What is it with me and harddisks?

Well I have got to wonder. These things just keep dying on me for whatever reason. Woke up this Tuesday, and after making coffee went to check the news on the PC as per usual. And it was dead. On, but not responding. Probably crashed during the night then I thought, and hit the reset button. Five seconds later I'm staring at the words "Disk read error" in disbelief. Not again!

"Fortunately" this is a pure system drive, there's not much else on it. So rom-collections, music etc is all on the two other harddisks I got. Still there's some info on the system-drive I'd rather not lose, so cue a couple of evenings of messing about with various recovery methods, without any luck. When finally deciding to do a format and reinstall Windows anyway, it turned out I couldn't even do that. When trying to format it, the progress bar just stayed at 0%. The disk was obviously completely dead. So went out and bought a new harddisk, a 320GB Western Digital. Not needing much space on it since I intend to continue using it the system, it was the smallest I could find. And I had to look in four different places to find someone who had any at all. Seems shops don't stock internal drives anymore for some reason.

Well I got that in and partitioned, and got Windows installed on it. And once up and running I make another interesting discovery; one of the other two drives isn't showing in the file manager. Looking in the device manager shows that it is there, but it has also crashed! What the hell!? Two drives at once?

I haven't begun trying to recover that one yet, so don't know how bad it is with that one. It isn't even that old, it's the one I bought new last time a HD died on me. Most of the content on it isn't very important fortunately. It holds all of my music, 99% of which exist on an external drive as well. Only the original Amiga music files aren't on there. It also holds my downloaded movies and TV-shows, but fortunately I backed up most of that recently when I was running out of space on the disk. So there wasn't a lot in that folder, only a couple of shows I hadn't watched yet.

The most important bit is that it also holds the torrent folder. Most of the downloaded material isn't important, but there's the stuff I was seeding myself. The worst being one I uploaded to Bitgamer only last week. Only one guy was able to grab the whole thing, and he isn't seeding it back. There are other people with partial downloads who'll never get all of it unless I can recover the files from that HD. But according to previous experiences with crashed HDs, I don't have much hope for it. Does anyone know of any decent HD recovery software? Does that boot CD in the sticky have any for example?

Why do these HDs keep dying on me? It's not like it's the system, it's been happening with all three PCs I've owned. This is the fourth time that it's happened to me, and two drives at once this time? Someone down there has it in for me, I swear! http://www.home.no/teho/argh.gif

Strange, if they were all in the same PC, i would say you had a PSU problem... but in different computers.... are you using the computers near any magnetic field? or a big sound speaker? or anything else? HD use very small metalic pieces, that could be damage by magnetic fields or something like that.

What did you call the latest two drives?

Dead and deader?

If this has been happening to you in three different PCs, each with different PSUs, I would guess it may be a problem with voltage spikes. Do you have a surge protector?

Hari and Kiri?
All the names under the sun when they bust?
I could carry on if you want...... No? O.k. i'll be quiet now.

You are a mean man.



Seppu & Ku?

I prefer cruel rather than mean. It allows for a better evil laugh. MMMMMWWWWWAAAAAHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAA.

I'd move house mate.
And before anyone says, no I don't think that is a bit extreme.

Your house is just something to keep the rain of your toys.

What Steve is referring to with the names is my maybe somewhat peculiar HD naming convention. The three drives are called Alzheimer, Parkinson and Downs. Alzheimer was the system drive, and Parkinson is the other one that's crashed.

It reflects what I thought of PCs back when I finally made the switch from Amigas. First PC I got had only one drive as they normally do, and I almost immediately named it Alzheimer. I've kept naming them similarily over the years allthough my feelings towards PCs has warmed somewhat.

I've actually been wanting to reformat the system drive a while anyway, as I wanted to partition it in two and install Linux on the other. I was going to name that partition Einstein. ;)

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Originally Posted by Sharingan

If this has been happening to you in three different PCs, each with different PSUs, I would guess it may be a problem with voltage spikes. Do you have a surge protector?

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No I don't. It shouldn't strictly be necessary here, our power grids hold a fairly high standard. High spikes like that shouldn't be occuring. It may be worth looking into still, so thanks for the suggestion. :)

Thats where you went wrong. Alzhiemers and Parkinsons are terminal diseases where as Downs is a perfectly livable genetic disorder. Your hard drives are just living up to their names. Alzhiemers probably started by losing information and Parkinsons just got slower and slower until it gave up.

You don't need to insult your hard drives by giving them funney names. Windows is the biggest insult you can give a HDD.

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Originally Posted by Teho

Does anyone know of any decent HD recovery software? Does that boot CD in the sticky have any for example?

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Yes it does, but I would now also recommend another boot CD called Hirens 9.3. It is a really good recovery CD with a load of useful software on it. I've got the ISO and it isn't too large so will upload it to the server for you later and PM you once it is there.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Teho

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sharingan

If this has been happening to you in three different PCs, each with different PSUs, I would guess it may be a problem with voltage spikes. Do you have a surge protector?

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No I don't. It shouldn't strictly be necessary here, our power grids hold a fairly high standard. High spikes like that shouldn't be occuring. It may be worth looking into still, so thanks for the suggestion. :)

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I would definitely recommend getting a Belkin surge protector as they come with surge protection insurance starting at cover for $100,000 for the cheapest models. One of my PC's PSU's was destroyed by a power spike two years ago and that even had a cheap surge protector fitted.

Must be your sheer animal *ahem* magentism :tease:

Also, what a shocker.

You've been exceptionally unlucky to have so many hard drive failures - too many for them all just to happen by natural causes.

Hard drives are, except in exceptional circumstances or problem models (anyone remember certain IBM "death"stars?), fairly reliable devices unless you start chucking them around your room. They normally don't just die either, but slowly walk their way to death usually by first making some clicking and chunking sounds and/or spewing out bad sectors.

Something must be causing the failures. Any common denominators between the three systems that you've had failures on? Have all your failures just been from working to dead, no in-between?

Sometimes, it's something not obvious that's causing the issues. I had two hard drive failures and instantly thought strangeness was afoot. It turned out to be the molex power connectors - my last hard drives must have had slightly larger connectors, or the metel in the plug had expanded under use.

Regardless of the reasons, the hard drives weren't receiving enough current to work reliably and gave all kinds of detection issues, appearing dead. Replaced the molex plugs with tighter contacts and all the problems went away.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Harrison

Yes it does, but I would now also recommend another boot CD called Hirens 9.3. It is a really good recovery CD with a load of useful software on it. I've got the ISO and it isn't too large so will upload it to the server for you later and PM you once it is there.

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That'd be great if you would. I've now had a look at the one in the sticky topic and while there are many nice apps there they are mostly for managing, partitioning and so on. A few errorchecking apps existed, but offered little towards recovering anything. I did get to do a scan of the drive though, and it read the whole thing without finding a single bad sector. So the drive is fine, with a messed up filesystem obviously. Probably happened when the system drive crashed and everything grinded to a halt, as the files I was seeding were stored on it it was constantly being read from. So if only I can find an app that can do a decent job of restoring the filesystem, all should be well. Hopefully.

As for surge protectors, I don't know. I haven't had a lot of failures with any other electrical appliances. The chip fan on my motherboard went just some months ago, but if you google asus+a8n+chip+fan you'll quickly see that this is a fairly common problem with these boards. Was relatively easily fixed, just switched it for a heatsink and its temp has been fine ever since. I say relatively, as the fan was fastened with these plastic clips from underneath the mobo, so had to take the PC apart and get the board out just to get the fan loose.

But the point is, I'm not exactly plagued with things failing on me. Except the harddrives. If I had a problem with power surges here, I should see more things failing on me. No, I'm willing to still just write it off as bad luck. They do see a lot of use after all, my system is always on and due to filesharing the harddrives are being almost constantly accessed. I do hope it'll be awhile till one fails again though, it's starting to be annoying. ;)

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Originally Posted by Bloodwych

Any common denominators between the three systems that you've had failures on? Have all your failures just been from working to dead, no in-between?

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The first two drives that's crashed on me had started to get bad sectors and cyclic redundancy errors before they kicked the bucket. One of them I just formatted and used again, and it worked for over a year before going in the same manner. It's only this time actually that it happened without any warning.

And no, there really aren't any common denominators between the systems I've had. When I built this one for example, I upgraded everything. Same with the last one, actually. In fact it was only the harddrives that I salvaged from the old system both times. As for power, I was very conscious about getting the right PSU for it. With the hardware I initially got, I only required a 400W. So I got a 500W so I could add more hardware to the system later without getting power issues.

I guess the only other common denominator is that this system and the previous one was both built on Asus boards. The first PC I had was a Targa model, and to be honest I don't know if they used their own mobos or licensed them from someone else. It's been too long, I've no idea today which board was in it.

Well it's a difficult one to track down going by what you've said, apart from relating it to power source issues as others have mentioned. Usually only the PSU actually blowing out would potentially cause damage to PC components as most should have a basic ability to smooth out spikes.

I hope you get it sorted as that isn't a nice problem to be faced with. Here is an article on Power Supplies and protection:

http://www.informit.com/articles/art...seqNum=14&rl=1

Of course, it may not be your problem at all as we're all just clutching at straws.

I think I mentioned in another thread, that I've personally been exceptionally lucky with computer equipment. I've never had a failure except for basic things like CR2032 batteries. Even my good old AMD 586 rig that got loads of abuse still worked, before it got scrapped! My brother has an old PIII 800 rig with a 20GB 7200rpm Quantum hard drive that's had even more abuse, but it still soldiers on and it's never had surge protection and only uses a cheap PSU.

As I often repair PCs for people I've seen a lot of PC issues over the years, but as Bloodwych said, it is normally only a faulty PSU that has ever killed an HD instantly. Normally they show signs of failing for ages with bad sector read errors or cyclic redundancy check errors. The only HD I've ever had that did die without warning was my first A1200 3.5" HD. It just wouldn't boot one day and made lots of clicking sounds.

FOOK.

My harddisk died on me too. No warnings, no nothing. Just a few clicks of death, followed by a total lockup.

I've got my stuff backed up, but I'm not looking forward to installing everything from scratch (I don't have an image of my system drive). Just locating all the drivers and crap is going to take me a day.

Oh well. The drive served me well for like 6-7 years, so ... R.I.P. 16 january 2008, 17:46.

My PC's still got my first PC's 9GB system disk in form 9 or 10 years ago and it's till going well (touch wood).

My HD from 1999 contains my OS and is accessed everyday and has never shown any signs of failing. Hopefully it won't in the near future.

The only problem with using such an old HD these days is speed. They are much slower than current HDs. The HD I used to use in this system was a 5 year old IDE drive and it would boot a fresh copy of Windows XP in about 20-30 seconds. With the new Seagate SATA2 HD I'm now using it booted a similar fresh copy of XP in about 10 seconds!

Just wanted to say thank for providing that CD, Harrison. I did end up not needing it though, but I've downloaded it anyway in case of another rainy day so it'll still be useful. :thumbs:

I tried a demo of a program called Active UNDELETE. It scanned the drive and found all the files, let me browse them and everything. But on trying the recover function, was told that the demo didn't allow the recovery of any files larger than 64KB! Well, that's a lot of help!

However after "getting around" that problem, it did end up working fine. It copied every single one of the files to a different drive. So now I've reformatted it and put the files back, and everything is nearly as it was again. So I'm pretty happy with that result as of all the HD crashes I've had, this is the first time I've actually managed to recover one. :)

That is good news indeed. I will have to remember the name of that program for future reference. :)

I don't know if they are the same program, but the Hiren's CD has Active uneraser and active partition recovery.

So active undelete? sounds good!

Yeah, it definitely works. It isn't actually made for rescuing files from broken drives, but for recovering accidentally deleted ones. Like if you managed to format the wrong drive or something. Worked fine with a corrupt filesystem too, but if you've lost files due to bad sectors on a drive then this program probably can't help you.

May I just say that this thread is a good advert as to why you should NOT try stopping a spinning hard drive with your thumb!

Weird. The harddisk which I reported as being dead and buried a few posts back suddenly sprang back to life again. Been working fine for two days now.

Perhaps there was some other problem with it.

Perhaps it's a Jesus HDD and it's Easter Thursday when the messiah of hard drives shall rise from the dead and show the way for all HDD believers to the promised land.

All hail my harddrive!

Just wait till the deciples start turning up on the doorsteps. "He's not the messiah. He's a very naughty Hard Drive"

Naughty? Pr0n is not a sin, you know!

*backs up all the pr0n*

That suggest a whole lot of reasons as to why your HDD died on you and then came back to life. It just dried out and freed itself up.