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Alright... so it would seem that my rig has been taking my HDD's and tossing them aside as of late. :s As some of you know, my 3TB drive failed a few weeks ago, and now my 1TB system drive (which held a lot of hurriedly copied info from the 3tb drive) is now giving me sh!t. I'm hoping that someone here can give me a hand- here's the situation: So in the past few days, I have been noticing that my computer has been s...l...o...w at times, and after a few hours of putting up with it, I decided to reboot. It POSTed just fine, and started Windows like normal, and after I logged in, I notice that the HD activity light is on solid, and my drive seems quite quiet. After waiting for my startup programs, Hard Disk Sentinel (which I swear by... we all have those programs) reported that there are some weak sectors, and that there was data transmission issues. The advice was to back up (ofc), and change the data and/or power cables. So I reboot my machine, using the latest UBCD, and load up Seatools for DOS. It plugs along just fine, and passes the SMART and short DST tests. During the long test, it gave me a fail code. However, it gave me the option to re-allocate some bad blocks/sectors, to which I OK'd- and the status is now "PASSED after repair". Still kind of panicky, I reboot my machine and try to get into Windows. No go, amigo. It is slow as f--king balls in molasses. So I go ahead and kill the power, and swap my HD's to another SATA controller, thinking that perhaps a power problem fried the controller.* Give it another go, and it's still slow. So I guess it isn't the controller. (Is there any way of testing these damn things? I could get a SATA TTL adapter perhaps?) My experience with dead HD controllers also told me that there was more to the story. Next step was to boot back into the UBCD, and fire up VivaRD in remap mode. It flies along (~14,000 mb/s), and gives me a report back that the disk is healthy. Now I'm relatively sure that the disk surface is alright (enough), but the issues of the speed is due to file system corruption. I boot off of a Windows 7 installation USB drive that I made, and am currently running chkdsk (chkdsk E: /R /B). Now I am probably around 36 hours in. There were several unreadable file handles during stage 1. It just completed the Index Verification (stage 2 AFAIK) and is now "Scanning unindexed files for reconnect to their original directory". Altogether, about 15% complete. So I am trying to figure out my next step. I have some ideas, but I figured it would be better to get some opinions: 1. I could wait for chkdsk to complete, and then copy off important files using another machine 2. I could wait for chkdsk, then run SpinRite in lvl 2 before copying off info, in case chkdsk f--ked up some files (which it did... but nothing too major lost. I could probably fix the problems with DISM, and reinstall some games) 3. I could *quit* chkdsk once it reaches stage 3, and hook the drive up to a *NIX machine, and run ntfs-fix. I *do not* currently have another 1TB+ sized drive, but after I get one, I *am* planning on running ddrescue. All I really care about getting off is my photography, which would not require ddrescue at this point afaik. I would run for data recovery services, but I can do most of that myself... all I lack is a clean room. And I do not think the problem is mechanical. I also don't have money to waste. (I'm practically dirt poor atm ) I have heard some recommendations of software called "R-Studio" to fix filesystem problems, and I'm wondering if anyone has experience with that. --- There's something else that I've gotten wind of... and that is using MHDD to check/modify the drive's firmware and hidden settings in order to force it to not reallocate, and stop re-scanning sectors, which would speed up the data copying quite a bit. Alternatively, I have heard of adjusting some variables for the translator sub-system. Unfortunately, all of the "fixes" I have seen are for the 7200.11 drives, and cannot be used on the 7200.12 drives. :/ --- So to wrap this all up, here's what I'm curious about: 1. What software is recommended to fix NTFS corruption? 2. Any other tests I can/should run to check data integrity, surface condition, etc? 3. AFAIK running SpinRite in read-(write inverse)-read-(write data) could help regenerate magnetically "weak" sectors? 4. Does anybody have experiance with using MHDD on a Seagate 7200.12 1TB drive to help with regenerating the translators or bypassing some hidden features like reallocation to speed things up? --- SMART has not been tripped, and all programs along with BIOS report the correct size, and that the drive is healthy. If anybody has more information it would be much appreciated as well. If you have to Google what SMART is, please do not post. *The only thing I can imagine that would've damaged my drives is during a self-test of my UPS system. It cannot provide enough current (vA) to supply everything with power now that I have upgraded my CPU months back. Thus, there is a moment where the voltage drops (brownout) when the UPS is testing the battery- it has a visible effect on my florescent light (it flickers/turns off), but my computer always stays running. On an additional note, I'll be gone until I can get this all solved. It could take awhile. I have my ETKey backed up, but not my Silent.dat file. So I might need a lvlset on SilEnT servers. But I think my lvls reset on SilEnT servers due to inactivity anyway...
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Stratos is one of an emerging group of startups trying to simplify the wallet. The question is whether consumers need one card for all their other cards in the age of Apple Pay. With a Chipotle burrito in one hand, I handed the cashier a credit card lined with miniature computer parts. She handed it right back. "We only take Visa and MasterCard," she said, puzzled by my Stratos card, which holds multiple credit and debit cards in the magnetic stripe running across its back. The trouble is, the card doesn't display any official logos, giving it the look of an attractive scam. She swiped the Stratos after I convinced her it actually held a Visa. The word "approved" flashed in blue across her terminal screen. Paying with a Stratos may not be as seamless as holding your iPhone near the register and using Apple Pay. Apple's mobile payments service lets iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners use their smartphones and their fingerprints to charge purchases to their credit cards just by holding their iPhone near a terminal. And while technologists rejoice at Apple Pay's security, only 6 percent of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners used Apple Pay as of March, according to market researcher InfoScout. Now so-called smart cards like Stratos, Coin, Plastc and Swyp have come on the scene. When coupled with a smartphone app, these devices -- which cost around $100 -- let users store and toggle among different payment cards on the fly. Cards are scanned in using a small card reader and managed with a smartphone app. Their pitch: A single all-purpose solution that melds modern networking and payments technologies for mainstream consumers. That is, until the financial infrastructure catches up with Apple Pay, Google Wallet and other digital payments systems. That's because consumers and businesses still rely on credit card technologies and financial networks implemented decades ago. Credit and debit cards, and the terminals that accept them, are ubiquitous. Kiosks that work with Apple Pay or any competitors, are not. Instead of having us pay with just our smartphone, Stratos and other startups want us to load multiple other cards onto a single device designed to work everywhere. "There's this chicken and egg problem," said Thiago Olson, CEO of Stratos, based in Ann Arbor, Mich. According to Olson, mobile payment companies design products that few can use because a small minority of merchants will accept that. That, in turn, means few consumers adopt the new technologies. Just ask Square, the payments company headed up by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The company continually rebrands various software efforts, like Square Wallet and Square Order, as it tries to get consumers to pay with their smartphones. Square declined to comment for this story. "Using this card [stratos] is a way to immediately link your smartphone to the current infrastructure," Olsen said. Greg Rosen, an investor at New York-based venture fund Box Group, shares that point of view. Although he was an early preorder customer of Coin, which originally launched in November 2013, Rosen just got his hands on the finished product. He's used the card for three weeks now without any hiccups. "It would be awesome if every single merchant took Apple Pay," he said. But that's not the reality. "It's kind of crazy that we're in 2015 and we're still paying with cash and plastic, and we have a computer in our pocket." Until the computers in our pocket become the main way to pay, he has a Coin card. Future-proof?The question facing Stratos and companies like it is whether these smart cards are detours in the mobile payments evolution (detractors call them solutions in search of a problem), or are practical products that can survive as the world transitions to digital payments? "Apple Pay has paved the way for the connected card," said James Townsend, a partner at Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Resonant Venture Partners, a Stratos investor. "The whole point of a mobile payments solution is that I can use it everywhere. If I can't use it everywhere, then I still need my wallet and what's the point?" Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru is skeptical. "The only problem [smart cards are] addressing is a fat wallet full of cards," Mulpuru, an expert in e-commerce, said. "Is that really that big of a problem?" Still, Mulpuru doesn't expect people to exclusively use their smartphones and mobile payments systems for at least a decade. But she does think the mobile payments space is poised on the edge of more substantial change. By October 2015, most credit card companies are expected to have issued -- or will begin issuing -- new cards with EMV microchips in them. Stratos and Coin are still working to make their products EMV-ready. That's because EMV, or the EuroPay Mastercard Visa standard, is expected to spread throughout the US credit card industry by the end of the year. EMV promises greater security through small microchips embedded in plastic. While Europe has had the technology for years, the US pushed for the technology only after high-profile hacks on Target and other retailers. By October 2015, merchants that haven't upgraded their terminals to accept the new cards will be the ones liable for fraud, not the credit card companies. The result: we'll start to see many more EMV-ready point-of-sale (POS) systems. That's a problem for Stratos, Coin and their rivals. "If you have a chip in your card, the POS system is going to prompt you to put your card in the [chip] slot," Mulpuru said. That becomes a problem with products like Stratos, which do not contain chips. That means you'll still need to carry around a backup card. EMV is also inherently more difficult to replicate than a magnetic stripe, and Stratos and its competitors have struggled to incorporate the technology into their first-generation products. Coin, which is the only other smart card shipping today, does not have EMV capabilities. Both companies plan to incorporate the technology into future products. Plastc and Swyp, due out later this year, expect to be EMV-compliant. Plastc will include an EMV chip in its universal card while Swyp says it will provide an "over the air firmware upgrade." But EMV cards in the US will differ from those in Europe in one notable exception: Instead of the highly secure chip-and-pin cards used throughout Europe, US consumers will use chip-and-signature cards. That distinction is why James Lynch preordered Stratos this month. An Ireland native, Lynch says he's used chip-and-pin cards for around a decade, and the US's relatively lax security measures made him uneasy when he moved to California last year. "Purchasing Stratos mitigates some of this worry," he said. What's more, Stratos, Coin and their rivals don't directly store credit or debit card information unencrypted -- and only transmit sensitive data from your smartphone. That makes devices inherently more secure than the standard magnetic stripe credit card. There are also options to deactivate the card if it loses communication with your phone. The only problem [smart cards are] addressing is a fat wallet full of cards. Is that really that big of a problem? Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research Still, the arrival of EMV-ready terminals poses another hurdle for smart cards: those very same POS systems will likely be outfitted to handle Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Wallet and other technologies that rely on so-called near-field communication, or NFC. As NFC terminals proliferate, Apple and its mobile payments rivals will become more popular. But not for a while. "The longer-term viability of a physical card is up for debate, but for the short- and medium-terms, NFC phone tech solutions are not going to put cards out of business completely," said Lynch. And he's right. Forrester estimates that in-person mobile payments -- which do not include those made on the phone during online shopping -- hit $3.4 billion in the US last year, or one quarter of 1 percent of total annual retail spend. But they're growing fast and are expected to hit $34 billion by 2019. "The media frenzy around mobile payments -- most recently Apple Pay -- has reached fever pitch and led some industry spectators to conclude that a payments revolution is at hand. Not so," Denée Carrington, a former senior analyst at the firm, wrote in November 2014. The adoption of mobile payments is an evolution -- not a revolution -- and the evolution is well underway Pending payment warsPerhaps the biggest threat to the smart card is simply the dizzying number of solutions trying to make physical credit cards obsolete altogether. Samsung offers Samsung Pay for its Galaxy S6 phones. Samsung also owns the technology behind LoopPay, acquired in February, that lets you replicate a magnetic card swipe with either a phone case or a keychain fob. There's also Android Pay, a new Google-owned payments platform that will soon power its Google Wallet service. The credit card industry doesn't appear to care which wins out, however. That's because credit cards don't go away. They just end up in different devices, such as phones, dongles, watches or smart cards, said Sam Shrauger, Visa's senior vice president of digital solutions. Which form consumers pick doesn't matter to Visa, which processes transactions through its electronic network -- so long as it's not cash. "Our competition, so to speak, is paper," he said, since that's just about the only form of payment that doesn't use a network like Visa's. Some consumers will opt to use several devices, while others may depend on only one. The credit card industry doesn't appear to care which solution wins out, because credit cards don't go away. They just end up in different devices. Because they work with the current payment infrastructure, companies like Stratos hope they can move wherever the industry takes them. Olson said he envisions working with Visa and others to issue their own branded smart cards. Stratos hopes to expand its $100 subscription service into a money management program that will help consumers manage their finances. One suggestion: A way to trigger the right card to maximize rewards points when you're, say, at the movies, booking a hotel or buying plane tickets. Ideally, Stratos could move into providing a platform for what Olson calls virtual cards. Instead of being issued new loyalty, credit or debit cards, companies down the line may be able to generate virtual cards that load directly into Stratos' app. Then with just a tap, the card could be ready for use on Stratos, which he hopes will have biometric fingerprint reading technology in the future. Even so, Stratos and others could face a hard sell. "This could have taken off a couple of years ago," said Mulpuru. "They're a day late and a dollar short. The industry has completely changed." Source http://www.cnet.com/
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