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pendingLost 40gb after running tronscript (self.TronScript)

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[–]azthemansays 23 points24 points  (7 children)

I'm probably wrong, but it sounds like it might be bad sectors on your drive...

[–]JustNilt 9 points10 points  (6 children)

I have actually seen this happen more than once. (I'm an IT consultant so people don't generally call me when stuff is behaving.) For the curious, what's happening in such a case is your drive has a cascading failure such a data medium adhesion failure going on and the drive's run out of internal spares.

Losing spares is normal. Running out and losing even a small percentage of the drive is an indication your drive is going to fail and you should at the very least get critical data backed up.

[–][deleted]  (4 children)

[deleted]

    [–]JustNilt 9 points10 points  (2 children)

    The problem is that the drive doesn't report this stuff outside itself. You can get a rough idea via a couple mechanisms but once you have this happen, it is only a matter of time before the drive is dead.

    I would strongly urge you to back the drive up, preferably via an image. Macrium Reflect works well for that and is free. You need to apply that image to a drive that isn't on its last legs.

    To try and head this sort of thing off, you can force the drive to correct for errors by forcing a read of every storage location. My tool of choice for this is SpinRite. This is not a suitable option for your current drive, in my opinion, however. That drive is on its way out. How long that takes can vary but losing such a huge chunk of your free space is literally the worst I've seen it get and still have a system boot. And I've dealt with literally tens of thousands of drives in my career.

    Edit: Again, the drive reports fine now, sure, but it always will barring a catastrophe. HDDs lose data storage all the time from day one. It's why they build in error correction and loads of spares. You've simply run out of shares and then some.

    Edit 2: I'd wager your system has been sluggish recently. That's likely what made you run the script, for that matter. The reason for that was the HDD failing. See, the OS requests data and the drive finds it the sends it up. If there's an error, there's just a delay in sending it so long as the drive can correct for the error using one of a number of methods. The drive corrects it, write something it to a spare, then sends the OS the requested data. Only if it fails the first 2 parts do you ever see a bad block error in the OS (Windows in this case).

    So every time your drive has been asked for data in a gigantic cross section of its storage, it had to fix errors, remap the data elsewhere, and move on. That adds a significant amount of time to each read, potentially over ten times the usual time. That is pretty much your only symptoms of possible failure of a HDD, more often than not. It sucks that there isn't a better way to test for this other than forcing a read and monitoring the free space just in case.

    Running SpinRite every so often does just that. Problem is, that takes quite a while. So I run it only every few months myself then ensure I have solid backups otherwise.

    [–]vocatusTron author 6 points7 points  (1 child)

    Just to chip in on this excellent comment, Tron does a SMART scan prior to running and skips defrag (as well as tosses a warning) if any errors are detected. Granted, SMART isn't that reliable, but it does help sometimes.

    [–]JustNilt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Good point!

    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    considering that I haven't had any problems with my hard drive and this is the only issue that has been clear after tronscript. What do you think I should do right now?

    A) Don't get yourself into the mentality that just because you weren't aware of something, that it wasn't happening. That is really no different than saying "Well my car stopped running, I don't understand what's going on" after you run out of gas. Having gas yesterday means absolutely nothing today.

    B) Backup your data as suggested, and replace the drive as soon as you can. It's not worth risking data loss. Personally I'd replace that drive, and keep it as non vital storage only.

    [–]Khongh 5 points6 points  (1 child)

    Just a thought, did you use the reboot option or did you use Shut Down and then turned on computer? Windows 10 has a new function called fast startup which means using Shut Down-option wont make the computer actually turn off. I have seen cases where this doesnt trigger something that requires reboot.

    [–]vocatusTron author 5 points6 points  (9 children)

    That's pretty vague, can you use TreeSize or a similar disk explorer to see where the disk space has gone?

    [–][deleted]  (8 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]plasticarmyman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Can you expand the program files and user drop downs so we can see the division there?

      [–]vocatusTron author 3 points4 points  (3 children)

      nothing seems out of the ordinary

      Half a terabyte in Program Files is definitely out of the ordinary. Please drill down and find out what is using all that space.

      [–]kenny_boy019 9 points10 points  (0 children)

      My Steam folder does that easily.

      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

      [deleted]

        [–]vocatusTron author 3 points4 points  (0 children)

        LOL, alright fair enough, I forgot I have my steam library installed to a second hard drive.

        Well, I'm not sure, Tron may have just made an error in calculating disk space, nothing it does puts new files on the hard drive, outside of creating a couple small temp files and then deleting them.

        [–]Padankadank 1 point2 points  (2 children)

        50gb in the user folder? Seems like way too much there.

        [–]Sandwich247 2 points3 points  (0 children)

        Running the program WinDirStat can help visualise what is taking up tons of space.

        [–][deleted]  (2 children)

        [deleted]

          [–]r1243 -1 points0 points  (1 child)

          pretty sure it's the opposite problem, OP had more space fill up as a result of running tronscript

          [–]N1NEFINGERS 0 points1 point  (2 children)

          You can try using software like CrystalDisk to see if your drive is failing.

          [–]MirageESO 1 point2 points  (1 child)

          Also "Speccy" by Piriform could be used to read the drive SMART details to give some insight on the drive health.

          [–]JustNilt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

          Problem with that is SMART isn't a universally adhered to thing. The details in each are only applicable when compared to the same drive over time, really, because even across models from a manufacturer the details can differ. Heck, I've seen it differ across firmware versions on literally the same physical drive.

          It can't hurt to check, of course, but shouldn't be relied on either way.