My 80gb slave drive just died *sob*


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My WORST nightmare has just come true.

I have (had?) a WD 80gb slave drive split into drives J thru S. This was done in case one of the drive went bad and I lost stuff.

OK...the J drive got too full (300mb left out of 8gb) my mistake because I wasn't paying attention. I use Powerdesk and it's Fix-it utilities. I was trying to at least fix the corrupted files so I could move them to other drives. It kept saying it couldn't fix the drive but stoopid me said keep trying. Now I have a local drive J that says it is not formatted. I have a feeling that the other drives are ok but they can't be seen.

My question: is it possible to save ANY of the files on J and if so how? Did I lose my other drives K-S as well?

ANY help or suggestions is greatly appreciated.

:hurt: :s :cross: :disappoin :(

anita

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Originally posted by aem4162

My WORST nightmare has just come true.

I have (had?) a WD 80gb slave drive split into drives J thru S. This was done in case one of the drive went bad and I lost stuff.

OK...the J drive got too full (300mb left out of 8gb) my mistake because I wasn't paying attention. I use Powerdesk and it's Fix-it utilities. I was trying to at least fix the corrupted files so I could move them to other drives. It kept saying it couldn't fix the drive but stoopid me said keep trying. Now I have a local drive J that says it is not formatted. I have a feeling that the other drives are ok but they can't be seen.

My question: is it possible to save ANY of the files on J and if so how? Did I lose my other drives K-S as well?

ANY help or suggestions is greatly appreciated.

:hurt: :s :cross: :disappoin :(

anita

what File system, just for giggles or shocks..?

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Originally posted by aem4162

It's Fat32. I'm not familiar with NTFS so I went with what I know.

anita

Note to you for future referances, USE NTFS! this is why.

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OK...use NTFS in the future. What is it, why do I want it, how is it better than Fat32, and how is that going to (possibly) restore my data on my slave drive?

anita

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Originally posted by aem4162

OK...use NTFS in the future. What is it, why do I want it, how is it better than Fat32, and how is that going to (possibly) restore my data on my slave drive?

anita

its not going to restore anything from what you've lost its going to protect you from this happening again. :)

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Originally posted by aem4162

How? You're talking to someone who knows nothing about NTFS.

:D:D:D

anita

NTFS is a JOURNALing file system, it can roll it self back it it finds trouble. use this forum, for a referance, search NTFS and you'll find plenty of information, that myself and others have posted here..

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I think NTFS can't do a difference here... seems to be a HD failure, not a file structure failure... I understand there are many corrupted files, that doesn't appear as a structure problem...

Rebooting change nothing...???

P.S.: I'm using FAT32 since Win95B, never a problem... and easy to reinstall without loosing a piece of my data....

Sure, NTFS is better... but FAT32 is easy... ;)

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Thank you, JHAres and xSTAINDx.

Rebooting changed nothing at all - J is still an unformatted local drive.

BTW...HD1 is the master and holds drives C-G. HD2 is the slave and holds (held) J-S.

I don't think the whole drive failed. The J drive ran out of space and stuff on the drive got corrupted. I don't think drives K-S are affected. The J drive was the primary partition (8gb) and none of the other drives show up when I go into manager. They were the extd drives 8gb in size.

Is there something in XP or is there a recovery program that will let my format J w/o losing my data? Or is there a way to extract the data to my master drive with a recovery program? Any recovery programs in mind?

thanks!

:D:D:D:D:D

anita

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Format w/o loosing data...??? I want that magic... hehehe... j/k...;)

I don't think a tool like that exist, maybe a recovering data lab can do that... but that costs $$$$....

I think you must try format ONLY the J: drive (loosing the data), reboot, and see what happens... :ermm:

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powerquest lost and found might help

i used it when accidently deleting my "stuff" folder from dos, and i got most of my **** back (10gb or so)

anyway why the HELL do u have so many partitions? it seems so damned pointless

also use ntfs, it gets fragmented less often and when u shutdown ur computer wrong it usually doesnt have to chkdsk it or anything, because its a secure file system...

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Originally posted by Rudy

best way would be to just kill everything and try to repartition the drive and reformat it but then u'll lose everything

That's just what I don't want to do. There has got to be a way to format and not lose anything. Low-level wipes the drive.

thanks!

anita

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also just to say

im still baffled why the hell you have so many partitions, could you please tell me?

see i have 3 hard drives, and they are what they are, C, D, E.

60gb, 30gb, 20gb, enough said

store your stuff in folders, not seperate partitions

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If you have a computer savvy friend, take your bad drive to their house and hook it up as a slave and make sure he/she has an anti-virus program just in case your hard drive have any viruses on them. Once you hook it up, try to see if the computer lets you copy the files from your hard drive to another. (If you don't see it, try downloading partition magic pro 7 from powerquest.com. Install it, open it, you should see all the hard drives connected on that computer, if there is a drive that is around the size of your hard drive and it doesn't have a drive letter assigned to it, that's your hard drive. Click on it and assign a drive letter to it so windows can see it in explorer. Once you have assigned the drive letter to your hard drive, check in My Computer to see if your drive shows up and if it does, try copying files from it. Hope this helps. *Also, it might be best if your friend had a cd burner. Because if going to copy all the files, you'll need a few cds.

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Anita, you could try this FREEWARE proggie called

Drive Rescue (Version 1.9d)

http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/rescue/index.html

I have used successfully Christian Grau?s another program called

Digital Image Recovery, and it seems to do some miracles with Flash Medias that have been messed up...

You can anyway give this tool a try, it does not write anything to the drive, only tries to read.

Good Luck !

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Originally posted by chrisxtreme

powerquest lost and found might help

i used it when accidently deleting my "stuff" folder from dos, and i got most of my **** back (10gb or so)

anyway why the HELL do u have so many partitions? it seems so damned pointless

also use ntfs, it gets fragmented less often and when u shutdown ur computer wrong it usually doesnt have to chkdsk it or anything, because its a secure file system...

I know it's silly to everyone else, but I have diff partitions because I don't want to lose everything if a partition fails. Looks like I might have done that anyway! Each partition has/had different things saved and I HAD been backing stuff up to CD - just didn't get very far.

I can't give up on this and I'm going to try to find a solution if it kills someone. Any suggestions are still welcome!

:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

anita, who plans to do NTFS next time

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Originally posted by chrisxtreme

powerquest lost and found might help

I think can't help in this case... the drive is not deleted, it appears as unformated... but I dunno, I haven't tried that tool since a long time ago, maybe has new features... :ermm:

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Originally posted by Wilbert66

Anita, you could try this FREEWARE proggie called

Drive Rescue (Version 1.9d)

http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/rescue/index.html

I have used successfully Christian Grau?s another program called

Digital Image Recovery, and it seems to do some miracles with Flash Medias that have been messed up...

You can anyway give this tool a try, it does not write anything to the drive, only tries to read.

Good Luck ! >

Hi Wilbert66,

I'm going to try it Friday night. I've got everything downloaded and it looks VERY promising!

thank you!!!!!!

:DD:D:D:D:D:D

anita

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Originally posted by chrisxtreme

powerquest lost and found might help

i used it when accidently deleting my "stuff" folder from dos, and i got most of my **** back (10gb or so)

anyway why the HELL do u have so many partitions? it seems so damned pointless

also use ntfs, it gets fragmented less often and when u shutdown ur computer wrong it usually doesnt have to chkdsk it or anything, because its a secure file system...

Hi chrisxtreme,

I'm going to try this Friday night, too.

thanks!!!!!

:D:D:D:D:D

anita

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Originally posted by chrisxtreme

also use ntfs, it gets fragmented less often and when u shutdown ur computer wrong it usually doesnt have to chkdsk it or anything, because its a secure file system...

As I said before, I never had a problem with FAT32. And the problem here wasn't a bad power off... seems to be a corrupted area in the HD.... I'm thinking in hardware...

Regarding the less often fragmentation... mmmm.... I don't agree... I remember when NTFS was a *new* thing... MSCE used to say "NTFS never become fragmented"... I proved them they are lying... ;)

Edit:

If you do the minimal cluster size for FAT32, using a partitioning tool (not FDISK), to avoid the space waste, FAT32 is faster than NTFS.... sure, less secure... but faster... I did the tests... :D

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Have you tried to see if the other partitions are viewable in dos? Use a dos boot disk and run fdisk and see if you can see your partitions there. Or diskpart.

If your other partitions are viewable in dos you might consider using xcopy or something to move their data over to your master.

You were saying that you have so many tiny partitions so if one goes 'bad' everything isn't lost. Does that mean you have some redundant partitions there? Also if a partition isn't a system partition you have a much less chance of it going bad in my mind. A partition that is just storing your documents, mp3's, ect isn't all of a sudden going to just up and puke out on you. I have a 40 gig hard drive, with a ~30 gig sys partition, 10 gig data and a little partition (700mb) for the page file. I've never had a problem using this system. I sugest for the future you just consolidate your partitions. It would have to make finding things easier at the minimum :-)

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Originally posted by JHAres

As I said before, I never had a problem with FAT32. And the problem here wasn't a bad power off... seems to be a corrupted area in the HD.... I'm thinking in hardware...

Regarding the less often fragmentation... mmmm.... I don't agree... I remember when NTFS was a *new* thing... MSCE used to say "NTFS never become fragmented"... I proved them they are lying... ;)

well ive been using ntfs since my mid-win2k days

probly around late 2000 early 2001 i switched to ntfs during one installation of win2k, thought eh what the hell, wont be able to accesss my hd from dos

well the only thing i really like is that when my computer freezes i dont usually have to wait for it to chkdsk, because my files dont get corrupted and such

also it does seem to get less fragmented, and it seems to defrag a lot faster when the drive is running ntfs...

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Originally posted by chrisxtreme

well ive been using ntfs since my mid-win2k days

probly around late 2000 early 2001 i switched to ntfs during one installation of win2k, thought eh what the hell, wont be able to accesss my hd from dos

well the only thing i really like is that when my computer freezes i dont usually have to wait for it to chkdsk, because my files dont get corrupted and such

also it does seem to get less fragmented, and it seems to defrag a lot faster when the drive is running ntfs...

I'm usually messing with DOS when reinstalling (deleting folders to avoid reformat)... that's another reason... ;)

And you're are right... is better than FAT32, I don't discuss that... :D

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