Hard Drive failure. Other half works but other one doesn't?

[GungSeng]

Hi everyone

I have a bit of a crisis here.

About an hour ago I was surfing at anandtech and then I closed firefox and winamp, started ABC and started playing GTA Vice City. As soon as double clicked on Vice City the system suddenly started to lag very much and I thought it was just some kind of windows glitch or a system failure. I got frustrated and took off my headphones and I immediately heard this quite loud noise coming from my case. It was this sharp "scratching" sound repeating every second and I realised something was wrong and I just managed to click "restart computer".

I have two hard drives. One WD 36gb SATA Raptor and one Seagate 120gb 7200.7 SATA NCQ. The raptor has a windows drive and a steam drive. The seagate has game drive, mp3 drive and a movie/apps drive.

At first I thought it was the raptor as western digital hard drives hive a slightly bad reputation. Then as Win XP started loading it started running CHKDSK. It checked the windows drive but found no mistakes and restarted the computer, but then it found two mistakes on the game drive and corrected them and proceeded onto the login screen. Once I logged in it lagged a bit and then crashed. I restarted and then I chose "Safe mode" upon login and everything worked without a problem. Once i got into "my computer" everything was in order except that the "mp3" and "movie" drives were gone and they had been replaced by two "local drives" with capacity of 0kb. wtf? Then I checked the disk fragmentation and all 3 remaining drives had about 2%. I tried to play GTA:VC and it worked fine about 30mins until it suddenly started lagging and the computer crashed. This time the hard drives didnt make any noises.

Now I logged into windows again and copied all "my Documents" and "my pictures" on a CD and prepared for the worst.

Now I have several questions:
1. Is it possible that only a certain layer breaks on a hard drive?
2. Does anybody know what is happening to my Seagate? Could this be somekind of virus?
3. Can I salvage anything from my "mp3" or "movie" drives?
4. If the hard drive is f***** then how is the game drive functional?
5. What the f*** is going on?

Thanks for reading this far. I cant believe this is happening. I thought that seagate drives were dependable. I have had this setup for about 5 months. Thanks.

 

[phatrabt]

Are you running FAT or NTFS on the drive? I recently had a drive go bad and the only solution I got was to use a data recovery prog to scan the surface of the drive and get as much as I could back. I got about 90% back. Have you tried using a Linux Live CD and booting to it and accessing your drive? Good luck!

 

[GungSeng]

Both are NTFS. I don't know which recovery program to use, but can you reccommend me any? I have never used Linux before so I dare not touch it unless you give me some instructions. Thanks anyway.

 

[phatrabt]

OK, NTFS is good. I used a program called File Scavenger. There are others out there but this one worked for me and the price ($45) was worth it, and I also have it if I have anything like this happen again. However, I'm planning to implement a RAID 1 array just so it DOESN'T happen again. Good luck!

 

[GungSeng]

Ok I downloaded the demo version and did a long search on both drives and it finds everything and says that the quality is good on everything except on a few items.

Seems that it can find the files then do you know what has happened?

What do you suggest that I do now?

Ask the shop send a new drive so I can copy the missing files to it and send the faulty one back?

I really down have space left any where and I cant even think about burning 80gb on a CDs.

 

[phatrabt]

First off, what kind of drive is it? Make, Model, etc. I would download the diag disk for whoever makes the drive and test it, which is usually the first step you have to do before they will RMA your drive. As for getting a replacement before sending the old one, you'd have to look at the RMA policy of the manufacturer to see if they'll do that as some do and some don't.

 

[ZeroRift]

I once had a similar problem with an old win98 system. Win 98 decided I only had half of my files and told me my drive was a removable disk drive. It also said the capacity was about half of what it really was. The system had been running fine for a year or so, and then suddenly, weirdness. All I had to do to fix it though was unplug it, boot windows, shutdown now that windows saw the drive was gone, plugged the drive back in, and re booted. All of my data came back and the capacity/type of HDD were correct. It's simple, and that may not be the problem if you're running 2K/XP, but it's worth a shot.