Is it my hard drive or my computer?

[ack135]

Hi there

am not very experienced with Hard drives and have a big problem I was hoping someone might be able to advise me on.

I had 2x 250GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 Hard drives connected to my Asus A8V board through the Via controller as separate drives. Bought a 500GB Diamondmax 11 to replace the second drive. All was going well transferring everything to my new hard drive, defragged it, left it a week came back to my PC and for some reason the PC wouldnt let me open some folders on the second drive saying they didnt exist or were corrupted. Restarted my PC and chkdisk started up started listing $I30 errors in thousands of files (using the 2nd drive all for media- my music collection and my photographs- Im a photographer, so theres a lot of those), it then started listing "recovering orphaned file such and such" thousands more times and then completed saying there were no bad sectors and windows started. Now I can get in to all the folders and see all the files but roughly 20% of the files on the drive in most folders cannot be opened/thumbnailed/previewed even though they still seem to be taking up space.

Basically Im wondering if the likelihood is that these files are recoverable because I have no backup of the newer ones! and also if I need to be sending this drive back to Maxtor to exchange under warranty or if its something that is possibly to do with my system not interfacing properly with the new drive? I am trying to check the drive with Maxtor's Max Power as soon as I can figure out how to get it to work (Have been told it wont work with drives connected to a RAID controller like the promise or VIA ones on my board, so not sure how to test my SATA drive with this board?), If anyone can recommend any other downloadble drive checking tools that would be great too (I did download some free app which said my drive was working fine but didnt seem that thorough a tool). Also have been trying to read forums for some idea of what to do and seems to be a good idea to update various system bios' but if I start doing that is there any chance I could make things worse (since the first drive running XP is fine at the moment).

Anyway sorry if I am missing something really simple here but if anyone could give me some advice Id appreciate it soooooo
much (more than I can express!!) as this driving me crazy!Is it my hard drive or my computer?

 

[kjv1611]

Don't know for sure if these will fix your problems, but based on my recent experience coupled with some other recoveries I've attempted for others in the past, I would do this:

1. If possible, first back up all that you can backup to a separate drive or other media (hard drive probably best choice, due to size of your data I'm guessing. I've seen a couple online stores that have 500 Gigabytes external drives now for $150 or even less - past few days.

2. Try a data recovery program, like you already mentioned. I just finshed using Active Partion Rrecovery last night to recover a RAID 3 partition of drives that didn't want to show up in a new Windows installation. That program worked like a dream! The same company makes several different programs, so you can just look and see which one works best for you:

http://www.active-undelete.com/products.htm#partition

Or you can also try a free program called "Restoration" - with it you just download a compressed file, and then extract to a folder, then execute the program - no "installation" necessary. I've used it before, and was able to recover about 50 gigabytes of audio files, I believe it was!

3. You could try running a program called "SpinWise" on your machine to check your hard drives, and it actually will correct some problems for you - I guess somewhat like the Windows Scan Disk, but it's much more detailed, and as such takes a VERY long time - you have to burn it to a CD if you download it, and then boot from your CD.

4. If you get all your data backed up, and you want to try and make sure your drive is totally formatted and running as best as possible, you could do these:
a. Download, burn to CD, and run Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN). Just realize that once you run this, I doubt there would be any REAL means of recoverying anything at all - so be SURE you want to use it. I have had a hard drive or two in the past that seemed to work much better just after running DBAN. This program is also very detailed and complex, and takes a long time to run.
b. Then run the SpinRite program before you put anything back on the drive.

5. If you are able to get all your data off the drive, and it seems there are still problems, and it's still under warranty, I'd just send it back for a replacement.

Hope some of this is of some help to you! I know how it can feel to lose and almost lose important files!

There are all sorts of options now for external hard drives - there are RAID and non-RAID solutions, there are USB, Firewire, and Network (NAS) solutions. And amazingly, the prices seem to have really plumeted on all the external stuff over the past 6 months to a year.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[ack135]

Thanks a lot for all the helpful info!

Have been offline all day running Maxtors diagnostic tool and the drive passed every test (so presumably its not the drive?). Tried the "restoration" tool but that got nothing, tried another recovery tool which found 40,000 lost files (about triple the number of files I was missing) but they are all renamed cluster such and such and split up (so the jpgs are only parts of the original pic, and txt files are unreadable for instance) so that wasnt that helpful beacuase I have no idea how to restore the information to where it was originally (Whats infuriating is when I google my problem I see lots and lots of pple have had exactly the same problem with chkdsk as me with orphaned files getting relocated and then being unopeneable but I cannot find a single example where someone has found a way to recover all these files successfully).
Thinking maybe my system is just having trouble because the drive is so big (500gb) and my system is a few years old- already had to throttle the drive down to SATA 1 when I installed it to get it recognized.

Anyway will run some more tests tomorrow!

 

[kjv1611]

If your system is 3 years old or less, I wouldn't think that 500Gb would necessarily be the problem.

What programs did you try?

Did you try any from the active-delete website?
Did you try Restoration?

Restoration isn't the most user friendly, as far as you have to restore every file individually.

I used the active partition recovery from active-delete.com and it worked wonders for me. However, you have to use the paid version to just do a strait "recover" versus creating an image file. But, it's not too bad considering you can get their whole package for under $100.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[ack135]

Hi again

I tried loads of programs I cant remember the name of (basically anything that offered a free trial (or at least a scan b4 you have to pay to restore))

I tried restoration (not the other you mentioned) but that only found files that I had deleted normally. And since I have 81,000 odd media related files on the drive I just dont have the time to go through with any program that wont put things exactly back in their place automatically


TO be honest I gave up on recovering stuff a couple of days ago, and have been reloading stuff from various backup dvds I have (turns out I actually did back up most stuff at one point or another so havent lost as much as I first thought- anyways also not so bad because for instance if there are roughly 200pics in each one of my photo folders ill have worked on the important ones and saved multiple versions of them so even if I didnt back up that folder to DVD ill still have at least one version of all the files I need - the fact that i may have lost 5-20 files from each folder that I prob would never have looked at again is annoying just because I'm a bit of a control freak and like to be complete! but isnt critical)

Have bought an external hard drive and have been backing up everything I hadnt already backed up to organized DVDs so I now have everything in triplicate so this never happens again

you live and learn I guess!

Anyways thanks very much for your posts!

 

[kjv1611]

Well, for future reference, if you ever get the time, and remember, I would HIGHLY suggest giving the Active Recovery stuff I mentioned. I tried several other programs in my recent situation, and others had suggested some other things that I tried. Active Partition Recovery was the only program that did what I wanted. Frankly, I would almost say it's better than a backup - well, not really, but hopefully you know what I mean. It worked incredibly awesome!

Either way, glad you did have some back-ups on DVD.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me