I have a htpc which I just recently installed winxp on a new disk after the old main HDD and motherboard died. I had a second 200GB WD2000 in there which had all my recorded TV on it. Now with winxp (no SP's installed) it all runs fine but any of my 50 or so previous recordings refuse to play properly... its very strange, they play segments from all the videos on the drive... parts of dvd video thats on the drive, then parts of the selected video and parts of the other .mpg files randomly. Its like watching tv and someone keeps changing the channel. I copied one of the files over to another machine and that did the same thing, so it looks like the HDD has gone crazy.. Im defragmenting it right now but surely that cant be it? Has anyone ever heard of something like this happening before??
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HTPC HDD gone crazy, videos are all mixed together...
- Thread starter chargin
- Start date
Most likely the drive was very badly fragmented. I had the exact same thing happen, except it was with an mp3 collection, rather than videos when I did a reformat. They played just fine before i reformatted, after clean install of WinXP, no matter which one I played, it'd be pieces of random songs from the hard drive. I analyzed it with defrag software, and found it was 40% fragmented. Unfortunately, at that point, defraging didnt save the data.
No Service Packs? 
Start\Run\diskmgmt.msc, what does it show the capacity of the actual physical disk as? If it shows up as 128GB, I really hope you didn't make any writes to the disk, as you've probably wrecked the file system if you did...
Start\Run\diskmgmt.msc, what does it show the capacity of the actual physical disk as? If it shows up as 128GB, I really hope you didn't make any writes to the disk, as you've probably wrecked the file system if you did...