posted
Because losing my router isn't enough of a pain in the ass for one week: "Drive 'e:' is inaccessible." blah, blah, "run chkdsk" blah.
So I don't know what exactly I'm doing wrong, but one of my machines keeps screwing up the file structure of whatever HD I stick in there. It seems to occur when there are a lot of things going on, big downloads plus network activity, maybe a document open. As the computer savvy (geeks) among you may have been able to discern, I was clever enough this time to use a separate drive for the OS (Win 2K) and Apps. So the system is OK. I just lost more or less all the data on the drive for reasons I plainly don't understand.
I did run chkdsk on the drive and recovered maybe 3% of my files. I downloaded an application called, PC Inspector which showed amazing promise. It sees a lot of clusters on there or whatever, but when I try to recover those, they're just useless broken documents with the appropriate file extension. I've more or less given up on recovering the data (if someone does know of a magic bullet to get it back, I'm all ears), but mostly I'm interested in preventing this from happening in the future. Any advice you can lend would be appreciated.
Registered: Sep 2000
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-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Any odd hardware? Friend of mine bought a hard drive cooler that killed three hard drives before he realized it was the common thread, and we still have no idea why.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
You could always ask a data recovery team to have a look at it, although that will obviously cost a bit. As to why it keeps happening... the main thing is to see if there's a common thread, as Omega said. Are the hard drives that failing always on the same IDE socket on the same IDE cable? Do you have anything else on that cable? Have you changed any of your other hardware? Do you get lots of power fluctuations? Do you like turning your computer off in the middle of saving a file because you are mad?
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
try google for a program called "Getdataback". I've had wonderful success with it.
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Omega: This machine is sort of a Frankenstein of older (and odder) parts, but all of them seem to function fine as long as I don't make it jump through too many hoops. The machine doesn't have a whole lot of memory: (128MB). Would that be it? I would think any cache files would be on the main OS drive such that my document drive wouldn't be affected. But then I am a mamby pamby pantiwaist who prefers Macs, so what do I know?
AMD Athlon 1250MHz
ECS-K6SA Pro
128MB RAM
ATI 3D Rage Pro
80 GB Seagate HD (with Win2K Pro SP4 installed + apps)
200 GB Seagate HD (for documents, etc)
PsyLiam: Honestly the data isn't worth me spending the money it would cost to take it in to such a place. I've tried two different free data recovery solutions now with no appreciable results. Meh, I've got the "irreplacable" stuff backed up on another machine, and should be able to track down the other stuff. I did try swapping the cable, but there is another drive on that same IDE channel that isn't having the same problem. I don't get the impression that it's a physical problem as it only seems to happen while I'm trying to do a lot. Certainly, there is no shutting off of power during disk access.
WizArtist: Thanks. It did see some new stuff and presented it in a much more reasonable manner. Unfortunately the files weren't usable, and I didn't feel like messign with that hex editor preview thingy.
Mostly I want to know what I'm doing wrong and how I can avoid having it happen in the future. It has that POS ATI card that let's it connect to my TV and that's mostly what it's used for. Looking at stuff on-line, showing people flash movies, clips, dumb websites, DIVX stuff. Downloading these things. Sometimes things get sluggish. I don't mind sluggish. I mind my file structure getting corrupted so that I have to go fetch that stuff all over again to show my luddite friends. ("OMG, all your base!!! WTF!!!")
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Swapping the cable didn't help, but it's always the drive on the same spot on whatever cable is used? Regardless of the drive in question? That's... slightly odd. Have you considered reinstalling Windows? It may be the OS itself that's having issues.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Well when it has done this in the past the 200GB drive was the only drive installed. At that time it was the master. And when it went, the Windows install went with it. So, yes, this incarnation would be about the fourth time I've installed Windows on this machine. And about the fifth time it's happened. Now the 200GB drive is the slave drive and although I'm not certain, I'm fairly sure it's a different position.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
You can check and see what drive Windows is using as virtual memory. I'm not 100% certain of the procedure for 2K, but it'll be something like...
Right click on My Computer and select Properties
Select the "Advanced" tab, and then click "Performance settings" or anything else than has "virtual memory" listed near it.
Select "Advanced", and then "change" on the "virtual memory" box. You can actually use both drives if you want, but Windows will have normally selected one for itself. There are many arguments back and forth as to whether you should manually put in your own virtual memory settings or do it yourself. They are boring and, to be honest, different computers seem to do better with different options. Let Windows handle it for now.
In the slightly more techie field:
1/ Have you got the drive running in PIO or DMA mode? 2/ Are they both formatted to NTFS? 3/ Do you have any idea what I am saying? 4/ When you say "sluggish", do you mean that things just get slow, or does the hard drive start churning? The latter means a lack of memory (real and virtual). I know you have said that you don't mind sluggish, but you really could do much worse than sticking a bit of extra memory in there. And XP. W2K is the Tim of operating systems...fairly pointless.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Er. I have not tried PIO or DMA mode, but to answer number three out of order, no, I don't know what those are or how to do that.
Both drives are formatted as NTFS.
By sluggish, I suppose I mean, very slow responding. Takes a long time to refresh the screen. I click and a minute later the menu drops down. As far as I know the drive wasn't doing anything that sounded especially energeric. I am usually running a particular Java application whose name I daren't mention when this happens. Or pretty much all the time that I'm not watching something.
So this machine not having really has more to do with me being silly than anything else. Some time ago before getting schooled by Cartman I bravely assumed that PC133 was interoperable with PC100 RAM and gleefully installed the PC133 alongside my PC100. And of course it isn't. So I've had this 128MB stick of PC133 with no where to go. As it happens this crappy old mobo accepts PC133 in addition to some flavor of DDR which I can't rightly recall. Of course, those aren't compatible and I read that in the manual (which I've since lost). And so some sort of idiotic pride has prevented me from spending the US$30 to get a big, nice wadge of DDR because it would make my PC133 useless. In summary, I am a moron.
Registered: Sep 2000
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
That was not in my lesson!
(PC100 and PC133 should be interoperable, though. At least if your motherboard's FSB cycles at the lower of the two frequencies. It does do that, right? Right?)
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
You're right it wasn't in your lesson. This was before your lesson. I don't know. I think I tried it in my G4 which is PC100 only. With two or three other sticks of PC100. And it didn't work. But now that I think about it there are certain other restrictions for Mac memory that are less true for PC (discrete devices everyone?) that may have made it not work. Hmm. See now you've got me thinking...
CORRECTION: my motherboard is an 'ECS K7S5A' and not the apparent figment of my imagination 'ECS K6SA'. For what it's worth.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
What speed is your PC? Because PC100 RAM might be too slow.
Also, I don't see why PC133 RAM wouldn't work. They're identical, with the only difference being that PC133 can work as a faster clock speed than PC100. There's no reason at all why it won't work mixed in with slower RAM. If the machine is too slow to trouble the PC133, it will just chug along normally. If it is fast enough to challenge the PC133, then the PC100 will be the bottleneck whether you have the PC133 in or not.
*checks*
Oh, this is one of those mobos that takes old style RAM in addition to DDR. My mum has one of them. You're right, you can't put stuff in the blue sockets and the black sockets at the same time. And unless you're using a really, really old motherboard, then the RAM is almost certainly the bottleneck. The PC133 and PC100 should be compatible with each other, but that's not important. Chuck the pair out and buy a DDR200 or DDR266 256mb (or better yet, a 512mb) DIMM.
(If you want to know what frequency your FSB is running at, look in the BIOS. You see the bottom screen on this page? Find the part of your BIOS that looks like that and tell us what it says your CPU frequency is. You can also find out which version of your motherboard you are using by looking here.)
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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