Hard Drive problem

markyboy.1967

markyboy.1967

Messages
8,171
Name
Mark Molloy
Edit My Images
Yes
I have a load of images stored im my " D " drive and im not sure if i have them all copied or not. When trying to access my drive i get a message saying the drive isnt formatted and asking if i want to format it. Is the drive now knackered and is there a way around this where i can access the drive and copy any images i havent alread done.
 
Last edited:
what ever you do don't format it, if you have an external drive caddy put it in that and try it on the laptop, to see if it can be accessed, also try running check disk on it

open command prompt as administrator

at the prompt type:

chkdsk D: /F/R

press enter

What that will do is fix any errors on the drive and attempt to recover bad sectors, you may want to try this before caddying the drive
 
Last edited:
it may sound a bit strange but take it out of the PC, wrap it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer for a couple of hours then give it another try. Its worked with all my "flakey" drives so far :)
 
I forgot to ask whether you are running OSX or Windows
 
Rob 80386 said:
what ever you do don't format it, if you have an external drive caddy put it in that and try it on the laptop, to see if it can be accessed, also try running check disk on it

open command prompt as administrator

at the prompt type:

chkdsk D: /F/R

press enter

What that will do is fix any errors on the drive and attempt to recover bad sectors, you may want to try this before caddying the drive
Click to expand...

Thanks--running this just now-will report back shortly.
 
Sorry but you should remove the drive and stop using it untill you have an alternative drive to store whats on there incase you get it working.

The drive has a problem there is no point spending a few hours with chkdsk to find that the drive has a few hours of life and not having anywhere to put the files on there. The freezer trick does work but again you will probably only have the time it takes for it to warm up before its gone again so timeing is critical.

Don't use USB drives they are not quick enough you want the fastest transfer method as possible, SATA or IDE disconnect your cd/dvd drive and use that if you don't have a cable spare.
 
Rob 80386 said:
what ever you do don't format it, if you have an external drive caddy put it in that and try it on the laptop, to see if it can be accessed, also try running check disk on it

open command prompt as administrator

at the prompt type:

chkdsk D: /F/R

press enter

What that will do is fix any errors on the drive and attempt to recover bad sectors, you may want to try this before caddying the drive
Click to expand...

Rob, this has done the trick even if if only for a little while until i an get any images off which arent backd up...Will get myself another drive now and use that as back up instead.
 
Backup backup backup. Lesson learned? ;)

The freezer trick sometimes only works if there is a problem with the platters/heads, this sounded more like a data issue on the disk. Yes this can be caused by failing hardware but I don't think we're there. Least not yet.
 
Neil, i usually do backup my images on disc and another drive but i have been getting lazy and ended up not doing it for nearly 2 months. All good now though and a new drive will be ordered today. Anyone any ideas on a reliable drive to use-1TB or so is ample, im a bit concerned now with WD as this drive isnt old at all.
 
Thing is everyone has horror stories about every brand..

Personally ive never had issues with seagate and samsung drives. But have had plenty of issues with maxtor and lacie (before someone says it I know seagate and maxtor are the same group, but maxtor is the budget line).
 
markyboy.1967 said:
Anyone any ideas on a reliable drive to use-1TB or so is ample, im a bit concerned now with WD as this drive isnt old at all.
Click to expand...
The problem is that manufacturers drive quality varies from drive to drive. Some drives are worse than others and just because a Samsung 1Tb drive may be good or bad, doesn't mean that a 2Tb drive from the same company won't be completely opposite.

The other problem is that you need a while for a new drive on the street to show how good or bad it is. I don't know of any central repository of information which is accessible to the public on reliability of drives - manufacturers wouldn't want to publish this information for obvious reasons.

I'd also be wary of recommendations (either good or bad) from people who only have a few drives around. Just because they haven't experienced a problem doesn't mean others won't and a sample size of one or two is just not statistically significant. If a drive has failed, their hatred of a particular make is probably proportional to either how much data they lost or how difficult it was to get back to where they were. Take any advice with a healthy pinch of salt (including this!)...

Personally, with 15+ HDDs and a couple of SSDs here in the house that the only reliable way I have found of managing this is:

  • Backup. For all my important data I have 3 copies. The original, a main backup and a mirror backup on another machine. These are automated and backups occur on my Documents folder at 20 minute intervals with the mirroring happening overnight.
  • Imaging. As system disks can't just be copied, invest in a drive imaging program and make regular images of your system drive. I do this on a weekly basis and the images are stored on the backup drives. Should one of my system disks fail catastrophically, the worst position I'm in is system as it was a week ago with data as it was 20 minutes ago and some mild pain to get it all back in one place again.
  • Redundancy. Both backup locations run a RAID 1 system. I effectively have 5 copies of my backup data.
  • Fault tolerance. I have a lot of media stored which would be a pain to recreate, but could be done. This is not backed up due to cost but is held on a RAID5 like array (it's actually more fault tolerant than a RAID 5 array but that's a detail).
  • Be prepared. I have spare disks ready to be swapped in should I need to

FWIW, most of my drives are Samsung ones. Not because they are statistically the most reliable, but because they are cheap. Once I got my head around expecting HDDs to fail, cost (after deciding on Green vs non-Green drives) was the most important buying decision for me as I always have a spare available.
 
neil_g said:
Thing is everyone has horror stories about every brand..

Personally ive never had issues with seagate and samsung drives. But have had plenty of issues with maxtor and lacie (before someone says it I know seagate and maxtor are the same group, but maxtor is the budget line).
Click to expand...
See... iif I hadn't spent 20 mins writing that above, I could have just agreed with you ;). Well, all apart from my hatred of Seagate (as I lost a drive in a RAID0 array that was a pain to recreate - see post above about irrational hatred of certain manufacturers ;))
 
markyboy.1967 said:
Rob, this has done the trick even if if only for a little while until i an get any images off which arent backd up...Will get myself another drive now and use that as back up instead.
Click to expand...

Thats good, as soon as your new drive arrives, as Neil says back it up.
For now create a tempory backup folder on your C drive and copy your photos to that :)
 
Temp back up folder now done, also written all images etc onto discsuntil i get a replacement drive. My C drive is a Samsung drive so i might just get another Samsung and then have a think about whether i need/want a Raid set up. Thanks again for the help and some good plain advice on drives.
 
markyboy.1967 said:
then have a think about whether i need/want a Raid set up.
Click to expand...
I'll backup (where's the :rolleyes: emoticon when you need it ;)) what Neil said. I have two types of RAID here. The first is one that gives me a single disk redundancy on data that I can afford to lose (but am too stingy to pay for extra disks to back up elsewhere as it's a 6Tbyte datastore). The second is mirroring of my backup drives because I had some spare disks when I built my datastore. My backup strategy has evolved over the last 3-4 years like this

  • No backup. I was lucky. I never lost anything, but then it was only used for mails and web surfing really.
  • Started to realise that a significant proportion of my life was being documented in one way or another on the hard drive, so bought a second drive for the computer (BACKUPA) and regularly copied personal data from my home directory to the backup drive.
  • Build another PC (so I now have 2). Retire older machine to become the house filestore. Back both machines up to BACKUPA on the filestore
  • Lose one disk in RAID0 on new PC. Spend quite a bit of time rebuilding data onto that machine with a complete reinstall of all programs etc and copying the backup data from BACKUPA. Didn't lose much apart from time, effort and the resulting hassle.
  • Buy drive imaging program and start to image system drives on a weekly basis. Lesson learned ;)
  • Buy another disk for main PC (BACKUPB) and mirror the data from BACKUPA to BACKUPB nightly
  • Upgrade media storage with a redundant array of 2Tbyte disks (before this I had no backup of my media storage). Release some older 1Tb disks from original media store. Rebuild BACKUPA and BACKUPB as (software) RAID 1 1Tb drives to provide redundancy on my redundancy.

The last step of this has only happened in the last month. I was on the previous step for about 3 years.

The only thing I need to do now is to get some form of offsite storage, but as we both primarily work from home, the regular commute just isn't there...

BTW, I apologise. I seem to have woken up in a mood that is compelling me to make very detailed posts today.
 
God he waffles on a bit... ;)

The short version is you always want at least 2copies of your data and a raid array counts as 1, no matter if it's mirrored or not as it's still vulnerable to a single point of failure (the enclosure/controller, file deletion, file corruption). Ideally factor in a 3rd copy which is rotated off site (work, parents house etc) in case the worst happens (fire, theft, flooding).

Depressingly I need to reassess my backup again, my main storage is 7tb and my backup is 3.6tb which is running low on space now (damn blu-ray rips and 5dmk2 raw files lol).
 
Cheers everyone. I will have a think about what i do from here as i dont want to be in this situation again although i did have a backup of 90% of my images so it wasnt the end of the world. I did always have at least 1 copy which i updated weekly but sadly i had fallen from that routine--this little jolt has nudged me in the right direction.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top