• Hard drive appears to be dead for no (visible) reason.
    3 replies, posted
[quote='Vipershark'] (9:32:05 PM) Vipershark: ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff (9:32:11 PM) Vipershark: okay, so (9:32:23 PM) Vipershark: ancient windows 98-era computer (9:32:28 PM) Vipershark: nobody's used it since like (9:32:29 PM) Vipershark: 2005 (9:32:48 PM) Vipershark: i went and turned it on since it was still hooked up in the other room (long story) and I wanted to use it as a server (9:33:00 PM) Vipershark: it has xp on it since the old hdd with the 98 install died (9:33:05 PM) Vipershark: so xp boots up just fine (9:33:10 PM) Vipershark: computer running really slow (9:33:13 PM) Vipershark: because old computer (9:33:26 PM) Vipershark: plus norton and a bunch of other stuff bogging it down (9:33:35 PM) Vipershark: i leave for about 5 minutes to let it finish booting (9:33:37 PM) Vipershark: walk back in (9:33:41 PM) Vipershark: error box popped up on screen while I was away (9:33:43 PM) Vipershark: clicked ok, didn't pay attention to the error (9:33:45 PM) Vipershark: instant blue screen of death, something about page file in non-paged area if I recall correctly (9:33:47 PM) Vipershark: automatically reboots (9:33:50 PM) Vipershark: xp won't boot, disk read error (9:33:55 PM) Vipershark: fffffffff (9:34:08 PM) Vipershark: now i'm trying to pull the hdd to rescue what files were on it [/quote] okay so i finally got the hdd out and it's in my other comptuer now i'm running a disk check on it using the regular windows xp pre-boot check and i'm getting a ton of "file segment XXXX is unreadable" errors the drive somehow committed suicide, it looks like oddly enough, this happened once before according to the guys at best buy when we went to get it fixed the first time back in like 2002 or so, the hdd somehow created its own magnetic field which wiped/killed the drive that makes no sense to me, but this is the second time it's happened, so maybe there's some truth to it currently up to file record segment 19543 as being unreadable. It's been running for about two hours now, and still going. Looks like the entire thing borked for no (visible) reason. As soon as this disk check finishes I'm going to run Recuva on it if possible, and see if anything is salvageable because there are some potentially important files that were on it which hadn't been backed up. (I was going to do a backup and format when i first booted it) Is there anything I can do here?
HDD's tend to die after a while randomly, rescue your data and get a new
Okay, so the drive scan completed overnight and XP booted up, so I don't know if the scan finished correctly or whatever. When I got into My Computer, it recognizes the drive as being hooked in as a secondary hdd (in other words, an E drive) and a program that I installed on my computer shows that the drive is nearly full, which I'm assuming means that the files are still on it. When I try to access the drive however, I get a "Disk E:/ is unformatted. Do you want to format?" box. I clicked no and am currently running Recuva on it to see if I can get the files off it it. tl;dr: The hard drive appears to have somehow unformatted itself, but the files appear to still be intact yet unaccessible. If Recuva doesn't work, what are some programs I can use to try to get the stuff off of here?
I tried Recuva and the estimated time was 36 days. After asking on the Piriform forums if this was anywhere near normal, they told me to try running the windows recovery console. I went to do that, and as I rebooted, my computer showed a warning that said "S.M.A.R.T. Hard Drive detects imminent failure. Your hard disk drive is detecting an imminent failure. To ensure no data loss, backup contents and replace this hard disk. Attribute Failed: #05" A quick look at wikipedia says... "Count of reallocated sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks this sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area). This process is also known as remapping, and "reallocated" sectors are called remaps. Unfortunately, on modern operating systems, such as Windows XP and onwards, "bad blocks" cannot be found while testing the surface, as this feature was removed. However, 3rd-party applications such as "HD Tune" can reveal bad sectors across the entire surface, even on partitions that are hidden. Also, as the count of reallocated sectors increases, the read/write speed tends to decrease, unless the bad sectors are manually repositioned to a hidden partition, although the boot sector is always at the start of the disk, so if damage is in that area, the drive is only useful as a redundant backup drive. The raw value normally represents a count of the count of bad sectors that have been found and remapped. Thus, the higher the attribute value, the more sectors the drive has had to reallocate." In other words, it appears that the boot sector of this hard drive has gone bad. I just ran Chkdsk from the XP recovery console, and it got up to 50% completed before erroring out with a message saying "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." Since it appears that the disk is about to die, thus eliminating any chances of saving the data, is it possible to clone the disk's current state to an image or another hard drive or something? If I can do that, maybe there will be a chance that I can save the files from the cloned drive. edit- As I said before, the files still appear to be on the hard drive, just in an unaccessable state. At least, to windows they're unaccessable. Would it be possible to mount the disk in a linux install and retrieve the files?
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