Saga of a failed hard drive

[ChrisGreaves]

The 80GB Maxstor IDE on the old Big Beige Box died just before Christmas, taking with it 6,000 photos shot since May 2005, including some photos of Betty's, some of Patty's which I’d convinced them both to u/l to the BBB as a precautionary copy. Plus, I reminded them, I back up to twin externals every night.
I do not want to relate how both backups came to be trashed the same day the BBB went down forever.

I feel ashamed that I left these two ladies stranded, as it were.

This morning Patty lent me HER BBB for 24 hours. I removed the skin, plugged in my 80GB Maxstor, and am now watching it RoboCopy 70GB to a 500GB external drive.
THANKS PATTY!

I’m posting because it all seems strange to me:

The last thing I saw on the old BBB was “Can’t find NTDLR” or similar and then “Disk Read Error” both while trying to boot. I set the Maxstor to one side for two weeks while I got on with the more immediate task of Win7.

The 80GB drive was partitioned into a 10GB WinXp partition C and a 70GB data partition D.

This morning Patty’s WinXP asked to check the disk before booting. I refused first time up because I hoped to grab the JPEGs before any more iron oxide flaked off. I could not, however, access either partition.
So I took a deep breath, agreed to the pre-boot scan of the drive, and watched about 20 messages “File record segment ____ is unreadable” pop up for each 1% completion of the job.
At 5% I got tired/impatient and rebooted.

This time Windows fired up and presented me with a 70GB Drive G (which, Patty-be-praised) is now migrating to a sound drive.
However there is no sign whatsoever of the 10GB boot partition on the drive.

I’m not too worried about that; once Robocopy is done, the drive is history, but I find it strange that the error/flaws seem to be so localized. I had anticipated that the tick-tick-tick business in trying to reboot 3 weeks ago meant serious across-the-drive problems.

The moral, if there is one, is like WSC’s “Never, never, never, never, never give up”.
I was NOT looking forward to paying $600 to $2,000 to get the photos back.

[Hey Jude]

Here is my saga--about a Toshiba Vista laptop which parallels yours in some regards---mostly 'never give up'

Friday night my daughter's Toshiba laptop refused to connect to the internet wirelessly, so she used the ethernet cable, but got impatient, so called Verizon since all her known fixes were to no avail. Verizon informed her it was Toshiba's problem and they wanted $35 just to "talk" so she said, she would just dispose of the 1 1/2 yr old Vista machine and get another with 7 on it. So she spent the entire day yesterday running her recovery discs she had made upon first purchasing said machine in Aug of '09. Each time it finished, it would give her a black screen with a light (so it looked light black but not grey). All total she spent 36 hours on this process, which ultimately led to her giving it to me today. I asked her if I could "play" with it. So sure enough, nothing happened when rebooting. I couldn't get into safe mode and F12 (Toshiba specific) wouldn't work. I have the exact same machine--except I immediately put a clean install of Win 7 on mine so I never made those recovery discs. Instead I bought a Maxtor EHD and made a system image and have 2 backups on it--the last was done last night after realizing if hers was byting the dust, then perhaps mine would also. I have the original Win 7 discs I had bought so wasn't worried as much about that.

So in the process of playing with it, I used FB chat to talk with one of my senior ops of another chat forum. We had both pretty much come to the conclusion that it was an insurmountable problem. Another op emailed me the link for Norton removal tool if I needed it, and one for disassembling a Toshiba so I figured I wasn't going to hurt anything. It was nice having phone and chat support . I figured I have a HD reader so could at least hook that up to check that out. I knew the PS was good since heat and air flow and lights were lit as should be. I was just about ready to tear into it, when #1 friend asked if I could hook it up to another monitor as perhaps the desktop graphics had "gone" so sure enough, I took it to the kitchen, disconnected my XP monitor and stuck the 15 pin plug into the side of hers and rebooted it. On reboot the Boot Screen came up (on XP monitor) saying a video cable was unplugged and asked which of about 6 ways you wished to boot. So I figured I would choose HD first as that would at least confirm if the HD had died. I used the arrow keys and enter on the Toshiba and shock of all shock, the screen came up saying that it was almost configured but you had to wait and then it would reboot itself--which it did. As soon as it rebooted--it went on/off about 6 times of its own accord, then I had the display screen on both the laptop and desktop monitors. Amazing!! I was shocked! Not sure what happened, but long story short, 4 hours later, I have removed Norton, installed ZA firewall, and MSE for virus/spyware. Then came the task of updating all the MS updates which happened to be 81 critical + 15 others. Once they loaded and the 'puter rebooted several times, (successfully I might add) I went ahead and finished my part with Malwarebytes, Revouninstaller, CCleaner, Eusing Registry Cleaner (she likes that) FireFox with WOT, Abine, Adblock Plus add-ons, and Chrome browser. She can put the rest on.

I sympathize with your plight Chris, and am happy you have achieved somewhat successful resolution. I agree, NEVER give up! (Secretly I wouldn't have minded buying her a new Win 7 machine and decided that buying Win 7 to put on it would be a waste since a couple of hundred more would give her a nice laptop for what she uses it for.) I was also looking forward to tearing it apart to see how it was put together etc., but this is a MUCH better outcome :-) I was using my laptop for communication, my cellphone for communicating with #2 op and the desktop for the monitor qualities hooked to her laptop. I felt like I had my own techhie shop going on here lol.

[HansV]

Phew! That worked out rather well, thanks to your persistence!

[StuartR]

If at first you don't succeed...

[Hey Jude]

"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that's where you will find success."
- Thomas J. Watson

[Bigaldoc]

"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that's where you will find success."
- Thomas J. Watson

Aaahhh, my main man: "TJ" !!! (Not familiar with the quote so I don't know if it came from Sr. or Jr. My time was mostly with the younger.)

Edited later: One place I looked sez "Thomas J. Watson, Founder of IBM" so obviously it was the big daddy, not junior.

[BobH]

I like the quote, HJ. Mr. Watson once famously said that the entire market for computers in the world was only about 5 or 6 machines.

Chris, the error you cited indicates a problem with the master boot record. I know this because I had the same problem with a Dell desktop soon followed with the identical problem on this HP laptop. The corrupted master boot record (google MBR and "Master boot record") can be caused by software collisions as well as hardware failure. I was able to recover the Dell desktop without buying a new hd. On the laptop, I wanted a larger HD and found one on sale at TigerDirect.com that moved my laptop up to half a gig.

If you are going to trash the Maxtor (have no intention of ever trying to use it again as an hd), you might be entertained by disassembling it to see the component parts. There is at least one rather interesting rare earth magnet in it. I use these in my workshop to keep collet wrenches and such at close hand. BE ADVISED IF YOU DO TAKE IT APART DON'T DO SO ANYWHERE NEAR ANY THUMB DRIVES OR OTHER MAGNETIC MEDIA.

DAMHIKT.

[ChrisGreaves]

... a problem with the master boot record.

I think so.
I have now recovered all the data and it gets doubly-backed up tonight.
I used John Gray's Smoke & Mirror trick to get rid of some cross-linked stuff that had arrived from the Win7 netbook.

I was left with two stubby branches each containing a single "Cyclic Redundancy Check" error-ridden file, which truncated each attempt to RoboCopy, but running three smaller sub-tree RoboCopys worked just as well.

I am going to try resurrecting the 80GB drive for use as a read-only drive on the BBB so that I can run the DOS SkyGlobe from the XP system.
I have a spare 400GB IDE lying around somewhere ....

Patty's machine is all re-skinned and ready to go home as soon as I get back from taking Patty out to a SUPERB dinner.

... disassembling it to see the component parts. DAMHIKT.

Been there, did that at the first opportunity.
But DAMHIKT? INSIUTAA!