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narayan
Joined: 2 Apr 2010
| | I have a new (2 months old) 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 internal SATA disk. I have made 4 NTFS partitions in it. This is not the boot disk (Windows is installed on another disk).
A few days ago the PC crashed, with a periodic tapping sound. When I restarted, dskchk identified this disk as faulty, and started recovery. But then it reported insufficient disk space in each partition and and aborted recovery (data in each partition was 70-90%).
Then I restarted the PC. But now I cannot see any of its partitions in Windows Explorer.
seagate has confirmed that my serial number does not have the firmware issue that causes the disk to disappear entirely. (They say this is a "routine" failure, and can be recovered with a data-recovery software).
But if I let the HDD remain in PC, the PC cannot boot: After the BIOS screen, Windows shows a black screen with MS logo. Then it shows a light blue screen with MS logo and shows "starting up windows..." below it; and hangs at that stage. Disconnecting the HDD starts the windows properly.
So I put the disk in a USB-adapter box and connected it to the PC via USB. When I turn the box's power on, the disk does not appear immediately: The "autoplay" dialog for each partition appears separately AFTER a few of minutes.
Further, all the partitions disappear after a couple of minutes.
The only way to make the disk appear again is to turn off its adapter box's power and switch on again. The whole cycle repeats. (If I just reconnect the USB cable it does not respond.)
What could be the reason?
I have Windows XP SP-3. Should I reinstall it? |
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narayan
Joined: 2 Apr 2010
| | | Forgot to add that the disk makes only the normal spinning sound, but there are no other sounds (clicking, grating, etc.) |
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FUD
Joined: 10 May 2010
X | | Your HDD is very probably corrupted, not damaged. I would recommend trying first to back it up with Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier.
Normally, CHKDSK (not DCHKDSK) doesn't stop because of insufficient disk space. It asks if you want to recover lost chains and convert them into files. Most of the time the data from these lost chains is not directly usable, or require rather extensive expertise to be fully restored. Unless you are missing data or important documents, just answer NO.
Now, if you still want to recovering these lost chains, clean up your HDD (CCleaner is excellent and free) and delete system restore points. Then run CHKDSK /F and answer YES.
However, you could have received the following message:
Insufficient disk space to fix master file table (MFT).
In that case, use Diskeeper 2010 (Free demo at http://download.cnet.com/Diskeeper/3000-2094_4-10023645.html) to increase the MFT size.
Whatever you decide to do, you'll still have to end up running CHKDSK /F (Or /R if you want it to locate bad sectors and recover readable information). |
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