Can I save my corrupt NTFS drive???

[tcfreestyle]

SORRY THIS IS LONG BUT PLEASE HELP A GEEK OUT ​

Hello,

I have been down in the dumps for the past few days and then I heard about tek-tips.com so I figured what have I got to lose.

Anyways... my WD 80 gig w/ 2 meg cache has given me problems almost all of the time. Sometimes I'll leave my computer sitting doing nothing... I come back and my computer is locked up... I can be DLing something and step away for about an hour and it's locked up! So one day i was sitting at my computer when I heard a sound like the HD suddenly stopped spinning... like a really jerkey stop... and then it starts spinning again... then the computer... you guessed it... lockes up! So now I know when it'll lock up... but not why (would apperciate knowing why it does this although it is not the actual question.)

So one day I left my computer again... and it was locked up. So I do what i always do and press the restart button. But this time something different happened... (I run Win2k on a NTFS file system) on the windows loading screen the bar gets all the way to the end... then the computer reboots... oh well I'll just let it load up again and it'll be peachy right... wrong... same thing happens... so I let the computer do this loop at least 10 times with no new results. So I wipped out the Norton Ghost Startup Disk. Ran a complete scan... everything said that the drive was in perfect working order. Odd right.

Then I figure I'll reinstall windows... so I do so... the bar goes all the way to the end... momentary pause... and WOOHOO... it booted up ok... but... always a but isn't there... then all my drivers where uninstalled... no icons on my desktop... and yet all my files still on my HD... ok... I can live with backing my stuff up and reformating.

Easier said than done in this case. My usual way of backing things up is to get everything I need into one big folder (in this case 30 gigs). Then I winRAR it up. Then, now that I look back at it make the biggest mistake... delete the save folder and hope everything goes ok with the RAR file. Now I go into Partion Magic and go to resize partion... make the 80 gig partition into a 45 gig partion and then make the unallocated space into a 35 gig Fat32 Partition.

The computer restartes as usual to apply the changes and 31% into the opperation... LOCKES UP... this is a bad thing... deffiantely a bad bad thing. 1 partition that is 31% Fat32 and 69% NTFS and all of my data is in 1 file so if any cluster this is on is corrupt... the file is as well... as far as I know anyways.

So I ran Norton Ghost's scan again... it said it was ok... now I know that isn't right... so I pop in the Norton SystemWorks 2003 Emergency Disk... and find out its scans are not compatible with NTFS or my HD is so corrupt it cannot find it. Now I go to run chkdsk... that's just DOS cannot mount a NTFS drive. So I get a trial copy of NTFSDOS and it doesn't see the HD either most likely because it is corrupt.

So I need a new HD anyways so I go order a 120 gig WD w/ 8 meg cache that'll be here on the 25th. I am hoping I'll be able to save the RAR file onto the new HD. Then after a few hours of searching I find

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

so I DL the trial of NTFS reader... it boots up... sees the corrupt NTFS partion... has a list of all the files and I can even copy the files onto a Fat32 partion or HD if I have one... I will the 25th... so now it looks like I haven't wasted $160 for the HD and overnight shipping.

I do not see how this free program is going to save my near 1000 of hours of work though... still VERY sceptical... so I was wondering if this doesn't work if anyone else knows of an alternative way of recovering all of my data.

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!

 

[johnodq]

As soon as you supected data corruption you should have written nothing else to the drive !

Go out get yourself another drive (40Gb drives are pretty cheap at the moment) back all your data up to it, then run your drive without letting it go into windows, see if you can hear the drive shutting down and spinning back up again, if it doesn't shutdown at all then it is probably a software fault. (I had exactly the same problem with an XP system a few weeks ago, it kept shutting down and almost immediatly starting up again, this would cause a BSOD then a page fault error and a reset was the only solution. But once I did the above test and the drive was ok, I switched to a different build of windows (on another drive) the drive has not shutdown by itself again.)

If your drive turns out to be ok, then once your data is safe reformat and re-install. Probably the easiest way albeit a bit drastic.

As drives get bigger and bigger and the amount of data we need increases then the importance of regular back-ups increases along with it, DVD-writers are a very handy and reasonably cheap way of backup up such large amounts of data, 4.5Gb takes less than 30mins on a 2X drive. ---------------
Johnodq
---------------
Please let me know if the advice I give is of help.
Feedback will benefit all

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[johnodq]

Oh and by the way data recovery software is probably your only recourse, the more changes you try to make to the drive the more corrupted the data will be.

A free program for data recovery is at:-

http://www.pcinspector.de/

---------------
Johnodq
---------------
Please let me know if the advice I give is of help.
Feedback will benefit all

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[tcfreestyle]

I have written no data at all to corrupt drive... I will be reciving my new 120 gig HD within the hour. Hopefully everything will go alright... I'll post the outcome

Thanks again!

 

[tcfreestyle]

The new HD worked great. I did a clean win2k install on it then got windows to recongize the HD. It couldn't read it at first but checkdisk works wonders... one of the very few things I like about Microsoft now.

Thank You to
johnodq
for their help.

 

[lucerne3]

Step "out of the box" and consider what might cause freezing. In my experience, a common cause is overheating of the processor caused by a fan either not running or running slow. You may not have adequate cooling even if the fan appears to be running.


Over to you...

 

[bradje]

If it's just data u want to recover, set up a new hard drive as a master (with NT loaded) and the corrupt H/D as slave (using jumper settings on the H/D). Boot up and copy the files off the corrupt drive.
JB