WHAT?!

[hansolo77]

I'm really about to start taking Fukitol 500mg. My hard drive just died. And you know what? It's the one that I installed GameEx and all my emu's to. And the worst part, I had Star Wars TOR on it too, and it crashed right in the middle of the game. My computer suddenly froze up, and wouldn't let me reboot. It kept telling me to reboot and select the appropriate boot device. I didn't have that drive setup as a boot drive, but apparently it's location on the SATA controller made the BIOS go all screwy when the drive was no longer listing. So yeah, I spent the last 2 hours trying for figure out how to get the computer to just boot up again before I found the setting to reconfigure the boot priorities. Now I'm just really f*cking pissed about my drive drying. I went to the local computer shop last weekend, and they want like $250 for a 1tb drive, and I have an empty box from the same brand/size for only $79 like 6 months ago. ARGH! Stupid flooding. Stupid harddrive. Stupid life. I'm so about to just give up.

:angry:

[Adultery]

Yikes...

[Draco1962]

Can the drive be read as a secondary drive instead of a primary drive? If so, you may be able to retrieve some if not all of your files.

[Rupert]

hang in there man!

[celly]

Have you tried using a bootable program to access the hard drive files? I've used the BitDefender Rescue/Recovery cd numerous time to get files from messed up hard drives. Worth a shot, only costs a download and a cd/dvd.

Linkage - http://download.bitdefender.com/rescue_cd/

[nullPointer]

Have you tried using a bootable program to access the hard drive files? I've used the BitDefender Rescue/Recovery cd numerous time to get files from messed up hard drives. Worth a shot, only costs a download and a cd/dvd.

Linkage - http://download.bitd....com/rescue_cd/

+1 to this! I’ve never tried BitDefender but have had tremendous luck with Parted Magic. It’s my go-to utility for any file system/hard drive operations that I can’t perform directly from Windows. It’s a great suite of tools. Don’t fear the penguins.

I would imagine either of these tools could be of tremendous benefit to you. Good luck man!

[hansolo77]

Well, the drive is basically just powering up, spinning up, then spinning down and powering down all before the BIOS has time to detect the drive parameters. This is the same results I have gotten on 4 of my other drives. I have tried MHDD 4.6 on it, which is MY go to Dos utility. It can't even get the drive into 'ready' mode to prep it for scanning. I also have in my arsenal "Samsung ES Tool" , "Seagate SeaTools for DOS (and windows...)" , "GRC SpinRite 5" , and a Windows Utility for WesternDigital drives (which this one is) called "Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics". I don't have BitDefender. It's more a hardware failure with the motor, and not something caused from a virus, etc. Since the only stuff I had on this drive is emus,roms,gameex, and swtor.

For temporary solution, I'm taking out one of my old 'spare' 250gb Samsung drives from my server. It's half the size, but the server keeps kicking it out saying the drive is full when it's not. I'm doing a complete lowlevel format and repartition on it now. Sometime next week during my off-work time, I'll try and tackle this other drive. It was bound to fail though. When the fire hit, I had a total of 12 drives. 10 had failed up till now. This is number 11. There's still one drive left to fail, which is my boot drive on the server. I wish I could do something about it to safeguard. But WHS v1 doesn't have any method (that I know of) to directly mirror the boot drive and replace it. All I can do is restore a backup of the boot drive to a new drive if it fails. Kinda stupid.

[Draco1962]

If you are getting the same results on other drives, I am afraid it isn't your drives. This sounds more like a mainboard issue. Have you checked to see if there is an update for your BIOS?

[hansolo77]

Well, the drives have worked fine since 2008. Then the fire. Then they die. I originally have them in the server when they die. Once they stopped working there, I moved them into my media center computer for testing. That's where I determined they stopped working 'officially'. I then tried a couple of the ones that are acting the same way this one is in my dad's computer, to test that very theory that maybe it's BIOS/Motherboard/SATA cable, etc. They act the same way in my dad's computer. I'll grant you, it's a small group to test with, just mine and dad's computer. The only other computer I know of that I could test them in is my brother's, who lives like 40 miles away. The one thing I haven't tried is updating the firmware on the drive, but I don't really see how that could help since I can't even read the drive from the BIOS before it spins/powers down.

[DazzleHP]

Have you tried booting from a linux live (dvd) disk? My dad a similar issue with one of his drives - doesnt show in bios or in windows (it was his backup drive) however i booted into linux which detected it and i was able to copy all his files onto another drive for him. After researching it turned out it was a corrupted boot sector screwing the whole drive.

if you want to give it a shot, even just to grab all your files try Linux Mint - It is the most user friendly version which i use, very similar to windows (in gui terms) and like all live disks you can boot straight off the dvd (or cd if you go for that version) no install required!

Grab it here:

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1889

Hope you get it sorted man!

Have a good crimbo

[hansolo77]

I never considered trying linux. When I used MHDD, it sees the connection and lists it as a drive I can select (like, drive #10, but not the actual drive name such as model/serial # like the other drives). So if the connection is there, maybe it is a boot sector issue. I dunno though, that wouldn't explain a spinup/spindown in like less than 3 seconds and then being completely silent until I reboot or unplug/replug the power.

[Tempest]

I'm not saying it is, but if it is a controller issue you can buy a new drive and put the new controller on the old drive to recover your data.

[hansolo77]

That would probably only work if the I can get an identical drive. These drives are going on 4 years old now. Good idea though.

[Tempest]

So what is the make and model of your drive?

[hansolo77]

Western Digital Caviar SE16

WD5000AAKS-00A7B0

15 FEB 2008

[Tempest]

I have 3 of them. 2 are dated 06 Dec 2008 and 1 dated 19 Feb 2008.

FWIW - I had 5 of those drives set up in an raid5, and for no apparent reason the whole raid just crashed. No warning, nothing.

I did not take my fukitol 500, therefore I said fuckitall, and reformatted each drive separately. The funny thing is that all 5 drives formatted just fine. Maybe I was too hasty?

If you want me to loan you one to see if you can recover your data I will, but you have to swear on your mothers grave that you will send it back ASAP.

[hansolo77]

Lol, but my mother's not dead yet!

It's wierd that you would have a similar problem. I got 1 more day at work, then I'm good for the rest of the week to try and figure this out. If it is a faulty power circuit board, that would just piss me off. Like I said, I've had a lot of these already die on me. I've done my troubleshooting to no avail, and pitched them all. The last one I actually disected, removed the cover, and watched it work to try and figure out what the heck was wrong with it. It's actually pretty neat inside. These have 3 platters, each platter about the size of 5 cd's stacked on each other. The way they talk, I expected the platters to be very thin, but they're not. The read/write head on this one was actually catching on one of the platter edges, preventing it from actually going onto the readable part of the disk. I guess when it's not in use, the head moves completely off the disks. In this particular case, it would try to move over on top of the platter, then jam on the edge. I knew this drive was toast as soon as I opened it up, but it was definately a learning experience. I don't know what could have caused the head to 'break' and then jam everytime it would load, but it sure explained why it wasn't working.

As for your suggestion, and recovery.... I would be willing to try this, if I had available space to recover the drive. It's 500gb, and I was using over 90% of it. I'm still going to need a replacement drive to put the recovered files onto. Right now, I don't have that available to me. And the cost for a drive of that size is absolutely outrageous for the time being (see my first post). I'll store this drive in a safe place until the prices come down, then I'll buy a new drive, and then I'll take you up on the offer if it's still available then. I don't want to rush into anything right now though since money is so tight. We litterally have to go day by day on food.

[Draco1962]

That is what is known as a head crash (PC equivalent of a face palm).

[hansolo77]

Hehe yea. The drive opened behaved very much the same was as this one did. Spinup and down before the bios screen loads. I really don't know what could have caused it to stop working. The only thing I can guess is the extreme heat from the fire must have some how warped the inner mechanism of the header, and eventually it just gave out. I'm hoping it's just a problem with the power board on it, and with any luck I'll be able to recover the data with a different board. That's about the only thing I can think of using. I'm off the next 3 days so I'll try and get some time to work on this more. Get a few more softwares, etc. I'm sick now too. Think I have strep throat. I had to come home early from work today cause I could barely function; been dizzy all day.

[hansolo77]

OMG OMG OMG

The last couple of days the server has been reporting orange.. Cycylic Redunancy Check (CRC) errors. I paid head and started moving stuff around to protect my 'important' data. Then last night the server icon turned red, reporting one of the drives has failed. Wouldn't ya know? This makes drive #10 since the fire. The good news is that it wasn't the main boot drive. However the interesting part is that the drive that failed is one I bought like a month ago to replace one of the other drives. I took the drive out, and hammered the snot out of it today while I was at work, doing a full sector-by-sector scan/erase/write/erase/write scrub. It was able to do the complete drive last night. It only took 2 hours to go through the whole drive on a scan/erase/write batch, so I had it do it repeats all day today while I was at work. I got home, ran it through a drive self test (DST) and generic short and long tests (which it failed before) and it was able to pass. I'm in the process now of getting it working with the server again. Had to go through and rebuild the backups database, which is gonna take a few hours.

But the interesting thing about this whole ordeal is what I discovered while removing the drive for testing. Turns out my server's power supply may be going bad. I noticed the fan wasn't running. I've seen some new-aged PSU's that have heat detecting fans that only run when they need cooling. This PSU I'm using though, according to the manufacturer's website, is NOT such a device. So the fan not working raised a concern. The PSU is very hot. I moved the PSU out the best I could without unplugging everything, removed the fan grill, and sprayed some WD-40 in the motor area. I then manually spun the fan around with my finger to get it all worked in. Powered up, and the fan still don't work. So I think what's happened is the PSU is overheating, causing it to fail. Dirty Power Supply correlates to unclean interrupted power to the drives, thus causing bad sectors. The drive itself isn't failing (accept for the few that I noticed were clicking harsh, etc) but just getting unrecoverable bad sectors due to insufficient power. Plus I think my PSU might be over taxing as it is. I have 10 internal drives, plus like 5 fans in one case with one PSU. The PSU is rated at 500 watts, which I figured should be enough, but I wasn't counting on having all the extra drain from the additional hard drives (I originally only had 3).

[Draco1962]

Umm.. yeah. 500 Watts is way underpowered for 10 internal drives, CPU, GPU, fans, etc. If you are going to run a server with more than 5 drives, have you considered a rack mount system? Even if you bump up to a 1000+ Watt PSU, you are going to have way more heat in that case than the fans can safely dissipate. You need to get that thing cool, Mister, and I mean now! LOL!

[hansolo77]

The strange thing about it, it's not really overheating. It's a mid-tower case, capable of holding 5 3-inch drives and 5 5-inch drives. The 3-inch drives are all SATA Hard Drives, 1tb each, mostly Seagate Barracudas. Then I have a dvd-burner in one of the 5-inch drives, which I only hooked up to install Windows Home Server on it. After that, I disconnected it from the Mobo and the power. The 2nd 5-inch drive is empty. The 3-5 remaining 5-inch drives are filled with a hotswap caddy of 5 3-inch SATA drives. All of the 3-inch drives in the case, plus 1 in the caddy, connect directly to the Mobo. The other 4 drives in the caddy connect via SATA controller expansion cards. There is no video card in the case, I only use the onboard Mobo video in the rare occasion, since I remote desktop most of the time. The drive caddy has a built in fan for exhaust into the case. Also for exaust I have 2 120mm fans mounted in the top of the case, 1 120mm fan on the back, and an expansion slot blower fan. For intake, there is 1 120mm fan on the front of the case cooling the drives, and 2 120mm fans mounted on the side of the case directly over the CPU and controller cards. The Power Supply sits on the bottom, draws air from the bottom (where it would be coolest) and exausts it right out the back. I have one more open fan mount next to the power supply on the bottom, that is empty. To tie it all up, I have the whole thing sitting in the closet in my bedroom. The closet, for some stupid reason, the post-fire rebuild failed to include any insulation, so in the dead of winter it's actually pretty cool in there. I have a program running in the taskbar that monitors the temperatures, and the highest it has ever reached is like 39 celsius. Usually it runs around 33-35. Right now it's 33. The drives on the other hand get up in temps, around 50ish when they're under heavy load. Right now, my hottest drive is 53, and that's because it's performing a defrag on that drive. The other drives are sitting around 45. The computer specs are bare minimum too. A celeron 420 chip and only 1 stick of 1gb memory. Everything is in the drives. All in all, I've never had any problems with this setup until the fire. Now all the drives were failing, and I couldn't figure out why. After discovering the power supply fan wasn't working, I'm pretty confident that is where most of my problems were coming from. I'm just gonna have to save up and break down and buy a new one. I'll probably go with something like an 800 or so. I found a website that had a java app to calculate a suggested wattage to get based on what all you have in the case. When I ran it, with 10 drives, 6 fans, and my cpu/ram, it recommended a mere 250 watts. So I figured 800 should be good. I probably should just go all out and buy a 1000 or 1200, but that just seems like overkill, especially since I've got 2 or 3 green drives.

[Draco1962]

I wouldn't trust the java app because that is way way off IMO. If your drives are closer together the heat will tend to concentrate and will be cumulative the higher you go up the stack. Hopefully the PSU replacement will remedy your issue.

[hansolo77]

So what do you think I should look for? I feel the 1k-1.2k to be a bit much, but it would allow room for upgrading in the future. If 500 is too low, would 800 be about right for my situation?

[Draco1962]

Get what you can afford. 1000 shouldn't be that much more than 800.