Hard Drive issue

[Scootin159]

Ok, I have had this 80GB IDE HDD running in my server for a couple years now, never had a problem, until today. All of a sudden I can't read/write to the drive. It shows up fine in my comptuer & the BIOS (even says 80GB), but it can't read/write any data to it (can't even read the volume label). If I open it says "Not enough free space to perform this action". Any ideas on how I might be able to further diagnose this?

 

[EeyoreX]

The hard drive manufacturer provides, for free, utilities to check the drive. The utilitiy can be found on the floppy and/or CD that came with your drive. Or, if your drive did not have this software (OEM drive for example) it is freely downloadable from the manufacturer's website.

\Dan

 

[Scootin159]

Originally posted by: EeyoreX
The hard drive manufacturer provides, for free, utilities to check the drive. The utilitiy can be found on the floppy and/or CD that came with your drive. Or, if your drive did not have this software (OEM drive for example) it is freely downloadable from the manufacturer's website.

\Dan

Did that, says the drive's SMART is saying there's bad sectors & the drive is unuseable :-/

Got an RMA already & luckily I have backups (and backups of the backups) since it was some pretty important data.

 

[WackyDan]

Best bet in the future is to run S.M.A.R.T. alert monitoring software. It resides as a sort of TSR but may give you more of a heads up pre-failure.

Note... that S.M.A.R.T. only works roughly 30% of the time.... The drive can still die without advance notice.

 

[Zepper]

Congrats on keeping good backups - aren't you glad you did! And for the best drive diagnostic tool, SpinRite is still the one. From http://www.grc.com . And for data recovery R-Studio from R-Tools ( http://www.r-tt.com ) is it.
.bh.