USB stick and working your way manually from command line using a bunch of tools including "ntfsclone".. Clonezilla may be using "ntfsclone" under the hood.

[dr_st]

Modern versions of Clonezilla, Acronis, and a handful of others should be able to clone a HDD to an SSD correctly aligning partitions and all.

[cadillacmike68]

I got everything I really needed off that drive - all her document files. She's killed 4 HDDs (two of them 500GB 7200RPM) over the past 21 years and I haven't killed any. And I took my systems to the desert on combat deployments. I did ruin a couple of fans though. At least the systems had backups.

I would have liked to have gotten the Firefox "personality" including saved PWs etc, but I pushed all my bookmarks over on to the system so that's more than she needed. The PWs are all accessible in a handy location so they'll just get re-saved as needed.

I'm going to back up all the primary systems (five) and then I'll give that drive one last look. If it's not a Track 0 problem, it might be re-usable, but I won't use it as a boot drive. More likely a scratch disk for transfers, etc. I'm always needing to move files around.

I have the latest Acronis True Image, for backup / restore, and Disk Director, for cloning, resizing, etc. I used to do a lot of cloning but I could not always get the cloned HDD to boot, while the backup / restore has been nearly trouble free. I'm sure True Image can restore a regular HDD backup onto an SSD. Backup / restore also requires one less spindle and allows you to backup one machine and restore it to another later.

Updates might install faster on an SSD, but you still have to wait on ms' throttled DL speeds, so there's not much of a gain.

[kfzhu1229]

I'm going to back up all the primary systems (five) and then I'll give that drive one last look. If it's not a Track 0 problem, it might be re-usable, but I won't use it as a boot drive. More likely a scratch disk for transfers, etc. I'm always needing to move files around.
Updates might install faster on an SSD, but you still have to wait on ms' throttled DL speeds, so there's not much of a gain.

Again it's much better for you to make your decisions if you have a look at the SMART info of the hard drive. You can reuse the drive if there isn't a good number of bad sectors shown (and in that case it's most likely sudden external shock or some software related issues corrupting the drive and it happens from time to time).
What I found about laptop hard drives is that sometimes a drive failing doesn't really mean the drive is of a bad quality, but rather the machine the drive was in had a really poor shock absorption system or the user really took a beating on the laptop.
With an SSD you won't have this issue. However, if you buy a cheap no name one and/or she doesn't use the SSD gently (by filling up more than 90% of the drive capacity so the drive can't level out the chip wear for example), it can fail too.
I have a friend that used a ThinkPad T520 for esports titles from time to time and he broke two HDD's by smashing on the palmrest when he gets triggered. Replaced the HDD with a Samsung EVO SSD and no problems until the laptop stopped being his daily driver.

[cadillacmike68]

I'll run crystaldriveinfo on it to see what's going on, but I've been doing this long enough to know when a drive starts going. If it checks out fine, I'll use it as a w10 drive for one of these systems. Otherwise, no worries. I have plenty of HDDs so that's not an issue.

[cadillacmike68]

I got CrystalDriveInfo and Hitachi's WinDFT and ran them.

CDI came up with a big caution; pending sectors was at 10. All the other drives I tested were at 0. CrystalDriveInfo only shows you the data, it doesn't reformat or anything, so I also ran Hitachi's DFT. It passed a quick test but failed the Ext test with "read Element Failure" It also failed the surface tests, both short and long.

So now I'm reformatting it - long format with winblows disk management.

I had to remove and re-insert the HDD adapter a few times. Same thing on known good drives. These POS knockoff HDD adapters aren't worth the space they take up, but I can't find any more genuine Lenovo T61 era serial drive adapter trays.

Re-formatting is supposed to restore some measure of healthiness to the drive. I'll test it again after it finishes formatting.

[cadillacmike68]

I think the drive is toast. It fails surface test checks and doesn't want to be recognized. I'm not wasting any more time on it. I got some new 500GB drives in, so I can replace her 320GB and build out some more machines.

The drive had over 25,000 hours running on it, more than any other drive I've looked at so far.

[MikalE]

I'd say she got her money's worth out of that drive.

[cadillacmike68]

I'd say she got her money's worth out of that drive.

Yeah, no complaints. That little 8897 has seen 3 HDDs over the years. It has a SXGA+ screen but I have her set up with two Dell U2412Ms.