HD trouble: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable

[bmd]

I recently bought a new 200gig WD hard drive, and being silly and not realizing that I needed and ata133 card, bought an ata100 PCI card since I had already used up all of my IDE channels. I installed the card and then hooked up the drive, partitioning it into a ~130gig partition and a ~60gig partition. Since the card was ata100, windows only saw a ~130gig partition and a ~7gig partition. I unpartitioned the 7gig partition in windows disk management and ordered an ata133 card once I realized my mistake.

Once the ata133 card arrives, I install it without a hitch and windows now sees a 7gig unpartitioned area, a ~130gig partition and a ~50gig unpartitioned area. Since I had already accumulated a lot of stuff on the 130gig partition and figured I could live without 7gigs for now, I just used windows disk management to partition the 50gig part. I copied over my folder of SVCDs from another HD to the new h:\ (50gig) partition but when I went to open it, I got the error in the title. I thought it was odd, but figured either the transfer of such a large amount at once had messed it up or windows disk management had borked the partitioning. So I repartitioned the 50gig area again (completely wiping my SVCDs), and set up a new folder for my SVCDs and divx movies. Now I've put some new SVCDs and DivX movies onto the partition and I'm getting the error in the title yet again.

The 130gig partition originally formatted by the WD disk utility floppy continues to perform flawlessly, haven't had a single problem with it. Could it be that the drive is bad, but only in part of the area of this ~50gig partition? I'm considering buying and installing partition magic and seeing if repartitioning that 50gig area in PM would help, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. Should I try completely reformatting the whole drive in the WD disk utility?

Any advice would be appreciated, stumped as to what to try here.

 

[EeyoreX]

What OS are you using, it will help others help you out.

Having said that, sorry I can't help you with your problem, but WD ships the retail version of this drive with an ATA100 controller card. No hard drives NEED ATA133, since no hard drives utilize the full speed anyhow. Plus, the WD drives are "only" speced at an interface speed of ATA100. Maybe there was a problem with your first controller, and having the ATA133 certainly will not hurt (it is fully backwards compatible) so the problem must be elsewhere. Good luck.

\Dan

 

[Zepper]

Eeyore,
. The 133 controller has support for the larger (40 bit?) FAT. Not sure about the 100.

BMD,
. WD (and most other HD mfrs) has a drive test utility on their web site that can zero out any of their drives - makes them just like new. So you can then repartition with the proper tool. If you decide you want Partition Magic, GoGamer has one of the best prices around (less than $30.). Be sure to DL any updates from their web site before using (PM8 has partition size limits too but I don't know what they are off hand).
.bh.

 

[bmd]

Using XP home. And yes, the ATA 133 has support for the 48-bit LBA addressing while the ATA 100 does not (this was why windows only saw 137gigs with the ATA100 card but it sees the full ~190ish with the ATA133).

I went out and got PM8 and reformatted and repartitioned the ~50gig partition and it seems to be behaving so far (although it also seemed to behave at first before also). Hopefully it won't randomly pop up a corrupt/unreadable error in the next few days as I fill it up like before.

 

[EeyoreX]

Yes, ATA133 cards do support drives over 137GB, I am not disputing that. But so do ATA100 cards, so I was pointing out that the issue was not with the controller not being able to recognize the large capacity.

ATA100 Controller cards do, in fact, support drives over 137GB. To wit:

Western Digital's controller card, please note the sixth bullet point.

Supports drives beyond 137 GB

I will point that this is the card that Western Digital sells to allow older computers support drives over 137GB. It is NOT ATA133 compatible, as the specs clearly show. Also, as the specs for the Western Digital Special Edition 200GB, 7200 RPM, Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive with 8 MB Cache clearly show it is an ATA100 drive. Seems silly to me that an ATA100 drive would require an ATA133 controller, no? Also, as I noted in my earlier post, the .retail version includes the aformentioned ATA100 card. Seems that Western Digital would more likely than not package the drive with a card that would enable users to use the drive. At the very least, if they were to be pulling a scam, they would sell an ATA133 controller card. Which, they do not.

ATA133 is essentially a marketing creation of Maxtor, as they are the only drive manufacturers that make ATA133 products, as the speed gain is negligable at best, since drives barely push the ATA66 spec.

\Dan

 

[Zepper]

Eey,
. Had you noticed that it sounds like he bought an OEM drive and then some generic ATA100 adapter?..
I agree that no ATA/IDE drive needs a 133 adapter for the 133 speed, but most generic ATA100 adapters didn't support the larger FAT and not sure whether that shortcoming could be rectified by an adapter BIOS update, but from what I've read here and other places it takes a chipset update for the larger FAT support.
. IAC, my advice was accurate and would have worked had he not already implemented a solution that he could live with.
.bh.

 

[iceberg187]

Yeah, I had the same problem with my WD 200GB SE under Windows XP. First a few folders on the drive disappeared (probably from checkdisk "fixing" the files) and then the whole drive got corrupted. I have no idea what caused it though, I had it connected to IDE and it was recognized as the full 200gb formatted for NTFS. I called Western Digital thinking it was a hard drive problem, ao they sent out a new one which I connected to the ata100 controller card that came with the drive in the first place. One day later, that drive corrupted too... so I'm not sure that it has to do with the controller card or IDE connection.

Is XP corrupting the drive because its bigger than the built-in 137gb size limitations, or does anyone have any other ideas? I have two other WD drives connected to my system each over 100gb and I haven't had any problem with those yet. Is this a common problem in XP under NTFS, or are both of the hard drives bad? Any help would be appreciated, thanks.