drive j: is unformatted!

Ratbag

Ratbag

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The good news is my last remaining commercial client paid me for the last couple of years' work - I am pretty slack about billing ...

The bad news is that I have a very sick HDD.
A "The drive in drive j: is unformatted. Would you like to format it now?" sick ... :puke:.

It is the 2 TB internal HDD that contains all my images and other backups!

No warning. PC just wouldn't start properly this morning.

I have copies on other external drives, of course, but I am waiting for the CHKDSK to finish to see how much data I have to recover. Potentially around 1.4 TB. I had to run CHKDSK from a command line, as the Windows GUI could not 'see' the drive.

Could be ugly ...
 
Ohh, that sucks really bad. Good luck with that, hopefully you can retrieve your files!!
 
Hey mate

All is OK, except for my splitting headache!

536,000 files appear to have been properly recovered, including the Adobe Bridge caches ...

Gotta love Windows NTFS file system! When it is said to be fully recoverable, it's true.

The problem turned out to be 140 KB of bad clusters in the boot sector, MFT and MFT mirror, along with problems in the volume USN and USN Journal. If you don't know what these are, don't sweat about it. Most people don't.

What it amounts to is that the most crucial data structures on the disk were damaged. With Apple OSx and their file system, that would have been the end of what was on the disk.

With Windows NT (all versions, including Win2K, XP and beyond, the system recovery tools can rebuild not only corrupt user data files, but also corrupt system data files that the user cannot even see, such as $MFT$ and its mirror copy, the partition table, Volume Bitmap, etc.

NT treats the entirety of the disk as a virtual object, and creates (or can recreate) a set of data structures that represent the disk contents. About the only thing that will stop it is a physical head crash, and even then it will quite literally grind away trying to re-map the volume!

I had this happen to a client once quite a while ago. My time cost their insurer around $38K for my work. I couldn't work for around 9 months afterwards, but I recovered all my client's data. The client was an accountancy practice, so I recovered all their clients' data too. No one lost their jobs, and none of their clients went to the wall either.

That's why I like NTFS, and have little time for systems that cannot use it for read/write access.

Today, it was my turn ... HDDs can and do fail. I am glad I have multiple backups current as at about a week ago.

Will have a yarn to Pedders later if I feel up to it.
 
I have a vague understanding, but very little. ;) It's not ALL foreign language to me. At least it's sorted now! From this I would guess you were IT tech or a programmer of sorts. Or just someone who know's what they're doing.
 
I never really thought of that.. This kind of thing would happen to businesses that have stored ALOT of data, more often than I'd guess! Scary. :p
 
I am just doing a boot-time CHKDSK on the damaged drive ATM. It is picking up other errors, which is what I expected. CHKDSK.EXE isn't just one program. The version that runs under the Windows GUI is different from the one that runs at boot-time, and different again from the versions that run during a boot disk command line recovery or an initial Windows installation. All called the same, which is somewhat confusing! Each does slightly different things. You cannot substitute any of the .EXE files for any of the others, they just won't work.

And yes, I have spent about 40 years in "IT". That term was coined in the early 1990s. When I first started doing this sort of stuff, universities didn't even have computing science degree courses!
 
The HDD has something very seriously wrong with it. Thanks for asking.

Had to recover it from the DOS based emergency recovery command line a few times last night and today. I am hoping that it lasts long enough to get all the data off it so that I don't have to rebuild it from non-current backups. About 200 GB to go, out of 1.45 TB. So far, so good! After I have a current copy of the data, I'll investigate what's wrong with it. Could just be the SATA cable. Could just need reformatting. However, I think it's cactus. Will get a new 3 TB one tomorrow.
 
That sounds painful. I've lost alot of school work to failing HDDs and USBs, but never that much data. Obviously you managed to get majority of it back.
 
SF, I have five backups of the data on the drive. Much of the data on this drive is online backup for both my PC and others on our network, so the original data is (hopefully) still OK. It's rare for multiple HDDs to fail simultaneously IME. Power problems can cause it. This is why I have so many offline backups.
 
I should start making backups I think!
 
You only ever need to backup data that you want to see again! :poke:
 
DONE!

Every single file recovered ... :biggrin:.

Now to deal with what's wrong with the drive ...
 
Thanks, FS. Looks like a Seagate Constellation 3TB is going in today. They cost about 50% more than Barracuda 3TB, but have a 24/7 duty cycle at 7200 rpm, and a mere 0.77W standby power consumption.
 
Thanks for your understanding, SF.

The Seagate Constellation 3TB is currently being partitioned and formatted in SWMBO's PC.

For some weird reason, Microsoft has removed support for extremely large disks in NT after NT4. NT4 and below could support a single disk or partition up 17 giga GB. I can't recall what the figure is in base 2, something like 2^64 ...

Since Win2K, this has been reduced to 2TB per partition or disk. So one needs a special driver from Seagate in order to 'see' the full capacity of the drive, and this also allows DiskManager in Windows to recognise the partitions (2TB Max each) and format them.

So a 3TB drive in XP or Win2K shows up as one primary partition of 2048 GB plus another of 764 GB. I can live with that.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the dodgy 2TB disk is nearly finished another boot time CHKDSK - about 6 hours. After I have transferred all the data off it directly onto the new HDD, I will do a long format on it and see how it scrubs up. It might be a bin job, but it might not be ...

When I have my main workstation up and running again, I will edit all this crap out of your thread and put it in the computer forum where it properly belongs!
 
Ratbag said:
When I have my main workstation up and running again, I will edit all this crap out of your thread and put it in the computer forum where it properly belongs!
Click to expand...

Done! :iconwink:
 
Thanks, mate.

Regardless of how interesting SF may have found it, it was just a tad OT ... :poke: :rotfl:.

We have just had a lightning strike close by, and the new HDD is in the middle of formatting! Power even glitches, but so far so good. The other PC with the dodgy drive is switched off ATM.
 
ratbag I recently tried some file recovery work on a rellie's computer. Windows recovery disks and Bart could not see any files on the disk - said it was unformatted, yet a little linux distro I use a lot (Precise Puppy) could see the files and copy them off to another disk.
 
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