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General discussion

Distasterous hard drive failure

Nov 27, 2003 4:38PM PST

I have a 200 mghz Pentium with 64 meg ram. Before disaster struck I was running Win 98 with two hard drives in it, a 4 gig Quantum Bigfoot as master and a 20 gig Western Digital as slave. Both drives were partioned for a total of 7 partitions. The Quantum was partitioned into 3 partitions. The Western Digital was partitioned into four, 5 gig, drives. One day it wouldn't boot into Windows but at the c: prompt I could list all the files on both drives in all 7 partitions.

But things got progressively worse. Even though both drives are recognized in the CMOS when they are installed, now I can only access the files on the Quantum. Currently I have installed Windows 98 on a 1 gig Maxtor as as master. When the Quantum is added as a slave it is accessible by Windows and dos. When the Western Digital is added as a slave, although it is shown as present in CMOS, Windows and DOS do not recognize it. My most important files were saved on the Western Digital. I need help.

Discussion is locked

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Re:Distasterous hard drive failure
Nov 27, 2003 6:08PM PST

First:
Hard drives can fail and do so at the most unsuitable moments (this is knows as "Murphy's Law"). A hard drive is NOT suitable as the only (backup) storage of information. The real disaster might be that you don't have a decent backup, which (more or less) can be considered your own fault. Having to buy a new hard disk can't be considered a disaster, financially spoken.

Then:
The BIOS and DOS/Windows check for different things, so it's perfectly possible for the CMOS to 'see' the disk and for DOS and Windows not to do so. The BIOS communicates with the electronics of the drive, DOS and Windows look at the information on the magnetic platters. So the master boot record (MBR) and the partition table should be OK, the partitions should exist and they should be formatted Fat32 (with Windows 98), the drive should be able to rotate, and the platter-side electronics should be working correctly.

To do:
Mount the WD as slave and set the switches accordingly. Check that the BIOS recognises it.

Then boot into Windows, go to the command prompt and type fdisk /status (followed by enter). This would show the partitions on the drives, where they are and how they are formatted. Booting into real-mode MS-DOS is possible also.
Most likely outcomes of this experiment: drive is unreadable, no partitions exist or they aren't formatted FAT32. No doubt everythng used to be OK, but at the moment it isn't any more. As I said: this can happen (the MTBF might be 10 or 20 years, but note the M!).

A specialised data recovery firm might be able to get your valuable information back, if you pay them enough (which is more than you like).

Post again if you feel the need.

Good luck,


Kees

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Re:Re:Distasterous hard drive failure
Nov 27, 2003 6:49PM PST

The result of the fdisk /status for the WD was:

partition 1, status a, type non-dos, 957 mbytes, usage 12%

partition 2, stats blank, type non-dos, 18607 mbytes, usage 100%

Total disk space is 8027 mbytes

Translate please

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Re:Re:Re:Distasterous hard drive failure
Nov 27, 2003 7:56PM PST

I find this example:

Display Partition Information

Current fixed disk drive: 1

Partition Status Type Volume_Label Mbytes System Usage
C: 1 A PRI DOS 50 FAT** 7%
2 A Non-DOS (Linux) 300 43%

Total disk space is 696 Mbytes (1 Mbyte = 1048576 bytes)

You should go to the source (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/multi-os/ch3.html, about midway) to see a readable lay-out with the columns intact.

Comparing your info with this example, I think fdisk thinks your hard disk = 8 Gb (it's 20), that the two partitions occupy 100 + 12 = 112 % of this (together nearly 20 Gb), that both are non-DOS partitions (not FAT32, so can't be read by DOS) and only one is active.

To summarize: your hard disk is an unusable mess. This might be caused by a progressive hardware failure (as indicated by the boot problems) or maybe there was a short power failure some time ago. The rule with hard disks, alas, is: if you've any problems with it, save the data and throw the disk away. The first of these won't be possible any more, I think.

Unless you decide to call professional help ("data recovery" is the thing to look for) you might try to use fdisk or delpart (download) to delete those 'partitions', then make new ones and format them. But I wouldn't advice to do this with this disk, because it's likely the problems would reappear. It's just a very unreliable piece of hardware now, and no more.

Sorry, but I don't think you'll get a more helpful advice from any other member. However, wait for Bob Proffit. He's the most experienced hardware expert on this forum.

Kees

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Re:Re:Re:Re:Distasterous hard drive failure
Nov 27, 2003 8:17PM PST
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Data recovery
Nov 27, 2003 9:34PM PST

This, I think, is only one of many do-it-yourself data recovery tools available. Google and the usual download sites will give more; "data recovery" would still be a good search term, wouldn't it?
It's nice if they work in this case, and definitely worth a try. But I fear the worst for Madison, although of course, I hope the best.

It's tragic that some lessons on backup are only learned the very hard way.

Kees

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I think everyone is covering it...
Nov 28, 2003 12:24AM PST

Skip to item 3 since 1 and 2 are just admonishments about the lesson.

1. This sort of disaster is sadly how most learn about keeping a copy of what they can't lose on another media (CDR is cheap.) The lesson is now learned so I'll move to the next item.

2. The data recovery phase could be simpler if the drives would have been created with FDISK and SIMPLE PARTITIONS. It's always the user/owner's choice on the matter, but after years of witnessing data loss and recovery, the FDISK, one big volume on one drive has been easiest to drag files out of. But this is just another too-late observation. In spite of others and my experience, people will go nuts with Partition Magic and create far too many partitions. Moving on...

3. DO-IT-YOURSELF (DIY) data recovery is treacherous. The first time DIY person may not realise what shallow waters their boat is in with rocks to puncture what's left of the data and scatter it further.

a. When doing DIY recovery, a duplicate is made of the hard disk and only changes are made to the duplicate. The original is left untouched during the entire exercise.
b. Money is spent on tools to recover the files. Demos are great to see which may work on the hard disk at hand.
c. It's the MONEY! Data recovery by those that do this all the time will cost hundreds. One 200M drive years ago ran up a 2 thousand dollar bill and was worth every penny since it was some medical data. (Lesson learned...) Prices haven't gone down much, but you tend to get gigabytes back for the price now.

The only new item I see I've added is that you do not work on the original hard disk, unless you are sure the tool is read-only and you are doing a test run.

Best of luck,

Bob