Drive Failure or Simple Data Corruption?

[rmnoon]

Hi all-

I run two identical Seagate 200GB ATA100 drives. I use one for a system partition and storage partition and the other for purely storage. I came home yesterday and turned on the computer. Upon booting windows wanted to run a CHKDSK on the nonsystem drive (labelled StorageI). After a minute or so CHKDSK reports that File Record Segment 44118 is unreadable, and it continues untill segment 44138 at which point CHKDSK hangs. When skipping CHKDSK the computer boots to windows and shows all three partitions in my computer, however StorageI cannot be opened without explorer crashing.

My question is this: Is this drive completely hosed, or is it just the partition, or is this data in some way savable? It is mildly critical (I'm entering college now and that drive contained various collections, my original music, my writing, and every school assignment over multiple computers dating back to seventh grade). It also contained my records for my computer building business. I'll survive without this data, but it'd be damn nice to have.

Traditionally I'd declare this drive dead, but usually when I see dead hard drives they stop the computer from booting or simply don't even detect the drive in the BIOS/operating system. By this reasoning the drive seems to be mechanically functioning. Is there a software program that can do a blind copy or something to the other drive? I've never had to deal with this type of failure before.

Could it be the IDE controller or cable? Would switching the drive to another computer be worth a try?

Thanks for reading this long a post. I'm open for all suggestions.

-ryan

 

[arkamw]

I'm going to guess that you have a few bad sectors on the drive. As opposed to running CHKDSK, run scandisk. That way, it'll write out any sectors (hopefully!) that are unreadble.

You can also try to use the diagnostic tools from the mfg. They'll usually include a good scandisk-type program.

The data in those sectors is probably lost. Windows will try to move the data out if it is readable. It may work, it may not. In the end, you may not have any data in those particular sectors.

If it does indeed end up being bad sectors on the drive, you might think about replacing the drive. Usually, they just get worse. However, I have seen some where the sectors are written out and the drives last a good while longer.

Likely, it is not the controller / cable.

 

[rmnoon]

Thanks. Can anyone offer any more information?

 

[jt99]

Run Seagate's Seatools diagnostic utilities and let it check for bad sectors. It may remap them for you and allow access to the drive to get your data off.

After that, RMA it.

 

[rmnoon]

Seatools remaps a couple of the bad sectors (I'd say about half), but the file system test "fails with critical errors". Is there any hope of getting Windows to read this? Is there any way to attempt to reconstruct the file system?

 

[rmnoon]

bump.

If there's absolutely nothing I can do can someone give me a link to Seagate's RMA policy/page?

 

[RavenD]

bump.

If there's absolutely nothing I can do can someone give me a link to Seagate's RMA policy/page?

Its quite easy really. You go to www.seagate.com, hit the link for support, and then in the left sidebar, there's a link for "Warranty Support and Returns" that takes you here. Takes about 30 seconds to find it .
As for trying to get the data off the drive, have you tried it from any other OS? Load up a Linux live CD that uses Kernel 2.6 or later (built-in ntfs support), and try mounting the drive. Might be able to get at least some of the data off of it.