2nd HDD suddenly "needs to be formatted"

We have a system that was built about a year ago with 2 harddrives. The boot drive is a SATA drive & was new with the system. The 2nd drive is a 100Gb WD Caviar IDE drive that we transferred from the old system.

As you may be able to guess, it is where we kept all the personal data files!

This setup has been working flawlessly for the whole last year.

Last night, when he tried to access the 2nd drive ... it thought for a moment & then tells him that the drive is not formatted (format now?). Thankfully, he chose no! hehe

If you open Disk Management is shows the drive as Healthy, Online, NTFS ... & 93.7 Gigs ... OF FREE SPACE.

These symptoms happen if set to cable select or in the more traditional master/slave relationship. This happens on both IDE channels. Swapped drive into a KG system, problem follows drive.

So ... this is an odd one, even for me. (As you may be able to tell, I've troubleshot a harddrive failure or two! lol)

I'm not ready to decide that it is fully dead yet ... but I also don't want to format it.

My thoughts are that I could possibly try it as a solo drive & boot the Recovery Console & try a fixboot/fixmbr ... even tho the drive has never had an OS on it.

Alternatively, I may try to LOAD an OS on it (kinda like a parallel install for the purposes of recovering data) ... but I'm not sure how that would work since it has so much data on there that would physically be BEFORE the Windows files.

So -- what I'm asking (sorry for the long post)

1) Any ideas at all?

2) Do you think any of the proposed solutions will work?

3) Any recommendations on attempts for data recovery, if I can't get the drive readable in one of our home systems?

Thanks in advance!!

 

How is that? Was external or something?

 

It has always simply been a secondary internal drive -- no OS needed. We bought it for storage on our old system at some point.

 

That is a huge mistake my friend you should always store important DATA on a hard drive with OS just in case anything happens

 

I'll keep that in mind ... however, I think I'd prefer to set up a RAID 1 for his data after this! *g*

Back to the original question ... other than the things that I've outlined, any other ideas? Any recommendations on data recovery?

 

TomaxBlade, to summarise.

The 100Gb WG PATA / IDE drive which you used for data storage is having problems. Specifically, it looks like the partition which existed on the drive for some reason no longer exits. You tried this HD on another system and you get the same problem.

In the first instance have you tried running the manufacturers harddrive utility.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

In respect of trying to load an o/s on the HD, that could have been a possiblilty eg you could have repartitioned the drive and installed an o/s but given the current state I don't think that this is an option here.

Try running the harddrive utility first and see what it says.

Keeping data on a secondary HD ie without an o/s is a very sensible thing to do. In fact, I use the boots and braces approach I not only have an 'extended partition' on my main HD but also have a second internal HD to which I also copy that data in the even that any HD develops a mechanical problem.

Post back with the results of the WD HD drive utility test.

Good Luck

 

I have to disagree somewhat on this. I always keep important data in at least three places; O/S hard disk, 2nd hard disk, & CDROM-RW's. The O/S drive/disk is the 'workhorse' disk. It operates much more than just a 2nd 'storage' disk, thus that much more prone to failure through sheer use.

To clarify, I'm talking about two seperate physical hard disks, not partitions one one disk.

(Just saw that the previous post also supports this.)

 

Re-running the test with the newest version of the Diags ... but initially got Final error Code 0257 ... "Error Correction Code. Between two to nine errors have been detected. ECC is a hardware correction technique that corrects errors. If ECC occurs, use Data Lifeguard repair option for additional error correction. Please re-test the drive with Data Lifeguard."

(As I mentioned, I'm re-running now with the newer version 11 instead of my initial diskettes with version 2.6)

If I DO decide to try to go the route of data retrieval ...

1) Will the "stick it in the freezer" trick work for this, or is that for a different type of failure?

2) Recommendations for places to take a harddrive for data retrieval?

THANKS!

 

No placing a hard drive in a freezer will not help in this case that is for psychical faults in the drive. (I am not sure if that even works, I have seen some web sites that say it damages the drive.)

I think that you have a problem with the master file (that is not what is it called on a NTFS drive) there is a backup in the back of the hard drive. A recovery program is your best bet. I recommend SpinRite 6 take a look at the site and see what you think.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

I found a video off his site that talkes about the program in depth.

http://media.grc.com/sr6_on_techtv.zip

Good luck

 

Thanks!! I'll bookmark those ... the harddrive miraculously (sp?) fixed itself short term!! lol

 

Backup all the data off that hard drive ASAP you don't know when it will go out again. Even if it does not fail, you have the peace of mind that you have a backup.

 

might want to try to boot from a cd, such as VCOM Partition Commander.
see if it can see the partition, if it does then it will let you exploer the partition ( just to see if your data is still there).
then i would obtain one of those usb to ide cable's ( got a couple flavors my self ).
Put the dying drive on it, put a NEW drive that is at least = in size, in place of the old drive.
then boot the cd and copy the whole partition over to the new drive, be patient it takes forever over usb.
and as always Smile
- someone else in the world has something worse than this...