f13.net

Name says it all. One of my auxiliary partitions appears to be dead. Disk is inaccessible, structure is corrupt and unreadable.

Any ideas? The other partition on the disk seems fine. Disk Management says it's healthy, but completely empty.

It's not a HUGE deal if the data on the partition is lost, but some sort of recovery would certainly be nice.

There are programs that can try to rebuild a partition/MFT but I haven't used any so maybe else can offer some suggestions. The damaged/destroyed partition may be a symptom of a bigger problem with the drive, however. If you have anything valuable on the other working partition I suggest you back up that data immediately.

The drive is a Western Digital, and they have all kinds of diagnostics that can be run.

And I ran them. And everything checked out.


Hmmmm.....

Active File Recovery Pro helped me when my drive went tits up during a Windows install. Google it yourself :mrgreen:

GetDataBack.

http://www.runtime.org/ (http://www.runtime.org/)

This saved my bacon once when in a drunken stupor I formatted a friends external drive when trying to install Win2k (who knew Windows would see an external drive during an install). Took a while to recover everything but it worked. Did it with an iPod too. One of the kids somehow wiped his iPod and GDB was able to scan and recover the music.

For whatever reason, the partition magically came back to life today. Maybe I somehow have the one Divine HDD?  :evil:

Back it up like yesterday and get a new drive.  If it died once it will die again.  Better safe than sorry.

The drive itself didn't die, just one partition on it. And I ran a full diagnostic on the HDD itself, and it (along with the other partition on the drive) checked out fine.

Besides, the data is non-critical.

It's up to you but be aware that the drive IS going to die. They only do tricks like that when they're on their last legs.

Was it a LaCie external? We used these at my work and the fuckers would do some really weird shit. Usually right before dying a very ugly death.

I agree.  Erratic behavior from a drive means replace it immediately.

I wish more people would understand that. My previous IT director refused to do anything about hard drive errors (presented on W2k's Event Viewer, no less) on the company's main database drive. You know, the one that holds the entire company's data. She said that those errors were only showing up at start up after a reboot, so it was probably nothing to worry about. I couldn't ever communicate my distress to her about how serious that was, she never believed me. Instead, we had tape back ups of over 30 gig of data! Wee! On the sly I set up an incrimental back up to an alternate hard drive on a separate server.

Kinda like the owner of the last place I worked.  He'd want to go home to do some work, so he'd just grab his laptop, still running, throw it into a backpack, and drive home with it on his car floor.  Guy went through 3 laptops in 6 months, having to pay for data recovery each time, but still didn't comprehend the idea of backing things up, and not driving around with a generic (not specially designed and mounted for in car use) notebook computer while powered up.  I told him every time I'd see him leaving the office with it running that he was one bump away from HD failure.  The thing that pissed me off was that he'd get all "damnit, piece of crap computer", and try to blame it on the manufacturer, and take it out on the store where he bought the thing.

Whenever I have a boss that refuses to accept my expertise about a critical fact, I type it up into a memo and ask them to sign it, making it abundantly clear the risks involved.

It doesn't necessarily make me popular, but when it's important enough it just about always gets the issue resolved.

I thought of doing just that, Stephen, but the company was small, the upper management rather clique-y. It would have come across as some form of black mail.

In the end, the work environment was just too stiffling. I just shut up and did my work. The failing hardware, the thousand dollar gaffes, the procrastination on critical software and hardware upgrades were all 'understood' by both the boss and her own superiors. But its been my experience thusfar that outside of IT, everyone thinks that IT somehow work by magic, so the issue was never real to them, but by god, RANK certainly was. So here, a lowly 'help desk' guy second-guessing my self-titled "IT Manager" was not going to do anything but shorten my own stay (which it inevitably did), and my boss continues on the path of least resistance.

I dunno, WDs full diagnostics are not finding any problems with the drives. And hell, it's the younger drive that this happened on.

EDIT: I'm more inclined to blame it on some goofy setting in my OS, or a bad cable.

/em paces up and down the street outside your door holding my "THE END IS NEAR!!!" sign, shaking my fist, and ranting incoherently.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data recovery software (http://www.stellarinfo.com) will help you in recovering your lost partition and data. It is a file and partition recovery utility which recovers lost data due to system format or data lost occur due to software malfunction, file/directory deletion, viruses or even sabotage. It provides partition recovery from FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS & NTFS5 file system.
Download the demo version of this partition recovery (http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm) utility, scan your hard drive. Scan result will show you the recovered partition and data. If you can see your data through demo version then get the full version to save it.

Hello, Mole.