Hard Drive problems

DMC

Hi, sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin....

Over the past few months, my 60GB hard drive, with Windows 2000 installed, occasionally grunted at me. As ths became more annoying, I occasionally ran Check Disk, and this appeared to sort it out, getting rid of a few bad clusters or sectors. Every three weeks or so, I'd have to run it again, as and when the grumbling reappeared.

Last night, it was worse than ever, so, as usual, overnight I got it to run. This morning, it was finished, it had found a few bad sectors of the hard drive, and marked them. Fine. As it was bad yesterday, I decided that I'd run that again while I was at work.

When I got back today....... Big ****-off blue screen "incompatable boot device" while Windows 2000 was loading. No way would it go past it, not even in Safe Mode, it would'nt even load the DOS prompt.

Faced with impending carnage, I turned to my 2nd hard drive, changed the jumpers and installed Window 2000 on my F: drive. Grand. So I thought I'd set the jumpers to slave on my newly fecked C: drive and see if I could perform some sort of recovery, copy file across etc.

No chance. Windows now recognises the old C: drive as an I: drive, but cant read any data on it. There is an 8MB C: drive, which is part of the unpartitioned 2nd hard drive. Looking further, I checked with Partition Magic Pro, which I had backuped on CD, and checked. It is recognising that it is the correct size, but not what format, it should be NTFS, but it reads it as "other". The 2nd hard drive, which I'm now running Windows on, is FAT32.

So, what are my options here?

Can I get the data from the hard drive?
How can I get Windows to recognise it again?
Or am I looking at the nice 120GB hard drive on Komplett for €120?

All answers and advice welcome.

str8_away

from my experience if the OS is running on FAT32 it has problem seeing NTFS as slave. There might be a way around it but I never found it.

On the other hand if the OS is running on NTFS there is no problem seeing FAT32 as slave

spongebob

your regular bad sectors point to failure on the platters and if you also had spinning diffficulties, donging noises or knocks then you could have a mechanism problem as well or both .

as the drive is very nearly dead (or fecked to put it technically) you will probably have to get it to spin up once to get your data off.

If it refuses to spin (not the problem DMC has) I normally turn it every which way (there are six sides and 6 axes) to see if it will spin on any of them, rebooting every time and listening for a spin up after the bios.

If this doesn't workand it still wont spin, I lay it flat, writing up and circuit board down and tap the long side of the drive after the bios splash screen appears (good tap but the drive should only move a few mm in response) as this is when the bios will try to initialise the drive and spin her up.

I have had to tap the drive and reboot up to ten times b4 the thing spun into life, and then got me data off.

Good luck and do not ignore those funny noises or regular bad sectors in future, you had your warning and didn't realise it at the time. In many cases the feckin thing dies and never comes back, in the case of a progressive failure there is hope. Ironically if you get really quiet drives you will often never hear the warning noises.

M

spongebob

Originally posted by str8_away
from my experience if the OS is running on FAT32 it has problem seeing NTFS as slave. There might be a way around it but I never found it.

On the other hand if the OS is running on NTFS there is no problem seeing FAT32 as slave

w2k can see fat16 fat32 and ntfs , i don;t think that is the problem.

M

SouperComputer

what muck said about firing up the drive is true.

assuming its spinning up and BIOS can see it, is it possibly a securities problem that wont allow you to access the HD?

there are sotfware data recovery tools available, a google search will help you there. But I think it may be beyond that now. Still theres a chance youll get somthing back

spongebob

forgot about the permissions bit.

rright click on the drive and select properties, security and then advanced, then owner and then replace owner (the admin on the old inslall probably) with the admin on th enew install.

it must cycle thru all files

M

str8_away

Sorry I did not explain myself clearly.

In my experience
2 HD (A) and (B) both has Win2K on it, say (A) has NTFS and (B) has Fat32.

If you set (A) up as master and (B) as slave and boot up with (A) you can see (B).
But if you set (B) up as master and (A) as slave and boot up with (B) you cannot see (A).

I think it might be the sercurity function of NTFS.

Muck if you read the orginal post you will see that DMC has no problem of getting HD to spin. The problem was that Win2K on second HD does not reconise orginal HD as NTFS.

Windows now recognises the old C: drive as an I: drive, but cant read any data on it. There is an 8MB C: drive, which is part of the unpartitioned 2nd hard drive. Looking further, I checked with Partition Magic Pro, which I had backuped on CD, and checked. It is recognising that it is the correct size, but not what format, it should be NTFS, but it reads it as "other". The 2nd hard drive, which I'm now running Windows on, is FAT32.

spongebob

OK

Control Panel > Admin Tools > Comp Management > Disk Admin

Does it appear in there ?

In the action menu does a rescan or refresh work ?

M

DMC

I think that str8_away has hit the nail on the head...

Drive A is fecked, on NTFS, and Drive B is where I have the new installation of Windows 2000 on Fat32

A was master and B was slave, now, to install the OS, I pulled the power from A, and set B to master, and that got Windows 2000 up and running.

At that point, leaving B as master, I jumpered A to slave, but the results are that B is operating just fine, but it cant read A. As Muck asked in his last post, in Disk Admin, it comes up as "unreadable" similar to what I was already getting on Partition Magic. Rescan or Refresh has no effect. So, it seems what str8_away said, Win2000 on Fat32 on master cant see an NTFS hard drive as a slave.

Would converting B to NTFS be the best solution here? Could I then see A after that?

str8_away is also correct, the hard drive is spinning and doing a half a boot up. I can see the white "starting up" screen on Win2000, then it hits on a bad sector... chugg chugg chugg chugg. Then blue screen. Its not hardware releated, I thought about removed USB devices, but thats not the issue if I cant get into Safe Mode.

I still feel I can get this back. SouperComputer, I will check for data recovery tools, recommend any? Always the optimist!

Eurorunner

I will check for data recovery tools, recommend any?

Easy Recovery Professional


But...you shouldnt need this - i *think* if you convert the other drive to ntfs, then you should be able to see drive A??

netman

bad sectors or unusual drive noise during normal operation (clangs etc) are a sure sign your drive is going to fail.

hate to say it, but it looks to me that you've left it too long. the bad sectors probably affected the partition table, and that's why neither win2k not partition magic can find the partition type, and in the case of win2k report the wrong size.

easy recovery can do some wonders, so give it a shot.

other than that, look up the warranty information for your hard drive before you spend any money. you might be getting a new replacement. it's definitely worth spending 5 minutes on, i sent a 2.5 year old 40GB IBM drive that had some bad sectors and got a brand new 60GB drive.

the thing with bad sectors is, they never stay isolated. it's just a simptom of drive failing, and will spread. if you really want to use the drive, after you recover whatever can be recovered, you can low-level format it, then fire up partition magic, look where the bad sectors are, and leave that area of the drive unpartitioned. create a partition (or two, three...) in an area free of bad sectors and leave some room in between.

it will work for some time until the bad sectors spread. if the starting sectors are damaged (with the partition table), some drives have the ability to relocate that sector to another healthy portion of the disk. look up the manufacturer's utilities for that.

good luck!

str8_away

I have used "Easy Recovery Professional" it is a very good program but it does not seems to work on WinXP with NTFS for me maybe I did not config. the program right.

Restorer2000 on the other hand does work for NTFS and very easy to use. You canget a demo program very easy on the net. But demo program only allows you to recover files up to 64k. But you can see what files you can recover.

Just a thought:
If you can get half boot up maybe you can try to "repair" Win2k. If you boot up with Win2K installation disk you can use the Repair function.

DMC

Originally posted by Eurorunner
Easy Recovery Professional

It worked

EasyRecovery Pro did the trick, I was able to see the files on Disk A, and I was able to copy them onto Disk B.

I'm sooo happy right now.

Thanks Eurorunner, and all for the help and suggestions!

(and if you are wondering why it took me so long, I've been ill, so last night was the first opportunity to fix it!)

Eurorunner

Glad to help. Have used Easy Recovery Pro before..its a good app..although some people on another forum are telling me GetDataBack is even better?

SouperComputer

theres another one called fille recovery pro which is good.

best to have as many recovery utils as possible. Some will recover what others wont. R-Studio allows you to play with some hardware settings and although very laborious gets good results.