Hard Drives crash

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Sun Aug 28, 2011 5:16 am

Hi, all. I bring to you a story of woe.

It's not space-game related, but it is computer-related (and that's what I use for playing).

A while ago, I thought my hard drive was nearing the end of its days. I decided to get a new hard drive. This new one would be the backup. I started moving files off of my C drive to my E drive. The F drive was a secondary partition on my old drive that I got back after I installed XP XP2 and was able to recover and use disks larger than 137GB. I had stuff being backed up on both F and E drives, which were on two separate physical drives.

The other day, I heard a clicking noise. My hard drives!

I didn't know which one was bad, so I unplugged each one and tested. I found that the E drive was not bootable. When I stuck the Windows disk in the CD rom, it said that E was not formatted or corrupted. This was my backup drive!

My main drive was giving me CRC errors. My F drive was also unformatted or corrupted, so...

Something had corrupted both backup drives and left my C drive in terrible shape. Note that the two drives that were corrupted were on two separate physical drives. Note also that one of those physical drives hosted the C drive, which was still readable (barely).

So, I got a new hard drive and installed Windows XP on it. Unfortunately, it was not easy, as my copy of XP is fairly old. It was before the days of 500GB hard drives, USB 2, etc. My ethernet card did not have drivers, either, so I had to figure out a way to get ethernet card drives on a machine that did not have USB or internet.

So: does anyone know what might cause two previously functioning drive partitions on two separate physical disks to become corrupted at the same time? Is there any way to get the data back? I repeat: the drives that died were my backup drives. This is hugely disheartening, as I had been depending on the backups to be restorable.

Anyway, I am holding out hope that the data is not lost forever. However, I am also afraid that there might be something evil at work, something that moved from E to F or the other way around, something that causes drives to die. I'm thinking maybe a zip bomb or an archive bomb (which I discovered today).

Post by **Marvin** » Sun Aug 28, 2011 4:42 pm

When you say you discovered an archive bomb, do you mean on your computer or while doing research?

d3drocks · Post by **d3drocks** » Mon Aug 29, 2011 12:19 am

GOOD NEWS!
YES! there is a way to get your data back!!!
do u have an NTFS of FAT32 filesystem?
when my laptop drive died, I used "GetDataBack" to recover my files: http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-products.htm
I managed to restore it all.

it sounds like you might just have filesystem errors or a few bad sectors.

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Mon Aug 29, 2011 1:58 am

See if I have this correct. So your C drive is your old drive which has a partition called F drive. And E drive is your new drive? If this is correct, how big was your C drive and how big was the F drive partition? If you where backing up the same data on both the F partition and the E drive and if the partition on the F partition was not big enough to hold the backup data that could cause the coruption and also in what format where the 2 drives backing up data? NTFS or FAT32? if each drive did a different format then that could cause corruption as well when you try to restore two different formats to a new drive. If none of the above applies then your data should be recoverable, unless you had a zip bomb or an archive bomb. Otherwise You can try what d3drocks suggest.......

Post by **DaveK** » Mon Aug 29, 2011 3:14 pm

Good Luck, Nigel. Losing data is a nightmare!

Malix · Post by **Malix** » Mon Aug 29, 2011 10:13 pm

2 separate disks blown at the same time, maybe controller on motherboard blew itself? In that case, the disks might still be fine. I'd make sure by trying them out in a friends computer or so.

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Tue Aug 30, 2011 5:50 am

Thanks for the help.

I got a new hard drive and got it up and running. I got a program called TestDisk (it's free and it seems to work). It said that my cylinder count is wrong. However, I was able to pull some files off my old drives, which is good. I have been rebuilding since.

I suspect maybe the motherboard drivers. I tell you, this old copy of XP is so old that it can't handle SATA drives, USB ports. I had no LAN until I figured out that I needed motherboard drivers to make the built-in ethernet card work.

The best part was that the hard drive company (which I will not name) that sold me the new drive included instructions for how to download the hard drive installation software from their internet site. It did not explain how to get to an internet site without a hard drive.

Post by **Vice** » Tue Aug 30, 2011 6:40 am

It did not explain how to get to an internet site without a hard drive.

Doh! lol

Malix · Post by **Malix** » Tue Aug 30, 2011 6:41 am

Any particular reason for still sticking with xp?

MMaggio · Post by **MMaggio** » Tue Aug 30, 2011 7:10 am

I have an XP and 2 SATA drives which work nicely.

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 5:29 am

From post: 113892, Topic: tid=7930, author=Nigel_Strange wrote:
The best part was that the hard drive company (which I will not name) that sold me the new drive included instructions for how to download the hard drive installation software from their internet site. It did not explain how to get to an internet site without a hard drive.

I have installed many hard drives over the years and this was almost always the case........

:P:P:P:P:P:P:P

They assume that when you buy a new Hard drive that you are expanding or adding a Backup drive to a working functioning Computer with internet connection. A good hard drive company should include an installation disk or media with their drives just in case your replacing your one and only bad or corrupted drive.