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Bizzare Problems.....

  • 05-03-2006 8:35pm
    #1
    The_Conductor
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 32,286 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    Out of the blue my main system at home has started acting up.

    Specs:
    Win 2000 SP4 with all updates, antivirus software and a hardware firewall.
    P4 2.8Ghz, 4Gb RAM, 4 * 250Gb harddrives (on seperate Promise and Highpoint RAID card), 2* 160Gb HDDs (onboard RAID), System HDD on primary IDE with a DVD burner and a DVDROM on the secondary IDE.

    This was all functioning fine up to Friday- when my system suddenly took almost 20mins to boot. Moving the mouse across screen was jumpy and without any applications and with minimal threads active CPU usage was up at 100% (RAM at about 300Mb of 4Gb).

    Tried to open my e-mail and the Outlook server crashed (files located on one of the RAID 160Gb drives). Thereafter trying to access anything at all on that drive froze the system. Rebooted the system- new hard-ware found- it insisted on reinstalling all my RAID drivers. Drivers reinstalled- and on rebooting a number of "Disk drives" found. All apparently installed fine- but identified in Device Manager as "Disk Drives" and not with Make and model no. as previously. System management states that all Dynamic drives are unmountable...... Reboot again- with everything removed apart from System drive and a single raid drive- not externally mounted as a Firewire drive. Drive mounts fine- but only able to see folders and files with names that start with a number or the alphabetical letters A- to- C. over 90% of the files have vanished. A scan disk on this drive hangs at the beginning of stage 2- scanning for errors does not even reach 1%- it just sits there. Ontrack data recovery mounts the drive- but only sees the same files as in Explorer- and recovery option nil for the missing files. Used space on the disk continues to register 114Gb (the correct amount for all the files).

    Mount the 160Gb drive on Firewire and map its contents as a network drive and get e-mail up and running again. No file corruption has occurred.

    Try to partition a fresh 250Gb drive on Secondary Master but only Disk Management only recognises 128Gb (and offers a max partition of 128Gb as either primary or extended partition). Reboot again. Stick this drive on a Raid controller- and XComputer Management willing to recognise its full capacity and mount it so that it can be partitioned.

    Full capacity recognised and formatted- drive mounted as Primary slave for data recovery via Firewire from all other drives with I intend to repartition and reformat as I go along.

    On moving the files that begin with either numbers or alphabetical letters A to C from the other HDD mentioned above- the rest of the files on this drive suddenly appear.

    Minor errors occur on restoring data (all iso images and bin files appear to have become corrupted).....

    After 2 days hard slog- have had to reformat 7 hard-drives and retrieve all the original data piecemeal in quantities of less than 20Gb a go by Firewire. Even now dynamic disks are no longer mounting- and indexing services have to be turned off to access any of the drives. System up and running (providing the pair of 160Gb Seagate Barracuda drives are kept away from it- introducing these to the system in anything other than Firewire puts CPU usage up to 100% and everything grinds to a halt.

    No suspicious threads running- and my virus scanner (I've tried two other ones which report similar) says all is clean (one hit on a Visual Basic project I'm working on at the moment, which I cancelled).

    Anyone any ideas whats happening. 2 days hard slog- but I have my data back.......


Comments

  • #2
    The_Conductor
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 32,286 Mod ✭✭✭✭The_Conductor


    Update- I left Ontrack Data recovery running for 3 days and rebuilt the disks.
    When playing MP3s (the vast bulk of which I ripped myself, in full 320 bit format) they appear to be chopped and interspersed with snippets of other songs- almost as though they have been randomly sampled and put back together again in the wrong order.

    File types exhibiting this- .wav, .flac, .mp3 (and others)

    I have tried using Winamp, Windows media player, Real Player and other players- all are playing the audio songs in exactly the same fashion (and in identical order- so I don't think they are being miscoded in live time).

    Anyone any ideas?

    Cheers,

    Shane McCarrick


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