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Help... Cannot Access a Hard Drive 2

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CptnJon

CptnJon

Technical User
Oct 4, 2005
25
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Within the last hour I lost access to one of my hard drives (60gig)!! This happened on a reboot. Just before the system closed down (as I was rebooting) I saw an error message about some file but it disappeared too quickly to read or do anything about it!

So I opened up the event viewer to see what had happened and noticed that starting yesterday I had a number of System errors as follows:

Source: Disk Category: None Event ID: 11
Description: 'The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D'

Then later yesterday another error as follows:

Source: Ntfs Category: Disk Event ID: 55
Description: 'The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume D:'

Note that I didn't know the errors were ocurring yesterday!

Then, when I rebooted today, I saw that the same event error (Ntfs one)had ocurred again and I now no longer had access to the drive!

I then decided to reboot and use the Recovery Console to access chkdsk. When I was able to run the chkdsk command on the drive I got the following error message "volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems"!!!

Does anyone have any ideas on where I go from here?? I have some data on that drive that I really need
 
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Follow-Up

I once again rebooted my computer and now see that another of my hard drives is no longer accessible! This drive is a 200GB drive that I split into 3 partitions.

Note that this drive is brand new... I installed in on Monday! Since then I have been converting old VHS tapes from analog to digital to eventually burn to DVD's... so I have over the last few days added quite a bit of data to the drive that I don't want to lose!

When I right-click My Computer / Manage / Disk Management... I see the first drive that went down (drive D) listed a healthy and Active but with 100% of its space marked as free! The new drive shows but is now marked as unallocated with no partitions!!!

Any ideas???

 
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Data recovery.
PC Inspector (free)


Plenty of other recovery software listed here.



Take any event error I.D. number and search for it on these sites.


The hard drive manufacturer will have free diagnostic software to thoroughly check your drive for problems.


You could also look at the FixMbr command from the Recovery Console.
 
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Are both Drives located on the same IDE controller?

If so, you might have a faulty controller and /or cable creating these problems.

I suggest plug in each drive on a different PC if possible and see if you can get to the data. You'll probably need one of the tools mentioned by linney.

Then check that the cable is o.k. and the controller on the motherboard is also functioning.



----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
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It can also be BIOS configuration. Try resetting your CMOS (or flash it with updated BIO file if available).
 
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linney, vacunita,rodrunner79... thanks for the replies.

I looked up the sites that explain event errors but unfortunately found nothing that seems to relate to my problem... or, more importantly, helps me understand what went wrong...

I downloaded pcinspector and had a look at the drives... it looks like I will be able to recover the data from the first drive that went down because it found some 13,000 lost files. I didn't even look for lost files on the 2nd drive that went down yet... I did notice however that the first partition on that drive (1 of 3) seemed to be a problem whereas the other 2 partitions I could at least see their names!

I took another computer and hooked up the 2 non-working drives (separately) to see what I could find out and had the same results... that is,
- the BIOS sees the hard drives;
- right-clicking My Computer/Manage/Disk Management... I see the first drive that went down (drive D) listed as healthy and Active but with 100% of its space marked as free! The new drive shows but is now marked as unallocated with no partitions!!!
- trying chkdsk /P or /R results in the error "volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems". Note that I can only try chkdsk against the 1st drive that went down (i.e. the one listed as "healthy and Active"). I can't run any Recovery Console cmds against the other drive or any of it's partitions presumably because the computers only see it as "unallocated"!

- I also tried fixmbr command from the recovery console but I am not sure if it did anything because there was no error or confirmation of success!

On the other points raised...

- the 2 drives are slaves on different IDE controllers so I would expect that it wouldn't have been caused by a faulty cable or controller(?)The masters are working on both controllers.

- I don't understand how it could be a BIOS configuration issue. The BIOS recognizes the drives and they did work fine for a while. Wouldn't this suggest that this is not the issue?

My concern now, assuming that I can actually recover the data, is that I have nowhere to place recovered data... My main drive is 120GB... but virtually full. The 1st drive that went down was 60GB with a 50-60% utilization; the 2nd drive is 200GB with roughly 50% utilization. I really don't want to buy another drive just so I can recover my data... particularly if I don't know what caused the problem in the first place! I could find myself with a 3rd unreadable drive!

 
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linney, vacunita,rodrunner79... thanks for the replies.

I looked up the sites that explain event errors but unfortunately found nothing that seems to relate to my problem... or, more importantly, helps me understand what went wrong...

I downloaded pcinspector and had a look at the drives... it looks like I will be able to recover the data from the first drive that went down because it found some 13,000 lost files. I didn't even look for lost files on the 2nd drive that went down yet... I did notice however that the first partition on that drive (1 of 3) seemed to be a problem whereas the other 2 partitions I could at least see their names!

I took another computer and hooked up the 2 non-working drives (separately) to see what I could find out and had the same results... that is,
- the BIOS sees the hard drives;
- right-clicking My Computer/Manage/Disk Management... I see the first drive that went down (drive D) listed as healthy and Active but with 100% of its space marked as free! The new drive shows but is now marked as unallocated with no partitions!!!
- trying chkdsk /P or /R results in the error "volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems". Note that I can only try chkdsk against the 1st drive that went down (i.e. the one listed as "healthy and Active"). I can't run any Recovery Console cmds against the other drive or any of it's partitions presumably because the computers only see it as "unallocated"!

- I also tried fixmbr command from the recovery console but I am not sure if it did anything because there was no error or confirmation of success!

On the other points raised...

- the 2 drives are slaves on different IDE controllers so I would expect that it wouldn't have been caused by a faulty cable or controller(?)The masters are working on both controllers.

- I don't understand how it could be a BIOS configuration issue. The BIOS recognizes the drives and they did work fine for a while. Wouldn't this suggest that this is not the issue?

My concern now, assuming that I can actually recover the data, is that I have nowhere to place recovered data... My main drive is 120GB... but virtually full. The 1st drive that went down was 60GB with a 50-60% utilization; the 2nd drive is 200GB with roughly 50% utilization. I really don't want to buy another drive just so I can recover my data... particularly if I don't know what caused the problem in the first place! I could find myself with a 3rd unreadable drive!

 
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Sorry... don't know why that last message got posted twice!! I only pressed it once!

 
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@CptnJon - I had a similar issue, awhile back, where I got hit by a Virus/Trojan (what have you), my PC went into reboot mode, EWIDO guard caught 3 files trying to be changed, went too fast for me to see what...

end of story, upon reboot the drive was not recognized correctly, and booting halted with a NON SYSTEM FOUND error... I almost reformatted and was going to do a Fresh Install of the OS... but my eye caught that the BIOS detected my drive wrongly (instead of a WD400 it said WD500 something), this kept happening for a time, and I decided to go ahead and CLEAR the CMOS, including resetting the NV-RAM, by taking out the BATTERY for awhile (10min in my case) and draining the CAPS by unplugging the PC from the POWER SOURCE and holding the PWR button... this seemed to have cured it for 4 months... until it happened again last month... now either the IDE Controller has a problem or the Drive...

if I had run CHKDSK before I noticed what had happened, the OS would have been totally messed up (wrong info of drive delivered to Windows Recovery Console)... my solution was to hook the drive up to an IDE PCI card (in my case a PROMISE TX2 FastTrak) and haven't had a problem since...

btw. I was using an ASUS P4PE-x MoBo...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
 
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Since the drives exhibit the same problem in different PC's I am now leaning towards a collapsed File System. That is the files are still there but the list that tels the OS where they are is corrupt. This can happen for various reasons, and is not uncommon.

I Believe there are repair utilities that can fix the file table unfortunately none come to mind However a quick google using "FAT repair" or "NTFS Repair" should yield interesting results. Its the only other way of recovering the files and Doesn't require a new drive. Except there is no guarantee that it will actually repair it completely.

Personally I'd recover the most important stuff, and then attempt a repair.

Just Curious but what is it you do that accumulates 300+ GB of stuff. No offense but short of video editing or really large database hosting, i just cant see how you collect that much.



----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
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BigBadBen... My BIOS seems to properly recognize... however I will try to Clear the CMOS and see if it does anything... at this point I will try anything...

vacunita... they are NTFS drives, so I will try to find a utility that repairs this type of files system.

To answer your question on why I need so much storage (380GB)... Prior to last week, I had 180GB and was running out of room because I do a lot of digital photography and a lot of editing of those photos (using PaintShop Pro [PSP]). An edited photo saved in PSP can be around 25MB or more... which quickly adds up. I also am not very good at doing off-computer backups... so I duplicated files on different drives. Unfortunately, now that both drives are inaccessible my backup plan has just gone up in smoke!!

Last week I bought the 200GB drive for 2 reasons: 1 - To provide me with a good location to backup my data; and 2 - I just started a project to convert a number of old VHS tapes to the computer and then eventually to DVD. This conversion work requires a lot of space, particularly when you bring it in and then edit the video.

linney, as a follow up to one of my earlier comments about PCInspector... although it did find some 13,000 lost files on the one drive, when I tried to restore the files I found that they are essentially garbage!!



 
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How many drives do you have in your machine? How many other peripheral devices are powered by your PSU (Power Supply) and what capacity does it have? I had to change my PSU recently as I started experiencing various issues (USB disappeared, main boot disk had errors on it). I changed the drive, put a new USB card in but I still experienced issues however once I swapped out the 480w PSU for a 600w I had no issues, it 'could' be that your PSU is failing and because of it hasn't written data back to the drives correctly.



SimonD.

The real world is not about exam scores, it's about ability.

 
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SimonDavies...

Using the Power Supply Calculator ( I determined that I needed a 336 watt PSU and that is for peak wattages. Even under full load, actual consumption is usually less than the figures calculated.

I recently installed an Antec TrueBlue 480 watt PSU and according to the above referenced calculator it appears to be quite sufficient.

Update

I have been researching and downloading everything I can find on how to recover data from a problematic NTFS hard drive. I downloaded DiskInternals NTFS Recovery tool (free trial version) and it found the 1st partition on the 200GB drive whereas the other programs didn't even see it!

DiskInternals NTFS Recovery also provided me with a folders tree view of the partition and I can now see the files that I am looking for... I haven't tried recovering them yet because I am making room on my main drive (120GB) so that I can write the files there. Unfortunately, saving files in 4.4GB groupings to DVD's is a slow process (about an hour per DVD)!

Hopefully, once I have made sufficient room on the main drive, I will be able to recover my key files and get my heartbeat down to a reasonable level!!
 
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I have a great file recovery utility, it is from Ontrak and it's called EasyRecovery, it runs in DOS mode and can read NTFS structures and also has a GUI to run as Win32 app... It recovers almost anytime you specify it to recover, you can even recover stuff that was on the drive before that drive was formatted (as long as it was not securely deleted). It's also capable of recovering in Raw Mode which I do not recommend, because you will have hundreds of thousands of files with a name called lostfile1, lostfile2, and so on after the sectors are scanned......... unless of course you want to go through a tidious process of going through each file. It also has a tag the file feauture, where you scan the sectors of the drive and then tag all files with a *.* extension which you can specify... It's pretty neat and useful for people looking into data recovery, I compiled the program to fit into a size of a 3.5" floppy. Anyone who needs it, let me know.
 
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I too have a similar problem...i reinstalled my OS ( Xp pro) on my primary drive and now....i cannot acces my secondary slave drive ....when i right click my computer > manage , it tells me that the disk is healthy and is 100%, which is no the case, i backed up everytrhing on there before the the reforamt to my primary...perhpas rodrunner79's app can help me?
 
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Why not just post the link here and share it with the forum? Is there a problem?
 
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to "mount" a volume,
go to
mycomputer
manage
storage
take it from there.
you should see your drive there.
 
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