Thinkpads Forum

Well, here's an odd one. I have a HD in my older 1.6GHz X61S. It has Win8.1 and Win10 on it. I finished updating Win10 and then shut it down, removed the power and battery and then removed the keyboard and bezel in preparation for swapping an Intel 4965 into it.

When I plugged the WiFi card in and powered it up, I got a hard drive error. Apparently the HD no longer spins up. If I remove the HD and put it in a USB case, it does spin up. Windows declared it dirty and fixed it. I can now access all files when the USB housing is plugged into my main X61S but if I put the HD back in the laptop it once again fails to spin up and throws a HD error. It does the same thing in my other X61S.

Just for grins, I switched the laptop from AHCI to compatibility, which did not help.

I am inclined to believe the HD has failed, but I'm not certain. Anyone have any idea what sort of soft error could prevent a HD from spinning up? Remember, it worked fine for years up until I shut it down after the Win10 upgrade (which was basically a full reinstall, but it completed OK).

I don't know if it means anything, but I think that as it was shutting down after the Win10 update I moved it and heard the heads park due to the motion. Any chance the drop sensor got stuck in "disabled"?

Paul

Well, I'd say that the drive is on its way out as well.

X61 should have a HDD test program in BIOS if I remember correctly. You may want to run this and see what happens.

Good luck.

I tried the HD test in BIOS and the MB doesn't see it at all. And it still won't spin up. Same problem if I plug it into my desktop via SATA, although THAT MB does recognize it. Still won't spin up and the boot hangs at the point where it would pass control to the HD.

The odd thing is that it works fine in a SATA-USB enclosure. So it isn't dead in the enclosure and it DOES spin up.

Is the shock sensor that parks the heads in the HD or in the laptop? Just a hunch, but I'd like to be able to bypass it as a test.

Paul

pgoelz wrote: So it isn't dead in the enclosure and it DOES spin up.

Well...get everything and anything important off of the drive since it's on its very last leg.

Good time to upgrade to an SSD...

No problem with getting stuff off it... there isn't anything important on it. It was not a daily driver (just playing with Win8 and Win10) and even so, it is backed up. Just trying to make sure it really IS dead before I pop for a new one

Paul

There should be a shock sensor (accelerometer) on the motherboard. Some hard drives also have their own sensor built in (Seagate xxxASG models for instance; believe it is referred to as "free fall" or "G-Force" protection). There is a diagnostic test in the PC Doctor for DOS test suite that is supposed to test this motherboard sensor. However, that program is getting hard to find as it was withdrawn from distribution a few years ago. If it were me, I'd try another hard drive in the X61s to see how it responds.

Well, I'm still puzzled. After more testing, in a USB powered USB enclosure it still works perfectly...... including the shock sensor. If I move it, you can hear the heads park for a second or two and any access stops. Scandisk calls it healthy and clean and all folders are present and accounted for.

In any PC I have tried.... including a separately powered IDE / SATA to USB adapter (not an enclosure), it refuses to spin up. If I try to boot off it in the USB enclosure, it starts to boot but when the pre-boot environment throws things over to the OS (Win8 and Win10 are UEFI boot I think, so there is a pre-boot environment that loads fine) I get an inaccessible boot drive error in compatibility or AHCI.

Off to Microcenter I go I guess.

Sigh.

Paul

Have you tried reading the SMART data through the USB enclosure?

This is the Power Up In Standby (PUIS) problem with the recent W10 update.

There has been a lot of discussion on the W 10 TP forum. Before I saw that, I had discovered that the HD "comes back" if installed in a different machine.

Microsoft have issued KB3021937. You have to install that, possibly disable the Microsoft "Turn on Fast Startup" option deep in the Control Panel Power Options, boot up in a different machine (or reset the HD using some other method), then offer an incantation while switching the machine on.

It's a mess. Here the dual booting fell apart with the same update. I have to dual boot with the old Windows 7 screen rather than the Windows 10 one.

Interesting. So maybe it isn't quite dead yet? However, it still refuses to spin up in anything (two laptops, a desktop and a non-housing SATA to USB adapter. It still DOES spin up in a USB housing. If I try to boot to it in the housing, the boot begins and it definitely reads the drive for a while but I eventually get an inaccessible boot device error. I believe this might actually be expected behavior booting to a USB drive?

I'll have a look at the Win10 forums and see if I can glean anything. In the mean time, got any ideas how to "reset" it?

Note that I dual boot on my main X61S with Win10 and Win7 (the dead HD is Win8.1 and Win10) but that machine uses an SSD.

Paul

OK, I looked it up and it appears you may be correct. At least the symptoms of having the PUIS bit set seem to match what I am seeing.

Trouble is that I downloaded the Hitachi Feature Tool utility that can manipulate the APM settings (is that the right one?) and while it boots in the laptop OK from the CD, when it tries to read my dead drive it crashes and exits. I tried it with the BIOS set to ACHI and compatibility with the same results. Ditto when plugging the drive into my desktop.

Still researching. I'm tempted to call Microsoft and ream them a new one. This is completely ridiculous unless there is an easier way to reset the PUIS bit.

Paul

Billaboard wrote:This is the Power Up In Standby (PUIS) problem with the recent W10 update.

There has been a lot of discussion on the W 10 TP forum. Before I saw that, I had discovered that the HD "comes back" if installed in a different machine.

Microsoft have issued KB3021937. You have to install that, possibly disable the Microsoft "Turn on Fast Startup" option deep in the Control Panel Power Options, boot up in a different machine (or reset the HD using some other method), then offer an incantation while switching the machine on.

It's a mess. Here the dual booting fell apart with the same update. I have to dual boot with the old Windows 7 screen rather than the Windows 10 one.

You sir get both the prize and my undying gratitude! You were 100% correct, Windows 10 killed my hard drive. I found a utility (HDAT2 Lite) that was able to reset the PUIS (I think the app called it something like "resetting the Power On Spinup feature") and I'm typing this on that machine from the "dead" hard drive. Everything works as it should again including dual boot.

What a mess indeed! Now off to write a stinging retort on the Windows 10 feedback app

Thanks again,
Paul

Yes. I had copied the W7 installation onto a brand new 1TB hard drive and set up dual booting with Windows 10. The next day the update to build 9879 installed itself automatically, rebooted and I had a "dead" brand new HD.

I had reached the stage of filling out the RMA docs to return the drive, when I discovered it came up when put in my X60 Linux machine, and then worked in the X201 until I rebooted.

I think you will find that Microsoft blame the Lenovo bios for not dealing with PUIS capable drives. I suppose the only positive outcome is that we've learnt about something new.

We (or at least I) did indeed learn something new. And blaming Lenovo's BIOS is shortsighted in the extreme. Implementing ANY function that kills hard drives in ANY situation is unacceptable. Period. It is one thing to warn the user that something is not compatible. It is quite another to kill the hard drive without warning to the point that you have to be very PC literate to even know it isn't really dead.... let alone revive it.

Another interesting point. I searched this morning for KB3021937. I found lots of talk about it including the Microsoft page announcing that it was available. But so far I have been unable to actually FIND THE DOWNLOAD so I can install it. It is not shown as installed under installed updates and Windows update does not offer to install it. I'm letting Win10 run the maintenance routine and when that is done I'll look again. In the mean time I have turned off "fast startup" which I assume was the cause of the "dirty" flag the first time I put the "dead" HD into a USB enclosure and plugged it into my Win7 machine.

It occurred to me last night that I'll bet money this is what "killed" the hard drive in my TivoHD (DVR). We had a power failure and after the power failure, the Tivo refused to boot. As I recall it refused to spin up. The hard drive checked out perfectly in a PC and I was able to use a Tivo backup / restore tool to restore the original image to it. But it steadfastly refused to boot. A replacement drive reimaged by the same tool worked perfectly. And the "dead" drive is to this day working perfectly in another PC..... as the boot drive. It had me stumped until this Win10 / X61S incident.

Paul

pgoelz wrote:We (or at least I) did indeed learn something new.

As did I...

Implementing ANY function that kills hard drives in ANY situation is unacceptable. Period.

I couldn't have said it better myself. The whole story is mind-blowing, and NOT in a good way.

It is one thing to warn the user that something is not compatible. It is quite another to kill the hard drive without warning to the point that you have to be very PC literate to even know it isn't really dead.... let alone revive it.

Amen.

Turns out I wasn't quite done. Using HDA2 to get the drive going again apparently just got it to spin up again. It didn't actually turn off PUIS. The next time I shut completely down and pulled AC and the battery, the HD again refused to spin up.

Found this on the web. Boot from any Linux installation including USB (which I have). Then....

##################

After you boot your LiveUSB/CD:
1. Open Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T or Ctrl+Alt+F1 or just click the icon)
2. Execute:

sudo hdparm -iI /dev/sd?

sudo hdparm -s0 /dev/sd?

hdparm is a Linux tool for configuring HDDs.

First command displays some info (look for Power-up in Standby on the list - Shift+PgUp to scroll the output). Second commands sends disable command to that feature. '?' in commands should work as a wildcard but if it doesn't use 'ls /dev/sd*' to find the letter of the HDD (it usually is either /dev/sda or /dev/sdb - but sometimes can even happen to be /dev/hda)

########################

Worked great and PUIS is disabled. For now, anyway.

How Microsoft expects most of us to figure this all out is utterly beyond me. But I'll bet it is good for Microcenter's business selling replacement hard drives

This is all fun, right?

Paul

I was thinkin about trying Windows 10 but I'm not sure if I want to now. I'll wait until its official.
Good thing you are able to get it back to life!

waow, just
W
A
O
W
!

how does this sort of nonsense persist? in the 1980s it was almost understandable, but.

glad you egghaids are around to 'splain/save the day!

I dodged a bullet, apparently! had been playing around with win10 on shiney new HDs on a couple different X series. "win10 is the good win7 of what win8 was meant to be" - so, I was seduced into trying it. really, really unimpressive. so, SO glad I went back and wiped win10 with clean win7sp1-refresh / slic2.1 - not just because it is so much more daily-usable, but b/c I lucked into doing it before running into this completely stupid issue. wow. waow. w a o w. just, wow.

I think the crucial Microsoft update is to be found at

http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/ ... =kb3021937

and you have to access it using Internet Explorer, which seems to have to install another program (or add-on). After that you can add either the 64 or 32-bit update to your "basket" for download.

I think I can see why they need real-world testers.

Billaboard wrote:I think the crucial Microsoft update is to be found at

http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/ ... =kb3021937

and you have to access it using Internet Explorer, which seems to have to install another program (or add-on). After that you can add either the 64 or 32-bit update to your "basket" for download.

I think I can see why they need real-world testers.

Hmmmm.... Regardless of whether I visit that link in Firefox or IE in Win7 or Win10, I get the same message to the effect that I need to use IE 6.0 or later.

On my main X61S with Win7 and Win10, Win10 installed KB3021937 on December 9th. That machine has an SSD so it is not affected by the PUIS bug.

On my backup X61S with Win8.1 and Win10 on a hard drive, the Win10 installation does NOT include KB3021937. That Win10 installation was unused for a while and made the jump to build 9879 just prior to the HD becoming disabled. I don't know if it has simply not found KB3021937 yet or maybe it was rolled up in another update and is no longer needed as a separate update.

Interestingly, I just tried to bork the HD in the Win10 installation that does not include KB3021937 and could not kill it. I left "fast startup" enabled, shut Win10 down, removed the battery and the AC adapter, let it sit for a while, then plugged the AC adapter in and hit the power button. It accessed the drive fine and booted right up. So at this point, I am pretty sure that the initial problem was the PUIS bug. But I am not yet sure I understand what actually triggered PUIS mode.

Paul