[felinusz]

I noticed when I restarted my computer today, that my D: drive wasn't showing up in Windows.

Perplexed, I cleared CMOS, rebooted again, and put the drive on another SATA channel.

This got the drive to appear in Windows again, but I cannot access it, run CHKDSK on it, or do anything with it...

I don't want to format it, it has my entire music and movie collection on it - this would be a serious hassle to get together again.


Here are some of the symptoms I'm seeing:
















The drive is detected properly by the BIOS, and by Windows. The pop up error says I need to CHKDSK it, but I cannot get checkdisk to run on it.

I have tried switching SATA channels with no luck. I don't have another machine with SATA to try it on, although I'm working on this.

Any suggestions would be very welcome

[redduc900]

Have you tried changing out the SATA cable?

[JDXNC]

Boot from your XP cd and run CHKDSK from the recovery console, it usually works even if Windows gives you an error.

If you want to try a software method of recovering your files I have had the best results with Runtime's "GetDataBack".

[felinusz]

Good call on swapping SATA cables.

I just tried that now, it didn't fix the D: drive, although one of my cables seemed to cause a BSOD on reboot when used with my C: drive.

And then, inexplicably, the drives would detect on boot, but Windows would not boot from the C: drive, no matter which mixture of cable or SATA channel I placed the drives on.

Clearing CMOS got Windows to start loading again, but it would freeze during the loading screen.

Clearing CMOS again, and taking the D: drive off completely got me back into Windows; here I am now.


This peculiar behavour has caused me to have a feeling that my motherboard might be past its expiry date. It's quite old and has seen a lot of abuse.... maybe the SATA controller died or is dying?

The unpleasant part is that there's really no way to tell or know. I don't have another machine I can test the D: drive on, unfortunately.

I'll keep messing around with different configurations. I really really really don't want to lose the data on this drive.

Boot from your XP cd and run CHKDSK from the recovery console, it usually works even if Windows gives you an error.

If you want to try a software method of recovering your files I have had the best results with Runtime's "GetDataBack".

Thanks, I will try this and see if it fixes my D: drive.

Good to know a program for this purpose, although heaven forbid I have to use it.






I should add some background here.

My D: drive was working fine yesterday, at some point I rebooted, at which point this problem started. The problem manifest itself at first, through the D: drive not appearing in "My Computer" whatsoever, although it was present in the device manager and drive manager.

Clearing CMOS and changing drive channels got the D: drive back into Windows software, but with the apparent "corruption" we see now.


Another strange error I encountered before swapping cables:

[hafa]

You could get an inexpensive USB external enclosure to test out the drive. It could prove useful, especially if your board is dying and you need to access your data.

[felinusz]

Originally Posted by hafa

You could get an inexpensive USB external enclosure to test out the drive. It could prove useful, especially if your board is dying and you need to access your data.

Aha, great idea, thank you!!

I'll be getting one today if I cannot figure this out using the onboard SATA

[JDXNC]

Originally Posted by felinusz

Aha, great idea, thank you!!

I'll be getting one today if I cannot figure this out using the onboard SATA

Another option - I have one of these, works great, same idea minus the need to put in an enclosure for quick testing: http://www.genericcomputer.com/shop/...p?itemid=11994

It also does 2.5" drives and 3.5" IDE as well.

[felinusz]

O.K., CheckDisk will not assess the drive.

It says something along the lines of "invalid parameters", or "corrupt drive parameter"; something parameter, the message didn't display very long before it auto-rebooted.

An HD-Tune error scan found damaged sectors on the drive.





The drive has somehow become seriously damaged. Seeing as how I didn't jostle it or anything, I guess it just failed randomly...?

Time to recover what data I can, and send it in for warranty....

Goodbye: ~9000 audio files

[aftermath]

you could give spinrite a spin (pun intended) http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

also get a copy of some type of boot-ably Linux LiveCD and see if that sees the drive.

[Krzysd]

r-studio's is a great recovery software, you should try that before you do anything.

[El<(')>Maxi]

How are you invoking chkdsk? Command line or in the Windows UI?

Try this from command line if you have not yet...it will schedule the operation to occur on re-start.

chkdsk /f

[felinusz]

I tried chkdsk /f with no luck; it still refuses to assess D:



What gets me is how random this is. The drive was perfectly functional one moment, and completely trashed the next. I defragged it once a week, even ran checkdisk on it less than a month ago!


I've started using Runtime's GetDataBack, although it looks like it will take ~40 hours to completely scan the drive . I haven't had time to run it completely yet, but I'm hoping I'll get most of my music back - the music is what's really important to me, the rest is trivial.

I "only" had about ~150-180 gigs of data on there...

The current plan is to see if Seagate will advance me a fresh drive, in which case I'll simple load all of the recovered data onto the fresh 500G they send me. Should that service be unavailable, I'll be burning a "few" DVDs....

[felinusz]

An update:

The drive is definitely toasted, but I was able to recover pretty much all of my data from it . Thank you all for the input and assistance!

[killermiller]

From my experience, random HDD failure is usually caused by heat.