Build 9879 trashing hard drives!

Saltgrass said:

I see the drive listed at MicroCenter. I seem to remember being there some time ago and there were two Seagate 1 TB drives types available and one was smaller. The salesman mentioned it only had one platter as opposed to more. The specs. seem to confirm this. So if you were only having problems with this one type of drive, I might think it was that specific drive.

the industry's first 1TB-per-disk hard drive technology. Windows XP, Vista, 7

BillyBob seems to indicate all drives are having a problem with 9879, but my Z87 system is running fine and not had any drive problems. Maybe having some specific information about the condition of the drives after they crash would help clear things up. But 9879 is having other problems such as BSODs due to Video drivers, so it could very well be having drive problems. Maybe he would attach his small dump file.

I sent details to Microsoft, plus they should have the info from numerous BSODS from error logs. I'm not saying that ALL drives are having these problems, I've been around long enough to know that it could be a variety of conditions including different motherboards and video cards etc.

The ONE common denominator here is build 9879, I'd say Microsoft has done a major shift with this build, hence all the problems, they have even admitted to the problems. When I talk about trashing drives I don't particularly mean damaged beyond repair in all cases, but certainly severely damaged to the extent that a lot of people would throw out their drives.

I was going to take mine back and claim it under warranty, but having repaired hundreds if not thousands of computers and HDDS in the past, I pretty well knew I'd be able to breathe life into it again, which I did.

I was going to check out the error logs, but in the end couldn't be bothered and ended up removing the partitions and letting Windows 8.1 do its own partitioning and formatting.

Im not blaming Microsoft, they made us aware of the problems with this beta software. I'm just pointing out that this is not some failure of HDDs its 9879.

Saltgrass, It is not only the Seagate drives that I use (ST1000DM003) but others as well.
Browse through the thread "I lost 2 Hard Disks after updated from Build 9860 to 9879" in this same "Installation & Setup" category and you will see references to multiple HDDs as well as SSDs. I started this thread because of those and the fact that I lost 4 Seagates Very quickly after upgrading to build 9879. Other people are having this issue also and does appear to be related to newer technology drives and possibly the PUIS (Power-Up In Standby) feature, very possibly because Build 9879 is sending the drive an instruction to go to sleep (or something) but never sending the proper "wake up" command. All other OSs and test software are not properly "waking up" the drives except, possible, a Linux "live" distro as mentioned in the link already provided. I would think that someone in MS should be able to decipher this issue if they really put some thought to it.

An additional note:
Tried this from WightWalker, Windows 10 Forums-Installation & Setup-I lost 2 Hard Disks from Build 9860 to 9879.
-Control Panel-Power Options-Choose what the power buttons do-Change settings that are currently unavalable
-Un-check "Turn on fast startup (recommended)"
-Rebooted.
-Re-added one of my ST1000DM003 HDDs to test.
Shut down & booted several times and after about the 3rd time, the drive failed AGAIN!
My previous post shows that this is apparently being caused by the PUIS (Power-Up In Standby) activation being done by build 9879, and does not appear to have anything to do with the "Turn on fast startup" for Win 10 (and 8.1) because I just checked my 8.1 settings and it is set to Enable that "Turn on fast startup" and I have one of the suspected drives installed for a long time with no problems.

I certainly agree with the comment about 9879 being a big problem, and not even for the same reasons mentioned.

I have no familiarity with the situation you are demonstrating, so I will have to do some research. I do have an ASUS Z68 motherboard and a 500 GB Seagate drive, so I will set that up to see what happens. If the problem seems to present on relatively older boards, maybe my board will present also. I will also try a newer drive since your post mentions it is presenting on advanced tech HDDs.

Just a question, in the Power options, what do you show as to when the drive is put to sleep? I think the default is 20 minutes. Also, what do you show for your Sleep settings, such as Hybrid sleep or hibernate? This may not be involved, but it does seem the system returning from sleep is involved.

Also, what does the powercfg /a command show as available sleep states?

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg /a

The following sleep states are available on this system:
Standby (S3)
Hibernate
Hybrid Sleep
Fast Startup

The following sleep states are not available on this system:

Standby (S1)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.

Standby (S2)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.

Standby (Connected)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.

Edit: This is the first website I checked and seems to have some pertinent info. Are there tools or jumper settings on the drives to disable the PUIS or PM2 option? Have you tried using the RAID controller instead of the AHCI controller?

Power-up in standby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HDD Power-Up In Standby (PUIS) feature to block non-system disks spinup at PC wakeup - Tutorials - reboot.pro

The system is set up with a primary WD drive and secondary Seagate 500 GB. I will let it do its thing to see if one of the drives develops the problem.

I noticed my WD drives all have a message on the front saying to enable PUIS you would need to jumper pins 3 and 4. The Seagate drives have no configuration pins, so if it were to be a factor, probably some software utility would be needed to set that option, if they even had such an option.

I notice another soul on the Microsoft site has lost their secondary drive and it sounds like what you guys are seeing.

The "Turn on fast startup" feature in Win 10 (and Win 8.1) apparently have nothing to do with the drive failures.
The one piece of concrete information is that after the HDD fails, inserting it into a linux machine and inspection with the hdparm command does show that the "Power-Up In Standby" feature for the failed drive shows ENABLED and reseting this feature to DISABLED, again with the hdparm utility "fixes" the issue. Then inserting the drive into a Windows machine shows that it is fine, no issues, all data intact.
I have downloaded the Build 9879 iso file and I'm going to test one more time in my smaller machine (i7-930) with a WDC SATA2 HDD for C: and one of the ST1000DM003 as the D: drive. I'll post results as soon as I have any.
BTW, I have my machines to "Never" Put the computer to sleep, just Turn off the display after 10 minutes.

OK, keep the info coming when you get anything new. I was wondering if the system just putting the Hard Drives to sleep was all that might be necessary for the problem to develop.

Also, since they made some changes to One Drive in the latest build, do you use and sync with One Drive?

Saltgrass said:

OK, keep the info coming when you get anything new. I was wondering if the system just putting the Hard Drives to sleep was all that might be necessary for the problem to develop.

Also, since they made some changes to One Drive in the latest build, do you use and sync with One Drive?

I'll keep info coming as it develops.
Actually, I prefer to NOT use One Drive. Everything was fine in the first 2 builds where you used the gpedit.msc to change to not save to OneDrive, but in 9879, you have to do an extra step, go into Task Manager-Startup and Disable OneDrive startup, otherwise, it always shows as running and it still insists on showing in Windows Explorer. I have my own NAS devices here locally (Buffalo 2 slot units) that I keep for data & other stuff.

I need you to confirm you are not using UEFI for your install. If you are, opening Disk Management and checking if there were a EFI system partition would verify you are using UEFI. If you show a System partition, which is Active, you are using an MBR configuration.

I have not seen any problems so far with the clean install of 9879 and the drives connected. I will run it through tomorrow to make sure, and after that, I might change the install to MBR to see if that might allow the problem.

Again, if you find any specifics about what the condition causing the problem, please advise. I do seem to see folks loosing there drives after an update and starting the system the next day.... But that was happening before 9879 came along.