Can't believe it ! Hard disk crash

~J~

~J~

~J~

Soldato
Joined
20 Oct 2003
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London
I'm "BEGGING" for help here!

My PC has just crashed, and upon rebooting, my datadrive with customers work on is saying "F:\is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

I've rebooted a few times. Nothing.

Right clicking and selected properties shows it has 0bytes of used space, 0bytes of free space and 0bytes capacity.

However, going into Disk Management in the administration tools clearly shows it as a 149Gb drive, 149Gb free space, 100% but has the diagonal lines in the partition view.

Has anyone any tips I can try that won't destroy the data or harm it. I can't reveal obviously the price, but the work on it is worth a LOT of money.

I feel sick with worry.
 
Cheers for the responses.

Totally agree with the first one, I 'should' leave it and sne dit to data recovery, but not having £500 to hand and the customer needing the program by Tuesday next week, it's not an option.

Been looking most of the night for some software, found one called GetDataBack NTFS which when run is clearly showing all my files. Left it running over night to to a total sector check, and at 3am when I went to bed it had found over 16,000 files so the data 'is' there, it's just how much is recoverable. Only problem is I had a power cut at 6.30am and lost the progress!! Will have to run it again tonight. The GetDataBack software doesn't write to the disk so hopefully it's not adding to the problem when it's running.

Spinrite looks good too, if I have no joy recovering, then I'll try that one, other than that I'm gona find a darkened room and a bottle of booze.

Cheers for the help, REALLY appreciate it.
 
I used GetDataBack for NTFS once on a drive that was damaged by a crash during a defrag. It got everthing back but it did take a long time. So there's hope.

Good luck.
 
~J~ said:
{snip}Only problem is I had a power cut at 6.30am and lost the progress!! {snip}
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Lucky there - but invest in a UPS. I mean for the kind of work you might be doing it will be a wise choice. Also, power could have been the cause of problem in the first place & not old, near-the-end, etc hardware:)
 
~J~ said:
I'm "BEGGING" for help here!

My PC has just crashed, and upon rebooting, my datadrive with customers work on is saying "F:\is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

I've rebooted a few times. Nothing.

Right clicking and selected properties shows it has 0bytes of used space, 0bytes of free space and 0bytes capacity.

However, going into Disk Management in the administration tools clearly shows it as a 149Gb drive, 149Gb free space, 100% but has the diagonal lines in the partition view.

Has anyone any tips I can try that won't destroy the data or harm it. I can't reveal obviously the price, but the work on it is worth a LOT of money.

I feel sick with worry.
Click to expand...



Tried looking at the disk by using a Knoppix Linux Live disk? Very useful indeed if a HDD 'appears' to go **** up.I used this method very recently to recover a 'supposedly' dead windows drive.

Worth a shot?

Regards
J-P
 
hp7909 said:
Lucky there - but invest in a UPS. I mean for the kind of work you might be doing it will be a wise choice. Also, power could have been the cause of problem in the first place & not old, near-the-end, etc hardware:)
Click to expand...
I would agree, but surely the more important question, is why the hell weren't you backing up such critical data?
 
Otacon said:
I would agree, but surely the more important question, is why the hell weren't you backing up such critical data?
Click to expand...

That's the kick in the nadgers. I was backing customers work to CD to give them today when it happened, Nero hung, reset machine, and whumpf!
 
Our network manager saved a illustration to his hard drive, and his windows corrupted and couldn't be repaired, NTFS DOS saw the files but a collegue used Spinrite to recover the files, I thought it had crashed but it eventaully fixed it, it took literally days though.
 
Quick update if anyone's interested...

Spent ALL day with GetDataBack. Had bits of success, VERY VERY slow running, system would sometimes hang, more resets, etc, and lots of frustration.

Was starting to think I'd made matters worse as on some resets the drives wasn't even showing at all, even in the BIOS, so a huge panic was setting in me.

Removed SATA cables again, blew on connectors, waggled leads, etc, etc.

In the end, as a desperate attempt to try 'anything' I swapped the cables from one SATA to the 'broken' one and booted up.

GetDataBack sailed through the checks. What 'was' taking about 4 hours to get to anything like 80% and a hell of a lot of errors, went from 0% to 100% in 35mins with no errors.

Saw the 'checking files', 'compiling list', 'sorting lost files' and all other messages as final checks were done and then finally...

Was presented with an Explorer-style view of my datadrive and all it's directories and files (including ones that had been deleted WEEKS ago!) asking what I'd like to restore and where.

Wondering if this was all too good to be true, I selected the files and clicked the "copy" button to confirm the restoration.

Final result...

100% restored :)

So only to find out, if possible, as to why it all happened in the first place! I'm going to run a check on the 'naughty' drive, so anyone have any tips on a good disk checking program as I'd like to use it again (it's a relatively new drive).

I know perhaps not the right forum, but based on the fact that a waggle, clean and insert of different cables, anyone think the SATA cables could be at fault? (I have a SN25P shuttle and read a few people saying the SATA cables are not the best, or is this just talk?), any recommendations on an alternative brand of cable?

IF it helps point to what the problem may have been, I've been having a few issues this last week with my drives, but thought the drive was just getting slower because of the amount of data that was going on. The harddrive activity light would be on for minutes at a time, constantly - no flickering, and every now and then my mouse would just 'lock' for a second or two the more activity there was. Again, apologies if it's in the wrong forum, but rather than start a new thread, thought I'd add to this.

Anyway, thanks again for the tips folks, rest assured I'll be investing in a longer UPS (mine only last 14mins) and I may look at an alternative backup solution rather than DVD.

Thanks again.
 
~J~ said:
{snip}Removed SATA cables again, blew on connectors, waggled leads, etc, etc.{snip}
Click to expand...
That's exactly what happened to my system, no thanks to a power flactuations & one huge outtage! & when I swapped the cables back, everything worked fine even the problematic HD :confused: So, again, I believe you're having power issues, don't even hesitate getting a UPS!

I know its too late but, wish I'd suggested this :rolleyes:
 
Speedfan - http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

This little proggy is mainly for checking tempatures of the motheboard, etc. But it also has some useful bits for chaecking the state of your hard disks. It lists the SMART info from the drive, and then nips off and looks up these details on the servers. This returns a report on the state of the drive, based on the SMART info. I have only used this on a few drives, but so far it has correctly ID the "cooked" drives I have handed it. Worth a check :)
 
GatDataBack saved 3000 photos of a friend a few weeks ago, he was gutted and thought he would never see them back but as you also experienced GetDataBack restored them all.

As for the future, I would schedule regular backups, I doubt there is a disk checker that will actually help, the moment it fails it fails.

Just keep GetDataBack close.
 
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