A HDD Problem.

[lamaros]

It seems I'm having a bit of a problem with aone of my HDs. It's a 200gb Seagate SATA drive.

Last night my computer crashed and I was unable to reboot it. It would lock up at the point where it started to load windows.

Windows is not installed on the SATA drive but another IDE one, and I found that my disconnecting the SATA I could get my computer to run fine, but any attempt to connect the SATA would lock it up again.

I have no idea what the problem was caused by, I wasn't doing anything I don't normally do. I'm resigned to the fact that the drive is probably just fucked, but I would like to know if anyone had any ideas about how I might go about recovering the data that was stored on it. Having spent the last week copying my hundreds of cds to it I will be a touch annoyed if it's all wasted time.

[Trippy]

It seems I'm having a bit of a problem with aone of my HDs. It's a 200gb Seagate SATA drive.

Last night my computer crashed and I was unable to reboot it. It would lock up at the point where it started to load windows.

Windows is not installed on the SATA drive but another IDE one, and I found that my disconnecting the SATA I could get my computer to run fine, but any attempt to connect the SATA would lock it up again.

I have no idea what the problem was caused by, I wasn't doing anything I don't normally do. I'm resigned to the fact that the drive is probably just fucked, but I would like to know if anyone had any ideas about how I might go about recovering the data that was stored on it. Having spent the last week copying my hundreds of cds to it I will be a touch annoyed if it's all wasted time.

Where was your swap file located, on the IDE or SATA drive? If it was on your SATA make sure you reset it so that there's only one swap file and it's on your IDE drive. Check the BIOS and make sure it isn't trying to boot off the SATA drive before the IDE drive. Then hook up both drives and try booting into Safe Mode and see if Windows can mount the drive. Be careful with CHKDSK -- it can actually make things worse. If you are willing to cough up a few dollars you can get something like Spinrite and have it try to repair the drive.

[lamaros]

Where was your swap file located, on the IDE or SATA drive? If it was on your SATA make sure you reset it so that there's only one swap file and it's on your IDE drive. Check the BIOS and make sure it isn't trying to boot off the SATA drive before the IDE drive. Then hook up both drives and try booting into Safe Mode and see if Windows can mount the drive. Be careful with CHKDSK -- it can actually make things worse. If you are willing to cough up a few dollars you can get something like Spinrite and have it try to repair the drive.

The swap file is only on the IDE drive, and it boots from the IDE first. Hung up on safe mode too.

Not worth getting Spinrite really.. Oh well. It was just all my old stuff, and I can live without, but it does waste a lot of time.

Could the fact I have the SATA drive sitting outside the case have played any part in it stuffing up? I used to have the drive in another PC, but ended up moving it because it used to crash to often (it was the boot disc there) so I'm going to assume that the drive is just not happy, even though it was working fine with this PC right up until it crashed last night.

[Engels]

I recently had a sata seagate drive on me die too, and yep, it can lock up the boot process because the motherboard recognises it at some bios level, but windows can't initialize it, and hence your whole system will hang without getting to the boot process. Do you have a raid controller on your board that the sata drive connects to as a single drive? The way you can tell is if at boot, your last post message is a raid controller trying to identify drives. During this last phase of post, you can see a message saying something like 'crtl-a to configure' or some such. If you can do that, and see if it can identify the drive, then you might not have a failed drive, but seriously corrupt data, which of course, doesn't help you any, but you may still have a working hard drive at the end of the day. If, on the other hand, the controller can't even detect the drive, well, then yer sol.

You may also want to see if another system that can use SATA drives can read the disk.

[Trippy]

What motherboard do you have?

[Tale]

I've had a similar problem with SATA and IDE disks on my aging motherboard, an Albatron PX845PE-PROII (i845PE, socket 478). It kept losing sight of my SATA drive every few hours, until I gave up and bought another IDE drive instead (rock solid ever since).

The board is capable of ATA/133 RAID via a Promise PDC20376 controller, which also handles the SATA channels, so I had to turn the RAID controller on to make the SATA work (though I don't use RAID). I've seen other reports of unreliability in using SATA drives on that controller chip. RAID controller stays off now.

[Strazos]

While we're talking about failing drives, what's the general life expectancy for decent drives?

[Trippy]

While we're talking about failing drives, what's the general life expectancy for decent drives?

Sometime shortly after the warranty expires.

[Strazos]

Ok, to be more exact....My primary HDD will be 4 years old this winter. How "at risk" am I?

Or are HDDs really still That random? I thought the industry moved past that with the demise of the Deathstar drives.

[bhodi]

Back up your shit. Sit down one day and break out the spindle of DVDs and burn everything you care about. No, really. Do it.

[Righ]

Hard drives have a reasonably high failure rate when they are young. Those that survive tend to last a fairly long time, but eventually wear out and fail. You need to know the rated service life (not the theoretical MTBF) of your particular drive. As Trippy alludes to, it's usually similar to the extended warranty period. However, your primary hard disk is four years old. It's substandard compared to the sub $100 drives you can buy today. Don't wait for it to fail - do yourself a favor and replace it with a cost-effective disk (~300GB) from a premium manufacturer today.

[Tale]

In 12 years of owning computers (building and upgrading my own), I've only ever had one hard drive go bad (touch wood). And it was an IBM DeskStar, it lasted 4 years and it only died after the PC received a heavy collision from a chair while switched on. And even after that, it started working again on about every 10th attempt to boot the PC and I was able to recover all data before discarding the drive. At work, I've seen two people's drives go bad over those 12 years. Both were fairly catastrophic. Even though it's really quite rare for a hard drive to die, it's vital to keep good backups because there's nothing as soul-destroying as losing everything you ever did on a computer.

[bhodi]

Most people ignore it, but your drive doesn't just die one day (unless you drop it). It gives off lots of warning signs, in the S.M.A.R.T. archetecture. You just need to get a program to read it periodically and run self tests. I use linux, which has smart stuff built in, and I glanced around, but all the windows programs that I saw you had to pay for (shocker!). There might be a freeware windows SMART reader/tester, and if so, you can check your HD's health that way.

[geldonyetich]

My last hard drive did just die one day.  It was neat, it made a little beeping sound like the manufacturers knew it would happen, but thought they'd be accomidating in the event it was installed in a server rack somewhere.

[Righ]

I've had bearings in drives just explode without warning. No diagnostics, no noise, just boom, total catastrophic failure. I've also had the logic board on a drive just stop working suddenly. In a data center I worked in, we had dozens of the same model of drive (presumably from the same batch) fail within a couple of weeks due to component burnout on their logic boards, and chose to replace several hundred drives of that type - no data lost, but quite a chore. The fact that people who only use a few hard drives have experience of failure is all you need to know. Back shit up, choose good drives, replace aged ones. SMART will catch the ~60% of failures that occur from mechanical wear, but SMART is also young - I've been playing with hard drives for quarter of a century.

[Strazos]

Ok, in that case, what's the best way to go about moving stuff over to a big new drive, some kind of image software (which I don't own)?

Might be kind of tough, because I think I am out of spots on my IDE cables, though I'd have to open my box to be sure of this.



Figures, my primary drice has both my C (windows) and D (important and/or personal stuff) on it. Bleh.

[Righ]

The easy way? Use Ghost. It can be done for free under Linux, but it's pretty hairy for people who aren't familiar with both Linux and Windows at a fairly low level.

[Engels]

You can spring for a Western Digital USB hard drive. They come in various sizes up to 120 gig. Back it up on there, then buy a new drive and as said above, use Norton Ghost to reimage the new drive.

[Yoru]

I've had harddrives fail on me before; a laptop drive once, exactly as the limited warranty just ran out (within a week, I believe) and the second 9 months after I purchased it. That said, my little server computer has a 7 year old harddrive in it, but I don't use it for anything critical - mostly as a cache so I can download demos and torrents while playing games on my primary computer.

[Strazos]

You can spring for a Western Digital USB hard drive. They come in various sizes up to 120 gig. Back it up on there, then buy a new drive and as said above, use Norton Ghost to reimage the new drive.

Gah, that sounds like overkill, buying 2 drives to replace one. I might just end up transferring the stuff I really care about to other partitions, maybe burn some stuff to CD...no, not DVD because I don't own a DVD burner. I haven't even had occassion to use my CD burner in at least a year, possibly 2.

Unfortunately, this is all rather moot as I can't really afford to buy a new HDD at the moment, and my goofy copy of XP Pro won't recognize anything over 140gb anyway. In the least, I'll have to set aside some time in the near future to back up my essential things in one way or another.

[Righ]

You need to install SP1 to recognise 48 bit LBA disks. Or you could just throw a EnableBigLba field into your registry ATAPI parameters and set it to 1.

[Strazos]

I thought it was SP2 that did the trick for larger HDDs.

Also I'm not touching my registry. All I need is for something to go wrong, and then have a dead OS...or something. It's kind of a moot point anyway, as I don't actually Need all that extra space so much. When I get low-ish on storage, it just prompts me to clean the crap out.

[Trippy]

You need to install SP1 to recognise 48 bit LBA disks. Or you could just throw a EnableBigLba field into your registry ATAPI parameters and set it to 1.

You may also need to update your BIOS depending on how old your motherboard is.

[Trippy]

You can spring for a Western Digital USB hard drive. They come in various sizes up to 120 gig. Back it up on there, then buy a new drive and as said above, use Norton Ghost to reimage the new drive.

Gah, that sounds like overkill, buying 2 drives to replace one. I might just end up transferring the stuff I really care about to other partitions, maybe burn some stuff to CD...no, not DVD because I don't own a DVD burner. I haven't even had occassion to use my CD burner in at least a year, possibly 2.

External USB drives can go up to a lot bigger than 120 GB these days -- e.g. you can get Seagate's 750 GB perpendicular drive as an external drive. In any event yes you should backup your most crucial (non-replaceable) stuff to CDs at the minimum. In a pinch, though I wouldn't recommend it given Google's ridiculous retention policies, if you have a Gmail account or other free email account with a lot of storage space you can "backup" your data there, at least temporarily.

[bhodi]

Ghost is a wonderful tool, but you should take this opportunity to do a fresh OS reinstall; Just get your files off your computer; There's room in your case, you can always canibalize your cd-rom cable temporarially... there are a number of ways of doing it, but it sounds like the best way might be to re-connect a new drive, install the OS, then connect the old ones one at a time and get your critical data off of them, then re-attach the newest of them for good.

[Strazos]

Heh, yeah I guess you could do that....

So, to do that, you would:

-Take out "failing" drive.

-Install new drive, set jumper to master, partition, install OS.

-Reinstall old "failing" drive on the IDE cable used for the optical drives. Now, would you set this one to Slave, or Master? Anyway...

-Select to boot from OS on new drive.

-Transfer whatever from failing drive; Profit!

I was just asking...there's not really anything wrong with my drive currently, besides age.

[Engels]

Strazos,

The only problem I see with your proposed solution is that your installed programs cannot be simply cut and pasted from your old drive to your new one. You'd have to reinstall all the game on your old drive. Using Ghost, however, you can simply take an image, or snapshot, of your whole drive and simply move it to a new drive. However, if you don't care about having to reinstall games, then go for it. Your solution is definately the simplest one in terms of raw data transfer.

The reason I suggested the USB drives, and in particular the ones from Western Digital is that they are very small and compact, easy to carry around with you. They aren't a SATA 'case' with its own power supply, they are self contained units, powered by the USB connection. I love them, best thing since sliced bread. For work, I carry around 7 computer images on a 60 gig drive. I can simply hop from computer to computer and use a simple Norton Ghost floppy disk with USB support and image any work computer with a full install of MS Office or whatever software suite one has in under half an hour.

That said, the only downside is that these USB drives that are NOT SATA have a slow upload speed. You can make a computer image fast, but you can't create an image and send it to the USB drive quickly; it takes around 30-50 minutes for a 6 gig image.

[Strazos]

Well, if I was to make an image of the partitions on the drive, the images would be the same size as the original data, correct?

But anyway, if/when I migrate to a new drive, I'd rather start from a fresh install anyway, and reinstall stuff as I need it.

[Righ]

Ghost, and some other imaging software can resize the partitions.

[Strazos]

That's not what I meant. I mean, how big is the image? If I image a partition with 8gb of data on it, is the image 8gb? (I would think so)

[Engels]

Correct. You can also compress the image so that its somewhat smaller than the original space occupied, but on the whole its best to keep it 1:1.