200 GIG WD Hard Drive went "CORRUPTED"

[Shinobi2600]

Hello all,

First off, this forum rocks, so much info!

Now the question at hand, and i'll describe as much as possible. I am running Windows XP Professional on an Athlon 1700+, with Asus A7V266 mobo, 512 DDR ram, 120 WD master. About 2 weeks ago i was downloading to my 200GB WESTERN DIGITAL 8mb cache hard drive. This was my slave drive. I went to open the hard drive (labeld "area 51&quot and i get a message "D:\ is corrupt" I was still downloading to the drive when i saw this prompt. I restarted the computer. Now i get the message "drive is unformatted, would you like to format now" No of course, b/c gigs of data will be lost. The hard disk was in NTFS format.

I have tried the following measures for recovery: 1. System restore ( i knew it wouldn't work). 2. Disattach and reattach hard drive *hard drive was rather hot at time*. 3. Use recovery programs. I have used several programs to recover my hard drive such as: O&O UnErase, "Get Data Back", "Recover It All", and R Studio NTFS & FAT which works the best so far. I've also tried ghosting my hd to a new one, however the only result is 2 200gig hd's that aren't recognized. Virus Scans picked up nothing. HERE are several links to pics i took from R Studio. Some files are recoverable. I hope they may clarify what happened:

Some Partions found-

http://web.mawebcenters.com/shino/images/PC_1.JPG

Some Directories Found-

http://web.mawebcenters.com/shino/images/SOME_FOLDERS_FOUND.JPG

Corrupted Directories and Files (mostly my mp3's i think)-

http://web.mawebcenters.com/shino/images/Matrix_Has_Me.JPG

My Final step is to see if Linux might be able to read the hard drive and see if anything is recoverable.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[VMPhilosophy]

Western Digital drives are one of the most unreliable brands right now as well as IBM /Hitatchi drives. there is a program (i read on a messege here some where) called getdataback i dont know much about it though.

"Did you ever wish a circle was a square, so when land sharks start circling the boarders you can just cut them off at the corners?" - Aesop Rock

 

[Grenage]

No Problems with WD here atm.

 

[Shinobi2600]

I have tried GET DATA BACK however it didn't work well. I have used several WD drives in the past with no problem, i wonder if it just the newer 8mb 7200rpm drives.

 

[VMPhilosophy]

in the past (read about 2 years ago) western digital drives didnt have this problem. around the time IBM and western digital started being produced in the same plant. they have both exibited signs of fault when several batches came out bad. anything after 40gb for ibm kept coming back from people we sold them to. Western Digitals soon followed suit. i would guestimate that we had to rma 75% of the ibm deskstar drives we have had and about 60% of the western digital drives with in a month of purchase.

"Did you ever wish a circle was a square, so when land sharks start circling the boarders you can just cut them off at the corners?" - Aesop Rock

 

[Dreamland]

How was the drive partitioned? What file system was used to format the partition(s)?

 

[Shinobi2600]

Partioned as 1 whole drive (no partitions) and is NTFS

 

[Dreamland]

In that case, Shinobi2600, you're chances of getting some of the files back are pretty good.

NTFS maintains a backup copy of the Master File Table near the end of the partition. (MFT is XP's version of the earlier FAT)

Your recovery program can, or at least *should* know that if it can be convinced that the drive was originally one huge NTFS partition. Your existing partition table was overwritten and now you have to figure out how to put a 'good' one back - this will help the recovery programs do their job. Any obvious way to do *just* that first in the programs you have?

Now, the download shouldn't have been writing there to begin with, so the corruption could extend well beyond the primary MFT being hosed. You're best bet is to get the secondary MFT, assume that it's still pointing to wherever on the disk the original, proper location of the files were and then start cleaning out corrupted ones.

Are you using a SB Live board? There was an issue a while back with two drives on the same cable of a Via 686B southbridge and SB Live cards. Some kind of PCI conflict. Everyone blamed each other, BIOS updates were released but in the end they never figured out what the deal was. General solution was to keep the drives on separate IDE channels (cables). Does your motherboard have the additional two ports for the Promise controller?

 

[Shinobi2600]

Alright, but how do i get the the MFT's ? Through the recovery programs? DOS? Linux? if you have any idea of what software i can use, or if there is a listing of steps it would help me out. To answer your question, I am Using an Asus A7V266 mobo, but i DO have a Soundblaster LIVE 5.1 soundcard (pci). The 200gig drive was not connected to a controller card, rather it was the primary channel's Slave.

 

[SESaskDFC]

Howdy:

Take a look here...

http://www.ntfs.com/quest14.htm

Murray

 

[raburg98]

I have same thing - Western Dig drive with it's proprietary bios and drives and A7V266. I am having major crash problems once I put on XP Pro. Did you resolve your flash and disk problems? How? Thanks.

 

[Shinobi2600]

Raburg. I have successfully solved my problems. FIRST OFF, you need to UPdate Windows XP to Service Pack 1. Then you need to go to

http://www.windows.com

and download a hotfix specific to drives over 137gigs.

Here's the windows solution (hotfix):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;331958

Here's WD's explanation:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=533&p_created=1031763968

I hope this solves the problem.

 

[Walter349]

The problem with the MFT is that the secondary MFT record, held in the middle of the volume (Roughly), does NOT contain a duplicate of the Primary MFT, only the 1st 16 records, which are supposed to contain the critcal records.

A corrupted MFT may result in the coruption of both MFTs and trash the boot code.

Its a bit late in the day, what with all the other actions that have taken place on the HDD, but normaly the first thing is to see if you can access the HDD from a boot disk, then try a utility called BCUPDATE.EXE which will update the boot code.