Transferred hard drive to new PC yields big problems

[chang542]

I got a new PC and when I moved my 2 hard drives into it, they began to have big problems.

I first noticed this when I tried to play certain MP3 files and kept getting errors... some would work, some would not. The same thing occurs with videos I have as well. For all the files the size appears correct, however they won't play. Some will actually play for a second or 2 and then quit. Others play almost 100% ok, but have parts that skip ahead in them now. This has primarily affected any files I have added or modified in the past 2-3 months. My older files for the most part are ok still, however there are a few exceptions.

On the first or second reboot since I made the swap, Windows XP ran through a disk check and made major changes to my file system index. It went through and dumped a lare number of files into a found.000 hidden folder. these files appear to be uncorrupted, however I just need to figure out where they went.

From what I can guess, it appears that the file index has been corrupted, so as it tries to play a song for example, it plays for a second but then it looks to the wrong sector of the hard drive for the rest of the song which isn't there. just a guess...

My big concern now is if I can recover those files that appear to be corrupted and fix the issue.

does anybody know of any tools that will do this or have any insight?

thanks.

 

[chang542]

I'm looking around and see some posts that say to try the program "Getbackdata" to recover data in some cases, so I'm giving that a try...

when I load it, it's showing 2 of my drives as only 137GB and won't go beyond that barrier and says check your BIOS and OS version for hard drive capacity support. Windows recognizes the drives fine (XP with SP2) and my Dell is brand new, so the BIOS should be up to date. I also have the 2 drives (200GB and 250GB) connected through and IDE PCI card just for that reason because when I first bought it, it was required to get large drive support.

So what's the deal with that?

 

[edfair]

I don't have any other advice on the support software but would suggest that you take the drives back to the original machine. Whatever issues you are dealing with on the new machine will probably continue and create more problems for you.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[chang542]

I tried that as well and I think it compounded the problem. When I first transferred the drives to the new machine, the disk check orphaned a large number of files and put them in the found.000 directory, then when I moved the drives back, it did the disk check again and moved more files around.

Also, when I put the drives back in the original machine, it did not recoginze any partitions on my 250GB drive and said it was unformatted. Upon a reboot, the BIOS would see the drive, however windows would not recognize any drive being there.

I then moved them back to my new system and the partitions reappeared on that drive. I copied off all of the data, however for the vast majority of it, I can't use it cause its corrupted in some way.... but at least I know exactly what I had.

I tried the "getbackdata" tool even though it didn't recognize my drive capacity correctly, and that didn't yield any results... I can still only play certain files and not others.

 

[Kemisco]

Hi chang542,

Does your old PC have the XP platform? If not, that may be why there was extensive maintenance done to the drives when you placed them in the new machine (converted them to NTFS file system?). Now that they have possibly been converted to the NTFS file system, perhaps that's why your older PC can no longer see them. I would think that converting them would not have been necessary, due to the fact that they are storage drives. XP should be able to view in this manner.

FYI: NTFS can see FAT, but FAT cannot see NTFS. Let's say, for conversation, that you wanted Win98 on a drive along with XP. It works slick to load Win98 first, then XP. In fact, if you start the XP installation when you're on your Win98 platform, at some point in the initial setup you'll be able to decide what to do with the XP installation: overwrite everything (which will knock out 98), or create a new partition next to the 98 partition (only if you didn't allocate the entire drive to 98). At this point you need to decide: will I ever want to view my XP files when I'm on my 98 platform? If so, you'll be able to choose FAT32 when setting up the XP installation. If you load a brand new XP platform onto a blank drive, you won't be given the option to install it as FAT32.

If you have a USB external burner of some sort that you know has the 5 1/2" device bay width, take it apart and hook one of your drives to the IDE cable; see if you can view the files through USB. If you can, at least you can get them off of the drives and copy them to a new location.

I hope someone here can help you with your problem. It should be easy, but something went wrong here. Please provide more information, if you can.

Kemisco

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Take your computer outdoors when blowing out the dust; it's mostly skin dust. A clean computer is a cool computer.

 

[chang542]

Both PCs are XP.. my old one a Dell Dimension 2400 ran XP Pro, my new one is a Dimension E510 runing XP media center edition, and on everything, the file system is NTFS.

I have no problems right now viewing all of my files on the new system, just opening them. I've only seen my music and movie files affected thus far. I can open up a few .avi files and they will work and play fine, but the large majority of the ones I open will give me an error from windows media player saying "cannot play the file specified". Same with playing MP3's in Winamp. Most of them won't play at all.

I tried copying the data to 2 other PCs, and the same error results.

 

[Freestone]

I'd be more than a bit concerned that GetDataBack doesn't see partitions greater than 137GB. If 48-bit LBA isn't being supported properly, this would account for all the problems you are seeing.

It's unclear to me how you have the drives connected in your new system. Are they directly connected to the new system's IDE interface or did you migrate the PCI card over too?

Forget XP SP2 for the moment, what size is shown for the drives in BIOS?

 

[chang542]

I checked the BIOS, and it recognizes the large drives correctly.

Currently I have 3 hard drives. The first is a 160GB SATA drive connected directly into the motherboard. The other 2, are IDE and connect into the PCI card as a master/slave and are 200GB/250GB respectively.

Looking closer at GetBackData, it does recognize large drives because it sees the 160GB SATA drive fine. However for the 200GB drive, it shows the drive itself as 128GB, however the partitions under it show up as 180GB first partition, and a 10GB second partition, which is the reverse of what it actually is. It should be 10 then 180. The 3rd drive, also says 128GB, but its partions are shown correctly 90GB then 143GB.

I copied a few files that I am having an issue with onto other systems, but they all end up with the same error saying "windows media player cannot play the file specified". Also, under file properties when you look at the summary, it would normally show artist, length, pixel size, etc. information, but for these ones, it all grayed out and shows nothing.

 

[stduc]

The files in question don't need a special codec installing to play do they?

Just wondering.

Because if a file can be copied then it is generally OK.

The original files could have become damaged somehow though.

For future reference I have always found that the safest way to get data from an old PC to a new one is to use a network. Having ensured the new PC is working OK connect to the old PC via a crossover cable and just use netbui if you can't be bothered setting IP address's. Share the root drives and copy what you need to. Check all is well with the new PC and copied data and unshare the root drives and disconnect them. Then, later when you have connected up the new PC to its normal network and checked all is well you can move the hard drives over and if you like and either reformat them or delete the data you copied over. As you choose.

 

[Freestone]

The 160GB drive is recognized properly by GetDataBack because the support for it is coming from the motherboard.
However, it appears that you have some kind of 48-bit LBA support issues between the added PCI card and the new motherboard. GetDataBack should be seeing the full drive size along with correctly ordered and sized partitions.

My guess is that the PCI card is not providing proper support for the large drives and that as you've added files over time, you've actually overwritten parts of files added earlier on, and what you are seeing now is the corruption of these older files. I suspet recovery will only be possible from backups, if you have them.

Is there anyway of moving the PCI card and drives back to the older system to see if GetDataBack recognizes the drives properly?

 

[chang542]

hmmm.... back with the old system, I wasn't using the card with the drives at all. Once SP2 for XP came out, the large drive issue was supposedly resolved, so I no longer needed it. now that i'm on the new system, I started using the card again since it has no IDE connections.

everything worked previously to this, so shouldn't i have seen errors before if parts of files were being overwritten? Its mostly the newer files I am seeing the most problems with, no the old ones. What point in transferring these drives to the new system, could have caused it to start acting like this? and what did it do that makes bringing them back in the old system have the same issue?

to be a little clearer and make another example, I have some folders that each contain MP3 rips of CDs I have. For a given album, tracks 1, 4, 5, 8, 10, and 11 will play fine, but the others won't play at all.

I am seeing the same issue with JPEG files as well. I can't open up certain pictures and I can't see any thumbnail preview.

If I switch to "thumnail view" for a folder that has many of these corrupted files, it will crash my explorer.exe right away when it tries to load them all.

Hypothetically, if I am eventually able to get GetBackData to recognize the drives correctly.... would that really solve my problem and make these files work again?

 

[Freestone]

Hypothetically, if I am eventually able to get GetBackData to recognize the drives correctly.... would that really solve my problem and make these files work again?"

I think the damage has been done already and the files are corrupted, and GetDataBack will be of no use in recovering them. At this point I think you should be looking to salvage whatever files are good onto your functional 160GB drive and/or anywhere else but your two suspect IDE drives. I also suggest suspend adding anything to the drives to minizmize further damage.

Does copying any of the files that won't open over to the 160GB help matters? I'm betting it won't, but give it a shot.

Once you have backed up the data, if you ever want these drives to work properly in your new system, you will have to figure out the root cause of your problem.