Questions tagged [hard-drive]

A hard disk drive (or HDD) is a non-volatile, random access device for storing digital data.

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9 votes
10 answers
56k views

My C drive is 20GB large and almost full, how do I regain space?

I have Windows 7 Ultimate installed on my PC. The C drive has a capacity of 20 GB and I have only a few applications installed. Still, the drive shows as being almost full up to its capacity and keeps ...
8 votes
6 answers
140k views

How can you find out the hard drive type, size (3.5” or 2.5”) on a PC?

How can I determine if a PC’s hard drive is SATA or IDE, and also if it’s a 3.5” one or 2.5” one.
11 votes
4 answers
19k views

How to find model number of Linux disk drive?

I have a Linux box with five disk drives, one of which I want to replace. The offending drive is /dev/sdc, but that doesn't tell me how to distinguish the hardware. The drive is SATA and the ...
0 votes
0 answers
709 views

Cloning Machine with VirtualBox

I am trying to clone a VirtualBox Ubuntu 16.10 instance for a remote machine. I am using VirtualBox Version 5.1.22 r115126 (Qt5.6.2). I have used Machine...Clone to clone the hard disk, which is a ....
0 votes
0 answers
279 views

Error 0xc000000f : Boot failed after I accidentally changed my C drive to active

I was trying to hard reset my computer. I was removing a parallel installation of Ubuntu which was installed alongside Windows. To remove Grub, I deleted the Ubuntu partition and then used the ...
0 votes
1 answer
5k views

Can't Clear/Format HDD or Partitions (Windows 10 Installation)

So, here's what happened. I plugged in a bootable W10 installation thumbdrive. After deleting two preexisting partitions that I had made manually, the installer created a reserved system partition (...
0 votes
2 answers
2k views

Moving windows XP embedded to new hardware

I'm trying to move windows XP embedded to new computer since the current computer failed. I've cloned the disc with "Acronis true image" and used "fixide" to reset the controlled driver. And I get ...
-1 votes
1 answer
6k views

I can't find my folder anywhere

I had a folder full of random images of me and my family, more than 100, and yesterday I tried searching for it on my desktop (where it has always been) and couldn't find it. I tried keyword ...
1 vote
2 answers
285 views

Is my laptop wiped?d the drive c, and then set up a recovery partition so I could sell the laptop

I took my laptop to a computer store to be wiped before reselling. The owner wrote in the comments section that he wiped the drive C using DOD and set up a recovery partition. Does this sound right? ...
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

SSD suddenley stopped working, displaying it to be 32kb in size

One morning my laptop froze so I forcefully shut it down. Afterwards I was no longer able to boot into my operating system. Now when I run fdisk -l on a live distribution it shows up as: Disk /dev/...
1 vote
1 answer
1k views

Windows XP: Hard drive is called letter "H:" instead of "C:"

I recently installed Windows XP Pro SP3 on an old PC. Everything seemed fine except for the fact that the 1 TB hard drive that I installed it to is called "H:" instead of "C:," like it usually is on ...
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

Fedora 25 GNU/Linux - find missing disk space and resize LVM

I've installed Fedora Server 25 64-bit using LVM and automatic disk partitioning. Automatically created /root volume was too small (16 GB) and a lot of free space was left and still available on the ...
1 vote
1 answer
2k views

The laptop with a hard drive locked

I have a laptop in the workplace with a hard drive which has been locked by the previous employee. Nobody knows the current password and I'm trying to figure out how to overcome this problem. It has ...
0 votes
0 answers
76 views

Internal Hard Drive Clicking and Unreadable

So it seems my 3.5" SATA drive is dead. I woke to the sound of it clicking this morning and powered off. When I turned back on, it clicked again continuously and refused to be recognise. Is this the ...
1 vote
0 answers
239 views

4TB Seagate, End-to-End errors

I've got a seagate 4TB drive, part of a RAID0 array. It's ~4 years old, but every test I've thrown at it says it's clean, working great, and every SMART test I've tried, including Seagate's own ...
0 votes
2 answers
986 views

Laptop is running very slow. Morbidly slow

I bought my laptop 3 years ago and never had an issue with it. It’s a 2014 ASUS X550LD with Windows 10 Professional powered by a 'staggering' 2 Cores-4 Threads Intel Core i7-4510U 2.00GHz (up to 3....
0 votes
1 answer
8k views

How to access NAS files when disk moved to tower PC as second HD

Hopefully someone can help. My NAS Lacie Networkspace2 has (almost) died. I took the drive out of its casing and placed it as a second drive in a Dell XPS tower with Windows Vista (I know... but try ...
0 votes
2 answers
2k views

Extra HDD dramatically decrease battery?

I have an Asus N550JV, and a few month ago I added extra 8 GB RAM and an SSD. I left the HDD instead of the cd-rom, since I thought it would be more useful for me. I noticed my laptop now holds much ...
3 votes
1 answer
6k views

Hard drive running even when not in use/unmounted

I recently went through a big effort of swapping my linux install over to my SSD, to gain speed and power savings. However I can still hear the hard drive spinning sometimes, particularly for the ...
0 votes
1 answer
5k views

Harddisk space used by unknown data on Windows 10

I'm really stuck on a problem with two of my drives (1 hdd + 1 ssd): Both show they are almost full after I have cleaned (wiped) the free space of the drives using PartitionGuru. (that finished ...
0 votes
2 answers
3k views

Can I install Windows 10 on an SSD without the SATA to USB cable and doing so on a single-disk laptop?

I have an Asus laptop with room for only one harddrive. I wish to replace my HDD with a Samsung EVO 850 SSD. However, I do not have the SATA to USB cable... I plan to Reset my ASUS to factory ...
0 votes
1 answer
314 views

SSD causing issues with computer freezing

I have a Dell XPS 15 L521X. The computer will freeze when booting or starting up. I have opened up the laptop and found the issue, my SSD. When the SSD is out and unplugged from the laptop, the laptop ...
0 votes
0 answers
49 views

Removed an internal hard drive with windows and ubuntu dual boot; can only see windows partition

I removed the hard drive of a laptop with Ubuntu and Windows on two partitions and put it into an enclosure. On plugging it into a windows PC, I only see my windows partition. I am unable to plug it ...
1 vote
2 answers
18k views

How to extend partition linux parted

Context I have a remote Linux CentOS VM on Azure which hosts a MYSQL database. I just finished upgrading the disk size from 30GB to 100GB. Problem is that extra space wasn't added to the partition. ...
2 votes
1 answer
7k views

C:\System Volume Information is taking up 60 GB

I decided to do some spring cleaning on my laptop, and used a disk analyzer to free up some space on my C drive. I've managed to go from about 13 to about 33 GB of space, but I noticed that I was only ...
0 votes
1 answer
843 views

Partition recovery for NTFS partition with corrupted MFT [duplicate]

The affected SSD is removed from a laptop with 4 partitions to be used in an external enclosure, one primary partition (C:) cannot be found in Windows, but could be read in Ubuntu. After I was trying ...
0 votes
0 answers
193 views

partitioning hard drive for windows 7 + ubuntu dual boot

Below is what my partitions looked like in my PC (with windows 10). I don't recollect creating these so i guess these were created by PC manufacturer. Recently booted from USB and deleted all these. ...
1 vote
2 answers
5k views

Is it possible to install an OS on external hard drive using another computer

Yes, i am aware this is a duplicate of this, but it was never directly answered and instead given an off topic answer, but in my case, the host computer cannot format the partition using the ...
0 votes
0 answers
196 views

Process explorer identified Wild Tangent as using 2GB Private Bytes on slow computer

So I was troubleshooting this problem where a computer was occasionally becoming unresponsive to the point that the only option was a power-cycle to bring it back to life. I tried the following: ...
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

CPU or Disk bottleneck?

Say I have machine A and B, where machine B has a moderately faster disk but a comparable processor to machine A, everything else is the same. I perform a large Spark job locally on both machines ...
0 votes
4 answers
12k views

Is it possible to transfer free storage space from one hard drive to another?

I have a Windows 7 and my C:// drive has a total disk size of of 50GB. My G:// and F:// drives have much disk free on each drive with 50GB minimum available. Due to all of the programs I install, my ...
-2 votes
1 answer
46 views

Dell XPS 410, 2007, Windows Vista Hard Drive is dead, How to copy all content including the OS into a new one

I think I have a Western Digital Hard Drive but I'm not sure. I don't even know how to open the thing up to check. I have the unit sitting in front of my laptop which I'm using to make this and it's ...
2 votes
1 answer
99 views

Is an hard drive still reliable if it a S.M.A.R.T attribute previously failed

I acquired an used Seagate 500Gb ST3500413AS hard drive. Its Ambiant temperature S.M.A.R.T. attribute is marked as Failed previously, every other attributes is marked as OK. I ran a S.M.A.R.T. self ...
3 votes
1 answer
3k views

Can't create vmdk from raw disk: VERR_SHARING_VIOLATION

I'm using this answer to create a vmdk file from my secondary hard drive. My problem is I keep getting an error stating: VBoxManage.exe: error: Cannot open the raw disk '\\.\PhysicalDrive0': ...
0 votes
0 answers
92 views

How to Restore a Cloned Drive to Original Size?

A while back I had a laptop that crashed on me and I was able to successfully clone the hard drive onto a 3 TB WD drive that I had in an enclosure. However I didn't realize at the time, since I had ...
1 vote
1 answer
427 views

Recovering data on drive after dd'ing an iso on it

I have a 1 To hard drive which was formatted in ext4 or NTFS (not sure..but I'd say ext4), containing only one partition. I mistakenly copied three iso in a row (I was testing several Linux live USB) ...
7 votes
1 answer
11k views

Can I use any SSD in any laptop?

Pre-Context: I'm good with software but newbie in hardware. I had issues replacing memory for notebook, I found out that there are several models and types of ram memory, and stuffes like voltage, ...
3 votes
1 answer
8k views

testdisk and load backup of partition table?

I have a new disk, so I wanted to see how the testdisk backup works. After partitioning and formatting the disk with gksu gparted /dev/sdc, this is what I get: $ sudo fdisk -lu /dev/sdc Disk /dev/...
1 vote
1 answer
341 views

Sudden hard drive crash, won't boot or mount consistently, need data retrieval

My hard drive suddenly crashed today. I run SMART monitoring software, but there was no warning. I wouldn't be so worried about it if my backup wasn't five-days old (my backup software is supposed ...
0 votes
2 answers
6k views

Find which physical hard drive is represented in path letters

I recently installed a new hard drive to my Windows computer, I want to format the old one but I'm not sure if it's C or D, how can I find out?
22 votes
3 answers
47k views

Matched or unmatched drives for RAID arrays?

Looking around there is conflicting information on this, with some strongly suggesting one or the other. From my understanding the issue with matched drives is that the wear on both drives is more or ...
5 votes
2 answers
463 views

Is it safe to overwrite LBA 2-2047

So back when I used WUBI before settling on using a VM, GRUB was installed (but I messed it up and had to reinstall everything (luckily I backed up)). That was back when I used Vista which starts at ...
0 votes
1 answer
2k views

Linux Luks encryption automount and unmount

I have a Luks encrypted external hard drive that I have setup to auto-mount and auto-unmount after rsync. I have the system put the encrypted file to be mounted under /dev/mapper/foo Anyway, im not ...
0 votes
1 answer
71 views

Extra hard drive is needed to boot the computer

While installing my new SSD, I had my extra internal hard drive still all hooked up. After installing Windows 10 on the new SSD, I tried to remove the extra hard drive, just to find out it wont let me ...
0 votes
1 answer
104 views

Copy a Domain account from an old hdd to a new installation on the same laptop

I have a laptop with Windows 7 Ultimate that is on a Domain and I have had problems with installed software which has caused some corruption to two of my software systems, they don't play nicely ...
2 votes
0 answers
5k views

Extract BitLocker auto unlock key from registry of broken Windows installation

I am trying to recover files from an old laptop where the Windows 10 installation broke. The drives (system drive C: and data drive D:) were encrypted using BitLocker, but the recovery key for D: was ...
6 votes
1 answer
10k views

Interpreting the Spin Retry Count S.M.A.R.T. attribute value for hard drives

I'm confused about the Spin Retry Count S.M.A.R.T. attribute value. On one particular hard drive, I see a raw value of 0, which the popular CrystalDiskInfo v7.0.5 interprets as a current value of 166,...
2 votes
1 answer
3k views

Increasing C size of a VM in Azure

I followed this guide for increasing C drive size of a Windows Server 2016 VM. However when running: Update-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -VM $vm I get the following error: Update-...
0 votes
1 answer
85 views

Why is my new PC 40% slower to calculate and write a grid surface?

I've just updated a PC to do scientific calculations more quickly. The focus of the change was to step up to the Nvidia 1080Ti from the 980Ti. Now I'm running a test model. I get the following ...
0 votes
1 answer
134 views

Unable to configure drives on Intel S500VSA server board.

I am installing two 2TB SATA drives on an Intel S500VSA server board. I want to configure a RAID 1 array. When I log into the RAID configuration panel with Ctrl-E I find that the two drives are ...

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