Penny Arcade Forums› Games and Technology› Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.

XP went beserk and now one drive can't be read

BlindZenDriverBlindZenDriver Registered User regular
edited July 2010 in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
XP hang at shut down and ran CHKDSK on one drive at boot. Now that drive is empty:!:

Also the PC is now really slow at times. This I think is due to short cuts and so on the desktop pointing to a drive no longer fully there.

"My computer" shows the drive as having the letter F as usual, but it is a no go to access then content and also no info on used/unused space is given. The Disk Manager reports the drive empty (RAW) and offers me to format it.

Fortunately the data lost are replaceable and/or unimportant, otherwise I would have a backup. However just for the practice I'd like to try and fix the issue. Any tips on bringing data back?






Background info:

PC with 4 physical SATA hard drives of which one used for data is now "empty". The drive in question used to hold a single NTFS partition of around 700 GB.

Bones heal, glory is forever.
BlindZenDriver on

Posts

  • theclamtheclam Registered User regular
    edited July 2010
    Well, if you format it, it will make the drive readable again (although you lose all that data for sure). If you want to see if the data can be brought back, you can try booting off an Ubuntu DVD or flash drive. Since it still shows as having a disk letter, you can try a chkdsk /r on it, although it might reject a RAW drive.

    Your disk is probably dying though. If you look through the System log in Event Viewer, you may see a lot of errors with 'disk' as the source, which would suggest something is physically wrong with the drive. You can also check the SMART status of the drive with something like speedfan. Once you format the drive definitely run chkdsk /r to see if it has lots of bad sectors.

    theclam on
    rez_guy.png
  • BlindZenDriverBlindZenDriver Registered User regular
    edited July 2010
    theclam wrote: »
    Your disk is probably dying though. If you look through the System log in Event Viewer, you may see a lot of errors with 'disk' as the source, which would suggest something is physically wrong with the drive. You can also check the SMART status of the drive with something like speedfan. Once you format the drive definitely run chkdsk /r to see if it has lots of bad sectors.

    Thank you for the reply.

    I guess you could be right about the health of the drive and for sure I will be careful if I ever use it again. I'm gonna try Ubuntu and maybe some disk tools to see what can be done just as practice in case I ever do need to fix a drive for real (knock on wood).

    BlindZenDriver on
    Bones heal, glory is forever.
  • LaCabraLaCabra MelbourneRegistered User regular
    edited July 2010
    theclam wrote: »
    Your disk is probably dying though.
    I'd say almost certainly
    You can also check the SMART status of the drive with something like speedfan.
    If SMART has been tripped it should let you know on boot and probably pause boot until you acknowledge it. Fucked disks, though, do not always result in SMART being tripped, for whatever reason.

    Good thing the stuff you have on there's not important. You should run a decent disk diagnostic tool other than CHKDSK if you're interested in how fucked your disk is. I use http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/, since it has a bunch of useful stuff on it. Run a long test with Seatools. Doesn't matter if it's not a Seagate disk.

    Note that you can almost certainly still recover your shit if you want to.

    LaCabra on
Sign In or Register to comment.
Penny Arcade Forums› Games and Technology› Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern