Often times the "click" is the read arm actually contacting something inside the drive (or being stuck on something), in which case a new controller isn't going to help. Just depends on what kind of click it is - it could be the read arm parking itself after failing to start up, which the controller might fix. The freezer trick really does work a lot of times. I usually get a long cable on a SATA to USB converter and work with it inside the freezer, but some people just freeze the drive and remove it, then plug it in. The latter can fail again as it warms up so I don't like it. Either way, wrap the drive very carefully in a freezer bag and get ALL of the air out of the bag, you don't want any condensation - I use a straw to suck the air out. Seal the bag (if you're using a long USB cable and working with the drive in the freezer, seal most of the bag and tape around the cable. Then stick it in the freezer and wait a couple hours. The tolerances are so tight in those drives that just the contraction from the cold temperatures will often unstick the head. When I did contract IT work, we actually set up a table next to the refrigerator in the kitchen because we used this so much.
Anyone know anything about printers? Our MG5320 is giving us the B200 error of death. I cleaned the printer heads and left it unplugged overnight as other forums suggested. I read somewhere that maybe the drivers got corrupted? I did was a think was a reinstall of the printer drivers and I still have the error. This printer always worked fine with my computer but we couldn't get it to print to el husband's. It gave the error shortly after I printed some PDFs that my dad emailed me, which may or may not be related. Any suggestions? I really don't want to buy another overpriced printer. I also have a bunch of backup cartridges that are about to lose their purpose in life. Bleh.
Holy Fuck, thank you Zack for the quick and 100% effective approach to this fix!! It's so simple. Goddamn. We have been pissed off at this printer for the past month. This is the link that Zack rep'd me, in case anyone else has this issue later: http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-1963504/workaround-b200-error-canon-printers.html
I got my "identical drive" and I got 5 of the controller screws out, but couldn't get the other two. I tried every trick I could think of except a tapping repair bit. The star hole finally stripped. So, since I essentially had a nice paper weight in the shape of my old hard drive, I figured I had nothing to lose. So, I opened the case. The upper most platter had two visible worn grooves in it. One about 2 mm wide at the midpoint, and one near the center where the arm stop against the hub. I opened the other one (got those screws out, but clearly they'd been set with Locktite or something) to compare, and of course, no grooves. It looked like they'd been made with sandpaper. When I swung the arm across the platter it made a scratchy noise. I think the center worn groove was preventing the arm from being able to move elsewhere, so I don't think the controller was the problem. I also compared the corner filters on the two drives. The replacement drive was white as white could be, but the bad drive had lots of black on the outside and little bit of black on the inside. It looks to me like debris got in there somehow and collected under the arm head and just ground in grooves. That sucker was sealed up pretty tight, I thought. Obviously, since it has a filter, debris / dust is a problem. How does it even get in there?
Hard drives aren't air tight because a pressure difference (caused by heat, usually) could cause slight deformations that would lose tolerances. That being said, the little filters on the drive should catch almost all of any "destruction" sized dust coming in from the outside. It could be that what you're seeing on the filters is from the inside of the drive, as it was worn away... airflow moves in both directions through those filters, depending on relative pressure (out upon startup/heat-up, in during cool-down once it's shut down). Did you happen to take a pic of the guts?
On that note... one thing to check is the little vent hole on the drive that says "do not cover this hole". The drive head relies on a cushion of air to work properly (which is why they're not a vacuum), and that little vent hole is what allows that air to pass in/out to provide that air cushion. If it got plugged up due to dust or something, that could have contributed to the failure. Looks something similar to this:
Oh, by the way, that's why the "Freezer Trick" works sometimes... it causes the air to become colder and therefore more dense and provides more of an air cushion for the heads.
It didn't have a labeled hole, but after reading what your wrote, I see there are clearly places where air can get in. The whole enclosure was pretty dusty. I usually vacuum off the vent openings and fan intakes, but it was a lot dustier inside the box once I started taking things apart. These are big, so spoilers: Spoiler: Bad Drive Spoiler: Blank Drive
I need to turn the rotors on my truck. I could just do it at the same time. I should just keep polishing until their shiny, right?
I just got a Lenovo G-70, and man this thing boots slow. It's got 16gb of ram, and I'm planning on adding an SDD to boot from (256 should be enough, right?). I'll add a larger hard drive for slower storage. My question: what the hell else can I do to speed this thing up? It's running Windows 10 64 bit.
The SSD will be night and day speed increase... you'll be surprised. Concentrate on doing that and then re-evaluate, is my suggestion. Just so you know, 500GB SSD are getting cheaper and cheaper, so I'd seriously look at doing that if you could. The Samsung Evo 500 GB is around $200. You can never ever have too much RAM or drive space... you'll always grow into it, and it's not like apps/programmers/games are becoming more efficient and smaller as time goes on. If you plan on having it for a while, save yourself an upgrade headache and bite the bullet now.
Follow up question: Seagate hard drives (actual disk drives)? I've found the Samsung/Seagate drives to be cheaper than the WD I've been using for the past few years. Worth it to spend more on a WD/Toshiba, or is Seagate acceptable? I'm planning on a Samsung 500 ssd.
If you want a clean install, you can also download a legit Windows 10 copy from Microsoft directly. Use the tool to create a flash drive image and boot to it. Lenovos usually have a button called a Novo button that gets you into the BIOS if your system doesn't have a boot selection method easily found. One thing to note is to download either the ethernet or wireless drive from Lenovo just in case neither are installed with Windows. Once installed, I believe Lenovo has a driver tool that will either install automatically or at least tell you which drivers you need. Like others have said, Samsung for SSDs would be my preference. Get a Pro if you can afford it, an Evo if you have to. I've also had pretty good luck with the Crucial 525GB SSD. It's like $160 on Amazon. Stay away from the Western Digital ones. I've been reading a lot of negative reviews after they bought Sandisk. For a rotational drive used as a primary drive, get a 7200 RPM drive with as much cache as you can find. For storage, a 5400/4200 RPM drive is better for battery life. Seagate is fine and usually cheaper. When you get ready to replace the drive, this will probably be the manual. I've never had good luck cloning from a larger drive to a smaller one, so you might have to use a backup program. I've used this one, called Fab's, extensively: https://www.fpnet.fr/ If you have questions or run into problems, I'd be happy to help. I own a computer repair shop and do a lot of upgrades.
Rant: Goddammit, motherfucking Windows 10. I am working on a big photo/ video editing project. About an hour in, I get a message something like, "hey, simpleton user, here's what's about to happen: we're going to load you up with an update, cool? If that's not cool, pick when you want the update." Well, that was not cool at all, so I picked Sunday at 4:00 a.m. and went back about my business. I finished all the edits and then went to save the movie to make a DVD. At 90%, an error message pops up, "you don't have enough memory to finish that task, hoss. Free some up and try again." Fuck if I can make heads or tails of task manager and the 87 billion things running. Why did that get so complicated? Anyway, I figured I'd just do a quick reboot and clear all that crap out. OH NO, silly user! Your choices are: -Update and restart -Update and shut down -Go fuck yourself So, why the hell does Windows ask me when I want to update, if it's just going to fucking do it anyway? Is there a way to trick it, and reboot anyway without the update. I don't mind doing the updates, I just didn't have the time to spare right then. (And couldn't risk a screw up) And, how do I sort through all the stuff to clear any memory without rebooting? 8000 of the things running are McAfee - I need to do something about that, too. ETA: I have a Dell Inspiron Intel Core i3-7100 3.91 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Win 10 Home
@Rush-O-Matic I haven't tried this recently, but it used to be that the "old" shutdown dialog had a restart option without updates. Go to your desktop (like, click on an empty area of your desktop) and hit Alt-F4. See if that dialog has a restart option without updating. If not, I would start with killing all of the McAfee stuff. You can either do it through task manager, or go Start > type "services.msc" > look for McAfee services and right click on them, select Stop. Or you can look in the task bar next to the clock and right click McAfee icons there and exit/stop/shut down/whatever. For other stuff, generally if you have all of your applications closed, there won't be much hanging out there that you can kill from Task Manager. You can click on the Memory column to sort by highest memory consumers and look for offenders, but if you don't recognize the task as something obvious, don't kill it (e.g. if Chrome is closed and there's a Chrome task hanging out in there, go ahead and kill it, but just because you don't know what Runtime Broker is doesn't mean it deserves to die). Sometimes apps just have memory leaks in themselves, so if you're working in Adobe Premier and run out of memory, closing Premier, then re-opening it with the project will often result in a bunch of free memory. Anyway, this was all 8 hours ago so I'm guessing you've sorted it. But get rid of McAfee. Windows Defender is just fine and is built in, and doesn't suck down system resources.
Yes, it still does. Thank you. I will try that if this happens again. (However, I don't know if all those options were there then. If I click on the "power off" icon right now, the choices are "sleep, shut down, restart" and the "restart" option was NOT there before.) I used to be pretty good at sorting through that when needed, and being able to shut down what I could actually kill. But, now, I just don't know. The task manager is so different and I am old and know so little. A couple points: - When I got the error message, the total memory allocation showed at 38%. After I restarted everything, before I did anything, I opened Task Manager and it was at 33%. So, I don't understand why 38% gave me a failure. Seems like it should have been like way higher than that to cause trouble. I have processed videos at much higher quality / larger files / longer time than that one. (Are page files still a thing?) - right now, I have been working for awhile, and have a couple browser tabs open, and AutoCAD, which is high memory use, and I'm at 43%. - anyway, I'll have to circle back to this in a while so I can provide a screenshot or something . . . right now it's fine, since I recently rebooted but, it seems like Task Manager will show multiple instances of the same application. And, I don't mean like service host or spooler or something like that. I mean, I'll only have one instance of say, Word open, but then it'll be listed 4 times or something. I may be remembering wrong, so like I said, I'll have to come back to that. - in the old Task Manager, I could right click and end task. I can still do that under "apps" and I only have a few. But, under "background processes", I do that to some and nothing happens. I chose "McAfee Cloud AV" to see and . . . nothing. I don't get a message that says "Warning, ending this task may launch nukes" or "Can't close this task" or "try back later, dummy" or anything. Just nothing happens. Why is it listed if I can't do anything with, including whether or not it loads in the first place? I did already reboot and do the update then. So, typed out my rant, while I was waiting for all that. This is the kind of advice I like! I know so little, that whenever I try and research it, or ask somebody, nobody seems to be willing to commit to that. So, two follow-up questions then: - why does anybody install McAfee? I get 30 different reminders from that software every day - whether I let it update or close it, the same amount. - if Defender works, what does McAfee do? - Under Windows Defender, there are several sections, one is "Virus & Threat Protection" and another is "App & Browser Control" Right now V&TP indicates I am using "other providers" (McAfee), so I'll enable that when I kill McAfee. And, App &BC is turned off. So, I will turn that on, I guess. My question is, if I need to separately activate App & Browser Control, what exactly is Virus & Threat Protection doing? Where else do Viruses and Threats come from if not from Apps and Browsers? I appreciate any answers and any help. I don't mind going out and trying to learn and research on my own. But, either I am lost with some of the topics and terms that I can't sort it out, or it's been so simplified, it's overly protective and useless.
@Rush-O-Matic In this process, did you try simply exiting your application, waiting 30 seconds, and then re-opening it? It may have nothing to do with what Windows sees as your available memory, but rather an allocation problem in the app itself. That is, by far, the most likely issue here if the OS was reporting you had plenty of memory. Alternately, your swap file might have been full, but that doesn't usually cause out of memory errors. Only in some very specific circumstances. McAfee makes virtually all of their money through businesses and pre-load deals with OEMs. Businesses need command and control centers for their virus protection (no business manages each AV installation individually), which the big antivirus manufacturers provide. And a lot of sales come from pre-loaded applications that people just shrug and renew because it's easy and they don't know anything else. For the Defender question, virus scanning works on both heuristics and "signatures" - specific known sequences of data that are associated with the virus software. That's what the V&TP protects against. A&BC is an additional layer, where it analyzes what apps you install and websites you visit to find problems before your computer runs them - "this app is known to be associated with malware" or "this website is known for phishing."