Originally posted by: junglevip
Hey all
My PC started playing up this afternoon - just freezing every ten seconds or so, then coming back for a second (like it was tripping on a bad sector...?) - so I rebooted. After Win2K restarted, one of my data drives disappeared from Explorer. In Disk Management the entire disk was marked "unallocated".
It's in a removable bay
I read that far, and had one thought - the drive must be overheating.
Originally posted by: junglevip
- so I shut down and slid it out and nearly burned my fingers. It was !!HOT!! I waited for it to cool down (and tried another drive in the removable bay, which worked OK) then I put it back in and booted up again. No different - still comes up "unallocated". I haven't done anything to it since I rebooted, so in theory the data is intact.
Not surprising at all. Is it a WD drive?
Originally posted by: junglevip
The drive is a Western Digital 120GB IDE drive
Hmm, how did I know? (No, I honestly didn't read ahead! I'll explain in a second what has happened to your poor drive. I've seen this before.)
Originally posted by: junglevip
, running off a PCI RAID controller, as a Master on a channel of its own. I got it about 18 months ago, and configured it as a single 111GB NTFS partition for video capture (it was about 90GB full).
I've had some advice about how to recover it, but I'd like a second opinion, right from the top. Bear in mind I'm penniless - so data recovery companies and expensive software are out of the question.
So what do I do? And what are my chances?
Nick
Well, if what I expect happened, happened, I think that your chances of recovery are actually pretty good.
I've actually seen all of the above before.
First off, removable IDE trays have horrid cooling, even plastic ones with little fans on them. The best ones to use, are ones that are metal, they conduct the heat away from the drive into the PC's case frame much better. If the tray doesn't have *at least* a fan on it, DONT put a 7200 RPM drive in it, period. You are just asking for the drive to overheat and fail.
Second, I've seen recent-model WD drives overheat, and when they do, they tend to lose sectors. However, the drives themselves usually don't die. I guess the media probably just develops a bad spot.
I'll let you in on another secret - the way that Windows' filesystems are designed is very poor, from a reliability standpoint. FAT32 (I know), and NTFS (I think), both have a "filesystem" timestamp, that exists in the boot sector, that is updated
every time that the filesystem is updated. (This is used for things like software RAID mirrors, so that it can know which is the more "current" mirror, etc.)
So *every time* you write to a file, the boot sector is also written to. Combine this with the failure mode of recent-model WD drives, that they tend to "lose" sectors when they overheat, and you have a recipe for disaster waiting to happen, due to poor HD cooling. Once you lose the boot sector, you lose access to the entire filesystem - Windows just simply cannot find it. This most important sector in the filesystem, is also statistically the most likely sector to fail, because it is constantly re-written by the filesystem update code. Clearly this is poor design.
Assuming that the HD is still physically detected by the BIOS when you boot (and it appears that it is detected in Windows, as a physical device), then there is a very good chance that it is still operational from a mechanical and electronic standpoint. So what you need to do, is recover the bootsector (and any other failed sectors at the beginning of the drive). Most likely, the actual data in the files is intact, and possibly the backup copy of the MFT as well.
At this point, I would probably personally dive in with a disk sector-editor, but I don't suggest that anyone else try that approach, unless they are a professional and know what they are doing.
The next-best suggestion, is to use several of the various data-recovery programs on the market. I'm not an expert on them (I prefer the manual repair approach), so I'll let some other experts chime in here with recovery-software suggestions. I just wanted to let you know what the most likely scenario was that lead to your current problem.
I do remember some program, I think called "FindNTFS", that someone commented worked well for them. It's also free.
FindNTFS link
For other alternatives, search Google for "NTFS data recovery". I unfortunately don't have any experience with any of these, otherwise I would offer some further suggestions.
As a safety precaution, you *might* want to consider obtaining another HD of nearly-identical or larger capacity, and using Norton Ghost (using the -ir "image raw" switch) to make a "raw" sector-by-sector backup copy. DONT do this with your current HD setup though, the consistent disk activity is likely to cause the HD to overheat again, and possibly further damage sectors. You should re-install the HD(s) in the system using *proper* cooling methods first. (A sector-by-sector copy of an entire 120GB HD, could take anywhere from an hour to up to possibly more than 24 hours, depending on the speed of your HD(s) and more importantly your disk controller. I find that Promise IDE controllers work well with Ghost for full-speed transfers.
Actually, wait a second. You mentioned that the drive was hooked to a PCI RAID controller. Can you specify which controller, how the HD was configured, and whether it was part of any RAID set?
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