Hard drive crash question

shasha

shasha

Fractal Fanatic
Never had an actual failure before, but my PC wouldn't boot this morning. I got a recovery disc for Win7 from another PC and ran chkdsk /f. Its been going for about an hour and right now it's recovering orphaned files. From the looks of it its recovering every single file on the system drive.

Just wondering since there are so many IT guys on here if I should just run to the store and grab a new HD and install fresh or is there a chance that something flaky happened but can be saved?

Its one of those cases where everything as running so amazingly well and the thought of having to start from scratch really sucks. I'm looking for some hope.
 
If it were me, I'd get a new drive and start fresh. Once drives start doing things like that, I no longer trust them. They don't usually get better, just worse.

Win 7 has a really nice (and easy to use) system backup tool that will let you clone the drive to another drive - internal or external. Once you get the system back where you want it, make a recovery drive so you won't have to go through the whole rebuild the next time.
 
I went thru this a couple years ago. I vowed it would not happen again. I have been strictly a Linux user for 5 years, after an HD failure, I started using three drives. One for OS only. One for data. And a third outboard to hold another copy of everything. Since I have not been able to make AxeEdit run reliably in Virtualbox on Linux and tired of dicking around with Linux DAWs, I recently added a Win7 partition to my setup which I use strictly for AxeFX and Reaper. I have two copies of a rescue system on two different USB sticks. Twice a month, I boot from USB and take images of my OS partitions, Win7 and Linux both, and store those on my data drive. Then I run an rsync copy of my entire data drive to the external.

With some forethought, I was able to keep my Win7 OS and data separate, using an NTFS partition (Windows) on my data drive and setting up my home directory, containing My Documents and all other user specific folders to be on that drive. While Win7 doesn't make it obvious how to change the locations of these things, it is all there under the user settings if you poke around. Once cloud storage gets cheap enough, I keep another copy of everything online, but presently I have about 120 gigs of data and the cloud is too expensive for my tastes. So, I am vulnerable to a natural disaster or fire, but the likelihood of three drives failing simultaneously is pretty slim, and at least I don't have to worry about hardware failure.
 
just a warning:
you should not have all your discs and backups connected at the same time. when lightning strikes (or your power supply goes flaky) you might destroy all your discs at once. Have at least two backup discs, and alternate.

Regards,
Marco
 
Yeah the hard drive is shot. That's what I get for using the one that came with the computer; it was a used workstation and I should have expected it to not survive being shipped very well.

Luckily I was able to get a few important documents off of it that I had been recently working on (like my resume for one thing). I'm pretty anal about backing everything up and the hardest part has been digging through the 15 copies of everything I have to figure out which is the most recent. I mean I found stuff from the frickin' mid 1990's that I've been holding onto for whatever reason.

I'm on day two of installation and configuration. Wouldn't have been that long, but I really screwed up when going in to re-install. I have a few drives and partitions and I just picked one to install over real quick because I was mostly worried about saving some files. Well the partition I picked to install over just happened to be the one that had my system image on it. And somehow I managed to screw up the blue ray image I had made as well. Oh well, no real loss other than time here; I actually had a few things on that original image that I didn't want to have on there so it should be lean and clean. Things like calibrating the monitors (I told you I'm anal) take a while to do so it's been a LONG weekend.

Just about done.
 
That's a drag man. I have mirrored drives to back up everything. And even them I back up. I have a utility for incremental back ups every night. Makes me rest more easily. I have my OS and applications on one drive and a mirror for that, and all my audio and stuff on another 1 TB drive and a mirror for that. But yeah, they're on the same computer, so f it floods or a power crap out happens, I'm screwed I guess. BUT I have another computer with more or less the same stuff across town! But I'd still be pissed.

Good luck!
 
hahaha computers ARE the devil!! :lol

and I'm the devil's advocate! :eek:

Seriously tho, as the victim of these kinda things on more than one occasion, my advice to you is:
1. Use one drive JUST for the os - prefferably a solid state - more expensive, but well worth it!
2. Use another drive for all your other data
3. Use externals (some use DVD's, but I HATE cd/dvds - haven't used them for bout 10 years! lol) to always back up your data periodically - every week or less, depending on what you do
4. Using an external drive, make a clone of your main drive when you get everything back up and running - drivers, programs etc.

In the event of a failure, your data is backed up on the externals, and you can use the clone of your main hard drive with all the programs/drivers etc and just copy that acros to a new drive, reducing the 'get back up and running' time.
The above procedure will take about an hour or two (if you took my advice and went solid state drive! ;) ) and you're back on your feet, as if nothing happened. If you're just starting fresh, well you have at LEAST a week or two to get back all your drivers, solve conflict issues, restore all your preferences and settings, re-install all your programs, etc etc.

Total cost would be something like:
$100 for your main drive - a 80GB solid state drive should be enough
$100 for a 1TB drive - for just about everything else
$80 for an external

Prices on these things vary from day to day, and would actually be much cheaper tho.....total cost would likely be somewhere $250. Might be a bit more that you were planning to spend, but
trust me on this one - I've been there too many times to know better now :lol
 
jon said:
hahaha computers ARE the devil!! :lol

and I'm the devil's advocate! :eek:

Seriously tho, as the victim of these kinda things on more than one occasion, my advice to you is:
1. Use one drive JUST for the os - prefferably a solid state - more expensive, but well worth it!
2. Use another drive for all your other data
3. Use externals (some use DVD's, but I HATE cd/dvds - haven't used them for bout 10 years! lol) to always back up your data periodically - every week or less, depending on what you do
4. Using an external drive, make a clone of your main drive when you get everything back up and running - drivers, programs etc.

In the event of a failure, your data is backed up on the externals, and you can use the clone of your main hard drive with all the programs/drivers etc and just copy that acros to a new drive, reducing the 'get back up and running' time.
The above procedure will take about an hour or two (if you took my advice and went solid state drive! ;) ) and you're back on your feet, as if nothing happened. If you're just starting fresh, well you have at LEAST a week or two to get back all your drivers, solve conflict issues, restore all your preferences and settings, re-install all your programs, etc etc.

Total cost would be something like:
$100 for your main drive - a 80GB solid state drive should be enough
$100 for a 1TB drive - for just about everything else
$80 for an external

Prices on these things vary from day to day, and would actually be much cheaper tho.....total cost would likely be somewhere $250. Might be a bit more that you were planning to spend, but
trust me on this one - I've been there too many times to know better now :lol
Click to expand...
Apart from the solid state drive I do all of that. I just managed to wipe the image by being careless when I re-installed and I didn't bother to verify the blu-ray image I had made. I should have been back up in minutes and not days.

Another thing that threw me off because it was just such a nasty failure was that it would finish the POST and then come up to a black screen with a cursor. Even worse I couldn't get into the BIOS so I thought that it was a major piece of hardware that failed. No. It turns out that the microsoft keyboard I had wouldn't allow the function keys to work before booting up. Its the stupidest thing I've ever seen and I probably wasted that whole first morning just trying to verify that it wasn't the PC itself.

I'm pretty much done; it's screaming again. The only thing that is odd is that I did a full chkdsk on the original drive and it was a complete mess with thousands of orphaned files. But all of the data is still there and I can get to it with no problem. I just can't get the damn thing to boot and that's even after doing all of master boot record repairs and master file table crap that usually works. I just ran out of ideas and patience. Even crazier is that I ran a full chkdsk on the drive again last night and it came out as being fine, even checking for bad clusters and surface areas. Only thing I can think of is that the index just got extremely corrupted (not really sure how it works in Win7 to be honest) or something else along those lines. I'm going to nuke it and try using it as a back up to my back up and see how long it lasts. If it doesn't hose in a few weeks I can probably just use it as a temporary drive for media or something. Its 1TB and if it works there's no reason to toss it out.
 
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You can use it as a backup! ;)

But time to get rid of them old 'tube' drives and go solid state! :lol Really - the difference is HUUUUGE!! It's like using a pod and going to the axe - the difference is VERY immediate, and when it comes to PERFORMANCE you REALLY notice the difference! ;) Much less likely to suffer from typical hard drive failures because there are no moving parts too.
 
I shit you not....not 3 minutes after I posted this the damn thing froze and then acted like it was going to sleep, Same exact damn problem as before. And this is a different HD all together.

After REALLY digging into it the best I can come up with is that its a windows or adobe update because I had just run through them the night before and the pending.xml file is causing issues with the SFC command. System restore was dying because of a corrupt adobe update that couldn't be rolled back.

More than a little irritated here.
 
If it were a Mac I'd have several suggestions for you for disk maintenance etc. But I'm lost on a PC. Sorry about your troubles. It's a PITA I know!
 
You know I'll just never be a Mac guy. I had to work on them for years and I just never jived with them. A PC actually makes a ton of sense to me and this is the first time that I can remember in years I was absolutely stumped by an issue. I even ran a memtest86+ for a few hours and swapped out graphics cards to eliminate it being a hardware thing.

There is one other thing that I didn't think of though. I updated my video card drivers about 2 days before it died on me and I may not have restarted. I also ran windows update around the same time. Well I installed the same damn drivers the other day and just finished updating windows last night. So I installed the lame old crappy windows display drivers from last year and skipped any updates from the last 3 months. We'll see how that goes.
 
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