Question C drive reading as partition in HDD Health

[Archon of the Valley]

Sorry for all of the threads I've created today but I'm really dealing with several weird issues right now and they're really frustrating me. A few days ago, I made a thread in regards to how CrystalDiskInfo stopped recognizing my C drive after I installed an update to the program following the installation of a new E drive, but that all of the information and SMART data would still show up in Speccy. Turns out, the solution to the CrystalDiskInfo problem was to run Advanced Disk Search in the program and it worked.

However, my C drive was originally drive 0. Now, E is showing up as drive 0 and C is drive 1. This is the case with every SMART program I run: CrystalDisk, Speccy, etc. I also noticed this was the case when I had to run startup repair about a week ago. Weirder, still, is that HDD Health refuses to display C as a drive. Instead, it displays C and E in the Partitions section of the program. No explanation whatsoever.

Furthermore, when I try to run GSmartControl's short self-test feature to test the drive, I get an error saying:

Cannot run Short Self-test
Sending command failed.
​

I'm really thinking this drive is on its way out but I'm hoping to squeeze as much life out of it as I can due to my financial situation at the moment. Is this issue a concern or can I just go on as normal? If it has anything to do with the slowdown I've experienced lately, I'd prefer to fix it but if it's not really a concern, I'll leave it alone.

 

[USAFRet]

So that we're all on the same page, a screencap of your Disk Management window, please.

 

[popatim]

The port number thing is a function of your motherbd and drives me insane. It's super annoying when you have multiple drive of the same kind and have specific drives on specific ports and turn on the pc andnow the port #'s don't align with the sata port numbers you've plugged thim into. Drive on sata port 6 shows up as port2... Grrr.

Drive letters always get assigned to partitions, not drives. Even if you use the whole drive for 1 letter you still have to create the one large partition on it - that is normal. The drive that houses the C: partition will likely have 2 to 5 other partitions as well, depending on the motherbd type (uefi or legacy) and how the drive was initialized (MBR or GPT)

 

[Archon of the Valley]

So that we're all on the same page, a screencap of your Disk Management window, please.

Which one? I could give screenshots of CrystalDiskInfo, GSmartControl, HDD Health or Speccy. I have the C drive appearing on all of them except HDD Health, where it reads as a partition instead of a physical disk.

The port number thing is a function of your motherbd and drives me insane. It's super annoying when you have multiple drive of the same kind and have specific drives on specific ports and turn on the pc andnow the port #'s don't align with the sata port numbers you've plugged thim into. Drive on sata port 6 shows up as port2... Grrr.

Drive letters always get assigned to partitions, not drives. Even if you use the whole drive for 1 letter you still have to create the one large partition on it - that is normal. The drive that houses the C: partition will likely have 2 to 5 other partitions as well, depending on the motherbd type (uefi or legacy) and how the drive was initialized (MBR or GPT)

Hmm, at least the numbering isn't a bad thing haha. Could the lettering partition thing have anything to do with why GSmartControl can't run the self-test on the C drive and HDD Health shows it only as a partition, rather than displaying the physical drive too?

 

[USAFRet]

Which one? I could give screenshots of CrystalDiskInfo, GSmartControl, HDD Health or Speccy. I have the C drive appearing on all of them except HDD Health, where it reads as a partition instead of a physical disk.

The actual Windows tool, Disk Management.

 

[Archon of the Valley]

Oh, my bad, here it is:

 

[USAFRet]

You have 2 actual physical drives, 2TB each?

Disk 0 and 1 refers to the physical ports on the motherboard.

 

[Archon of the Valley]

Yes, one is a Toshiba DT01ACA200 7200rpm drive (that's the C drive) and the other is a Seagate ST2000DM001-1ER164 7200rpm drive (E drive).

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, one is a Toshiba DT01ACA200 7200rpm drive (that's the C drive) and the other is a Seagate ST2000DM001-1ER164 7200rpm drive (E drive).

I'm not seeing any specific issues.

 

[Archon of the Valley]

Hmm so I shouldn't be concerned? It's just a weird error in specific programs?

 

[USAFRet]

Hmm so I shouldn't be concerned? It's just a weird error in specific programs?

Is everything actually working?

 

[Archon of the Valley]

Well, things have been slower than usual after an issue I had about a week and a half ago. I was trying to install a new USB keyboard but had a backup PS/2 keyboard attached at the time. I unplugged it after plugging the USB one in but the driver wouldn't install so I (stupidly) decided to force it to power off. When it rebooted, it tried to run chkdsk and I canceled it. Upon signing into Windows, it kept giving me errors, telling me to run chkdsk and such. However, I didn't want to do that as I knew it'd take ages on this PC (as I had to do it once before). I tried running sfc, couldn't even boot into safe mode and I eventually fixed the issue by running startup repair. It told me it detected an error with the file system and it repaired it within about 26 minutes.

Since then, the system works and no corruption or anything is apparent, but it does seem to be slower than it was before all of that happened. It may be in my head but it feels slower. Furthermore, I noticed that both search indexing and pagefile.sys are consistently reading and writing to my disk and I can't quite figure it out, so that's why I was concerned by this issue.

Like I said, things are working now and I do have my important info backed up, but I really wanted to try to squeeze a little more time out of this drive. I can't complain if it craps out since it's about seven years old at this point (and I use this PC a lot) but with my finances the way they are right now, I'd prefer to squeeze a few more months out of it if I can.

 

[neojack]

on a system hard drive, you can try to disable windows prefetch service and windows search service to improve performance.

https://www.technipages.com/windows-enable-disable-superfetch

How to Disable Search In Windows

If you really don’t use Windows Search much, you can disable indexing completely by turning off the Windows Search service. You’ll still be able to search–it will just take longer without an index.

www.howtogeek.com

but best solution would be to clone the C drive to an SSD. 512gb ssd are not really expensive.
free clonling tools like macrium free can do the job.

I recommend Crucial MX500 series, best reliability. Avoid cheap Dramless ssds like the BX line.


no loses since you could reuse the SSD on your future PC anyways.

 

[Archon of the Valley]

I've disabled the search indexing and it helped a bit, but what about prefetch? I'm not super familiar with how that'd impact my PC.

I can't even really afford a 512GB SSD at the moment, but even so, this is a 2TB drive. With as many games as I play, that really wouldn't be an option for me right now, especially with a tight budget. I do plan to get an SSD down the road so I get better performance for specific games, though.