[20361]

So things were OK for a couple days after I got rid of the bad dll file, but today it all went to H again.
Super long bootup, HD light almost always on and other glitches.
Rebooted and Windows wants to check a drive for inconsistencies, so I let it, 2 hours later it's still hung up checking.
Well, it told me the volume label was "Movies", which is the 1.5TB Western Digital drive with, gosh, I don't know, maybe 300 movies on it?
Tried to install a disk repair app, could not get it to install, computer kept doing something with the drive.

Well, since I was a computer tech for so long and I built this thing from scratch, I opened it up, disconnected the drive and everything is working fine now.
BAD new is I lose all those movies I collected.
GOOD news is the drive is still under warranty until 4/2013, free replacement.

Going to try and recover what I can before I return it to WD for replacement.

Bad drive pulled from 'puter.

 

[91 whiskey]

Good luck with that. The only computer advice I can offer to others is for them to give their computer to me so I can shoot it.

 

[Harrychl]

It must be nice to "know" computers...It's all I can do to turn one on!!!

 

[20361]

Looks like the drive is total toast.
Can't get XP to boot all the way with it connected.
When it did boot, it couldn't read the drive anyway, semaphore timeout.
So much for that.
Going to WD site to fill out the RMA.

 

[Lil Beaver]

Don't tell us you didn't back those movies up! LOL Look whos talking I have never "backed up" any of my computers as Microsoft continues to make it so difficult unless you use a 3rd party program and even them are confusing to many people. I do try to move files and folders off the HD to a CD so at least I will have a copy of the important letters, documents, and pictures. I havn't figured out how to simply copy my e-mail address's so I just copy the names and e-mail address's into a text document and copy that to a 3 1/2" floppy disk ( Yes I still keep a floppy dick drive on my computer ) or CD. Then little fellas can hold a lot of text documents in a very compact space even when you keep them in duplicate.

 

[here2serve]

spinright can often help.

Or testdisk/photorec you will loose filenames and meta data if the partition is gone. Of course if the drive is on it's way out make a dd_rescue image of the disk and recover the data from the image.

Many times I've had good results keeping a drive ice cold and using a live linux CD to move the data to a new drive.

 

[91 whiskey]

Yes I still keep a floppy dick drive on my computer

Does your computer know you're telling everybody about it's personal issues?

 

[20361]

Just got off the phone with WD, new drive coming in 3 to 5 business days, then I return old drive in same packaging.
25 minutes on hold and 20 minutes to get the RMA, he had search for a replacement drive, seems they don't make that model anymore.

 

[20361]

Don't tell us you didn't back those movies up!

Uh, nope.
But I did back up the OS just in case it was that drive going bad, fortunately it wasn't.
But guess where I backed up the "C:" drive?
YUP! the drive that failed!

 

[Lil Beaver]

Uh, nope.
But I did back up the OS just in case it was that drive going bad, fortunately it wasn't.
But guess where I backed up the "C:" drive?
YUP! the drive that failed!

Ain't that the way it always goes????

 

[popeye]

Have you tried installing the bad drive as the ONLY drive and booting off the Windows XP install cd to run repair command? It's been a couple years and I can't remember syntax but if the MBR is flawed you may be able to fix it and access the drive. I've done it a few times in the past.

 

[20361]

The drive is partitioned as a 366MB Primary and 1TB Second partition.
The Primary has Windows 7 Ultimate and is the bootable partition.
Windows 7 boots and runs, albeit very slow, as the 1TB partition appears to be corrupted now.
Once Windows gets going after about 15 minutes, the second partition appears in My Computer as Drive D:, but shows no info as to size or contents.
Any attempt to select the drive in Explorer (NOT to be confused with Internet Explorer) or right-click, Properties, causes a hang for many minutes until Windows gives up and gives a semaphore timeout error.
This ends up causing Explorer to crash, wipeout the desktop, restart and restore the desktop.
Control Panel, Computer Management, Disk Manager will start but never display any drive info as it cannot read the partition.

I have one more thing to maybe try, find a disk utility that boots from a CD and see if the partition can be restored.
If that doesn't work, it goes back to WD.
I already have the RMA and a drive is shipping today.

I hate to lose 500GB of movies, but it's not like I can't get them again.

I tried installing SeaTools (will analyze any brand drive) from Seagate, but it complains I don't have Microsoft .Net 4.0, which is wrong because I DO!
So that didn't work.

 

[1Phantom]

I guess it is time to go up to Windows 7 and use those new 3TB Hd.

 

[20361]

Some success.
I booted Win7 and it wants to do a disk check again on startup.
This time I let it run, took about 30 minutes checking the USN Journal.
Then it continued into Windows and I could see the movies on the drive.
I restarted back to XP Pro 64 and good news, the movies are there.
However, I don't trust the drive so I'm copying everything to my 2TB drive and then I'm going to wipe it clean before returning it.
And it's 864GB of movies and is going to take several hours to copy.
But better then losing them all.

 

[MissKitty]

And no one has given him a hard time about what KIND of movies? LOL slackers!

 

[popeye]

For some reason I missed you're doing a dual boot drive. Obviously the info I provided would have really screwed you up. When I retired two years ago we were having trouble getting 180 gig drives for the stuff I was working on. Now the smallest I see are 500 gig.. Funny stuff. When I started working on mini computers in '75 the biggest drive was 10 meg split into 2 drives in a cabinet that weighed 200 lbs.. Since drives are really cheap maybe you should do Raid/mirror?

 

[20361]

And no one has given him a hard time about what KIND of movies? LOL slackers!

Sorry, Miss Kitty, the only movies are GUN porn (NOT the other kind) and SciFi, Action, Comedy, Animated (for the Grandkids), classic westerns, etc.

 

[Montkun]

I bought a 1 TB external drive just for that reasoning. Only bad part is now I need another drive because I've filled that one. But all I have to do is grab another SATA drive and I can use the same adapter to make it external or just throw it in, back up the info and disconnect the drive completely just to have it as a true backup drive that isn't just spinning in idle most times.

 

[Montkun]

Have you tried installing the bad drive as the ONLY drive and booting off the Windows XP install cd to run repair command? It's been a couple years and I can't remember syntax but if the MBR is flawed you may be able to fix it and access the drive. I've done it a few times in the past.

FIXMBR is the syntax and usually works best if the OS primary booting drive fails, not so much success with a secondary storage drive. If he was dual booting from the other drive however, it would definitely have a big chance in coming back. I'm glad to see you're able to save them though, I've felt the pain of the dying drive far more times to count. A good tool I've used for years is the Microsoft Diagnostic & Recovery Tools discs, which is the product of Microsoft buying the Winternals software from it's creators years ago and making it into a fully functional recovery tool for all versions of Windows XP and higher. I've saved my fair share of drive data with that when they get on their last legs.

 

[20361]

I have 5 physical drives, 7 logical drives.
A 160GB is split into 2 equal partitions and boot XP Pro 64 on one and XP 32 on the other (XP 32 for those apps that won't run 64 bit due to no 64 bit driver)
A 1.5TB is split 366GB and 1.0TB, the 366GB has Windows 7 Ultimate and the 1TB is the movies.
A 100GB for download temporary storage until I can move the files to the proper place.
A 2.0TB (1.81TB formatted) holds TV shohws and now the movies that I am moving from the flaky 1.5TB drive.
A 250GB for whatever, converted video temp files created by the conversion app, a few BluRay ISO rips, and other junk.

Anyway, copy the movies is working, although I did lose the Back To The Future Trilogy BluRay rips, they were corrupted.
About half way through the drive, can't do much of anything else during the copying, computer is bogged down due to the flaky drive, sometimes it just quits copying and hangs, had to hard reset twice so far.
I paused to see what's up on TA.