Hard-Drive Woes

talking_walnut

Yesterday my 2 yr old Western Digital hard drive started acting up on my. Ran the diagnostic program on it and it kinda looks life its heading towads that great computer dump in the sky (gave me an 0207 error if that means anything to someone).

Right now I've the drive disconnected and I'm hoping I'll still be able to recover the data when I get a new drive. I'm considering creating some kinda RAID array but not sure how to go about it. Can anyone point me in the right direction to read up on what I'd need to do? Main thing I'm wondering is, is it possible\easy to add more drives to the array at a future date? Don't have too much money at the moment.

Cheers for the help

snappieT

By putting the drive in a waterproof bag and into the freezer, you will get some more time out of the drive to copy any necessary files across to another drive.

J-blk

You don't actually need a RAID aray.

When you get your new drive, simply set up two partitions on it or (depending on it's size, three). Easiest way to do this is with FDISK in DOS mode, though if you have Powerquest's Partition Magic 7/8 or Acronis Partition Expert, you can do this after you've installed Windows and it's easier.

Setting up three partitions makes the most sense if you have a pretty large new drive coming and this is how you'd want it split up:

1. 10GB for Windows only and essential system files.
2. Secondary partition for documents/pictures/other data.
3. Third partition for games/programs.

Depending on if you install more games, etc or need more space for data, you can choose which of the 2nd and 3rd partition will be larger. Up to you.

The reason for all this is Windows remains on a small partition, which you can very easily create a Disk Image of and save it to one of the other partitions. If it all goes belly up (and Windows many times does), you can very easily restore it in minutes, from one of your other partitions.

That's a bit of future proofing there...

As for what to do with your current setup, when (and if you do that is) you have your new hard drive set up, it will be your primary master drive I imagine.

Change the jumper on your current drive to slave (or connect it to the secondary IDE controller instead of your DVD/CD drive for now) and boot into Windows. You then simply drag and drop all the data from your old drive to your new data partition.

Disconnect the old drive and chuck it... or take it apart as a project...

talking_walnut

Thanks for the advice J-blk but I already have a seperate hard disk for my operating systems. Wanting to set up the array isn't really connected to my current predicament I suppose but I've wanted to do it for a while.

Thanks for that snappieT. Had heard that trick before but had forgotten about it. Gonna leave the drive alone untill I figure out what I'm gonna do and have a hard drive to copy my stuff to but this advice might come in handy.

pcwares

hmmm.. not sure about that error code. Only ref i have for a code like that is to do with asp loading incorrectly on iis.

Anyway the fridge thing doesnt work. Its a myth. I have tried it to see and so have some of the boys.

Try slaving your harddrive to a working HDD. Cancel CHKDSK if it runs also because it will prob stall.

Ruu_Old

if u want to recover data of a near brokey drive, keeping it cool does actually work.

J-blk

talking_walnut - Sorry, from your original post I thought you were primarily interested in saving the data, rather than the RAID array itself.

Have you decided if you want a mirrored or stripped array then? Does your motherboard already include a RAID controller and if so, what is it?

talking_walnut

Thats no problem J-blk. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Right now I'm just considering my options. Don't have a job right now so don't have a huge amount of money. That's why I'm wondering if it'd be possible to build up a RAID array over time ie. buy one or two disks now and add more when I had the money.

My motherboard does support RAID alright. Using a Asus A7n8X. Been considering making it external though, like this.

(Dial-UP warning: Lot of pictures. Check here for the original Slashdot article.)

As I said, still in the preliminary planning stage. Any advice or feedback would be extremely welcome.