Hi Guys, not sure if this is the best place to look for help but I'm lost here and unsure of what to do.
I've just finished ripping my 400+ DVD collection to a 2 TB Hard drive and I'm worried it's failing. It's only 5 or 6 months old but I've been using it almost daily. I have over a TB on it and don't want to lose it if possible.
Today, out of nowhere, the drive disappeared from "my computer". I restarted the htpc and it was still gone. I unplugged the sata and power cables and hooked the drive up to my desktop and it still wouldn't show up. After leaving it sit for a few hours and trying again, windows took FOREVER to load, literally a few minutes (it's on a small solid state drive and usually boots in 15 seconds) and the drive was back with all my movies and tv shows in tact. After about 10 minutes it disappeared again. This has now happened a few times and I'm afraid to turn it back on again. Anyone have any ideas? How do I transfer all that data to another drive if it won't stay connected for more than a few minutes?
If you need more info please let me know.
Cheers
A hard drive shouldn't fail that quickly no matter how much you have used it.
Can you confirm a full disconnect in "Disk Management"?
And have you had any hdd failure warnings at boot or in windows?
Is it tight in your htpc case? A sata power or data cable with to much pressure against the hdd connectors, could damage connectors to the drive and lead to same issues..
(2012-11-17, 08:53)hewskie Wrote: [ -> ]Hi Guys, not sure if this is the best place to look for help but I'm lost here and unsure of what to do.
I've just finished ripping my 400+ DVD collection to a 2 TB Hard drive and I'm worried it's failing. It's only 5 or 6 months old but I've been using it almost daily. I have over a TB on it and don't want to lose it if possible.
Today, out of nowhere, the drive disappeared from "my computer". I restarted the htpc and it was still gone. I unplugged the sata and power cables and hooked the drive up to my desktop and it still wouldn't show up. After leaving it sit for a few hours and trying again, windows took FOREVER to load, literally a few minutes (it's on a small solid state drive and usually boots in 15 seconds) and the drive was back with all my movies and tv shows in tact. After about 10 minutes it disappeared again. This has now happened a few times and I'm afraid to turn it back on again. Anyone have any ideas? How do I transfer all that data to another drive if it won't stay connected for more than a few minutes?
If you need more info please let me know.
Cheers
The best investment you can make for this situation (large drive(s), big collection of media) is Spinrite. It's $89 bucks but it's a lifetime membership, and not only does it fix pretty much anything that can happen to a drive when it comes to data, it can be used on a new drive and will tell the OS never to use areas that are questionable saving you from tons of problems down the road as the bad spots on a drive expand due to use.
Explanation of Spinrite by Steve Gibson at GRC.com
If you buy it and go to download the software that makes and burns your copy of spinrite, don't freak out if you only seem to be downloading a link. Steve Gibson is a genius at assembly programming and this program is TINY considering what all it does. It seems to be having very good results from SSD Drives too, judging by the increasing mail he is getting with people's thanks.
PS, it does not like UEFI BIOS and Steve has the next update planned down the road to address that so it's not high on his huge list of things to do, but you can pop internal drives into non-UEFI machines and run it through spinrite that way, this is the single best software purchase I have ever made.
The use you have given it over the last 5-6 months is quite normal for a HDD.
If i were you and I really didn't want to rip the DVD's again I would buy another drive and start moving the contents over in small chunks.
Thanks guys, T800 that's probably what I'll end up doing. I tried it again today and it worked for a bit but I'm worried about leaving it on for a long period of time.
Thanks again.
(2012-11-17, 15:35)RaggSokk3n Wrote: [ -> ]A hard drive shouldn't fail that quickly no matter how much you have used it.
Can you confirm a full disconnect in "Disk Management"?
And have you had any hdd failure warnings at boot or in windows?
Is it tight in your htpc case? A sata power or data cable with to much pressure against the hdd connectors, could damage connectors to the drive and lead to same issues..
I had it happen in my RaidZ set up. However, that's why I had a 1 drive redundancy in place. That one failed in under a year, however the replacement working fine for a bit, but after a few months the number of bad sectors sky rocketed like nothing else. However, it's stopped at 900 and RaidZ hasn't been giving a single damn about it so I haven't been worrying about it (hint don't do this, replace drives if they have 20+ sectors).
Now onto your issue. Don't spend money on recovery software, it tends to be for lazy people who can't find it themselves. The best tools for the job are in this,
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd . You should download the iso (FREE) and burn it to a cd. It is a boot cd that requires no working operating system to run, and runs from the disk drive. It runs MS-DOS or a os called Tiny-XP, which is just a minimal xp installation that has many tools for saving a working OS (like fixing malware or the like), however the tools you will want to use are in the MS-DOS version.
I have been able to save 3 hard drives with the repair tool of the program MHDD. There is no real tutorial necessary, you simply load it up and it gives you a few options, one of which being scan and repair. Another tool I haven't used but sounds promising is DRevitalize, however if MHDD doesn't fix the issue then I don't think Revitalize will be able to either.
Another possibility is that the hard drive is over heating inside its enclosure, which would actually be really easy to fix(just take it out and plug it into your PC), however you should first try the instructions above, as they have worked for me in similar situations that you are finding yourself in.
Good luck
EDIT: I almost definitely think it isn't an overheating issue and rather an issue with the drive, which MHDD should fix, due to the issue with Windows taking forever to boot. It usually means that its stuck waiting for the drive to respond to its requests.
Thanks for the info Xeno. You mentioned that this doesn't need an OS to work. Since the problem is on my 2TB drive that just holds the video files, should I just unplug the SSD with Windows and try to boot with just the problem drive and dvd drive hooked up? will that work?
Cheers