Corrupted Hard Disk

[Byatt]

OK, recently bought myself a 160Gb Seagate drive, and an icy box to put it in - backed up up a few files to it.

OK, all is working fine, it looks cool, can now play my music off it and use in-case HDs for other stuff. Then - suddenly, started getting "H:/ is not accessible - the file or directory is corrupted or unreadable". Made me jump, as winamp, of course, just moves to the next track, so you get a lot of these errors very quickly.

Basically I now get this error whenever I try to access this disk - even just trying to view it in "My Computer" - weirdly, it still comes up as a healthy partition in disk management.

So, is this disk buggered, and what do I do? Just reformat, or is this an RMA job? Can I recover any of this data?

[5cupa]

is it running usb or firewire ?

[eldren]

Ouch. I know your pain - this is exactly what happened to me 2 weeks ago with my boot partition on one of my 160GB Samsung drives I'd taken to work. It was a 40GB partition, and I've lost basically everything that was on there. File recovery software (Stellar Pheonix and Ontrack EasyRecovery) were able to get back quite a lot, but most of it is corrupt.

I thought it might be that the drive got too hot, seeing as, when I took it out of my work machine, it was so hot, it burnt me. When I took a different 160GB Samsung to work this week again, I took the precaution of temporarily installing a fan right next to the drive. And, again, the drive was totally corrupted, even though it was cool to the touch. Fortunately, this time, I had backups of everything on the drive.

Which leaves three possibilities - the power supply (Which is a cheapy no-name 300W), the IDE cable and the IDE controller, the latter two being rather unlikely in my opinion.

So, to answer your questions, reformat, the drive itself is fine (Although Windows is lying about the partition being fine - it's corrupt to the extent that EasyRecovery wasn't able to find any partition information, even though I correctly gave the partition type and cluster size), and check your power supply. File recovery may get back a few files, but don't count on it. Good luck. :/

[Byatt]

is it running usb or firewire ?

firewire, although running it on usb doesn't seem to make any difference.

eldren - cheers for your comments (and sympathy - 40Gb is about what I'm losing too - thankfully all my music was still on an internal drive, or I'd be considerably more bothered) - will reformat unless 5cupa has a miracle solution!

[Byatt]

Ok, sorry to bump, but I reformatted and the same thing happened - is this harddisk really alright?

These things are OK to just "turn off" when they're not connected to a computer (i/e when I've just shut down the pc for the evening) , right? I'm not being a complete muppet?

[PopUpPirate]

In BIOS turn on S.M.A.R.T. disc, fingers crossed it will give you the fault when you boot up.

[rory1984]

The answer is to use GetDataBack (www.getdataback.com) to recover the data; and then reformat the drive. All of this must be done over the USB2 interface, since the Firewire is just plain shoddy on the Icybox... it is based around the skanky Prolifics PL-3507 chipset.

I am having the same problems (had 250gb maxtor drive go all corrupt on me... but have managed to recover most of the data using method outlined above).

It seems that USB2 on the Icybox is fine - but firewire is just dodgy... google for more. see the article below for a glimpse into the world of dodgy firewire chipsets/drivers:
http://www.bustrace.com/products/delayedwrite.htm

[Ferral]

Create a Windows startup disk (Or use the autorun boot from cd option, I would use win98 for this if you have it) and just boot into a dos environment with no cdrom support or anything. Make sure you copy scandisk onto this diskette also from the windows disc if you use the startup disc.

Run a full scandisk on the drive including the surface scan (It will take ages !). You will need it to correct errors automatically so to get a list of the switches for scandic use :

scandisk ?

at the prompt.

so to use the switches do something like :

scandisk c: /a/s

Using this it will mark any bad sectors on the disk and take it from there with RMA etc