Trust ThinkVantage ToolBox?

Hi all,

My HDD is throwing SMART read/conveyance test errors in ThinkVantage Toolbox; it hangs during the test before giving the error saying it can't read a certain sector. Anyways, the latter supposedly indicates damage incurred while "transporting" yet the only transporting is room-to-room and use on a bus or train. No zero-gravity antics.

How trustworthy is ThinkVantage Toolbox? I also ran some stand-alone diagnostic software from Lenovo that also said yes, you have SMART errors and to prepare for imminent failure. chkdsk found/fixed a bunch of errors but that doesn't seem to do anything. Am I missing any other tests? Any sort of advice is appreciated; I don't want to waste the service rep's time.

One last thing: Lenovo's Think service is still based in the USA, right? If not, when would be a good time to get a native English speaker to avoid any possible confusion?

 

Have you used the ThinkVantage Active Protection tool? It is supposed to prevent accidental damage to your notebook while you move it around. It does this by shutting down the hard drive when it detects some sort of movement in the accelerator sensors.

Even picking up your notebook and moving it around the room can "theoretically" damage the hard drive. Or giving it a fast nudge on the table. Although I never saw this actually happening with any system that did not run the active protection system or something similar. Nevertheless, the possiblity exists.

SMART is supposed to tell you the health of your system. If it detects some sort of errors, a wise move would be to backup everything you have, even if the hard drive does not seem to be failing.

Unfortunately I don't know how reliable the SMART reports are.

SMART is not something by Lenovo, so I would think any tool that reads the SMART info would report the same metrics for you.

 

It's been running in Windows' control panel since I bought it. Seems weird that there's an option to install it in the ThinkVantage tools file in the Start menu.

 

If the damage truly is because of transporting, it might mean that only that particular area of your hard drive has suffered damage. If otherwise there are no other sounds/indications other than SMART, you might be lucky and maybe able to use the hard drive. I would still backup everything important though.

Did you run the chkdsk surface scan? That should detect unreadable/bad clusters/sectors and mark them as such, so the computer will not try to use those. Any data stored there would have been damaged and/or destroyed.

chkdsk will also create some files (in the root of the drive, if I recall correctly) where it stores anything recovered when it detected the bad sectors. So you should also check there is there are any files there after the scan.

 

Salvage what you can and ditch the drive. Once you see errors like that, you can never trust it again with important files. Get an SSD if you're worried about jostling the drive while moving the system.

 

ThinkVantage Toolbox has PC Doctor for the diagnostics, I haven't had issues with it. I would back your data off immediately and replace the drive, SSD if you absolutely can. Even with the Active Protection System, you can still kill a drive with a slight jar, and I've seen it happen in real time.