HD suddenly missing

[Miles Emerson]

I have a data hd for video of 500GB capacity. I have used it for storage
regularly for two years. It is currently about 3/4 full, maybe a bit less.
After installing a video input for my ATI hd card, Vista often failed to
recognize the drive--even in device manager. XP had no issues recognizing
the drive and worked better with video capture. So, I switched to XP.
After using for a few days, capturing to the drive, transferring to the
drive, XP now fails to recognize it--even in device manager. The BIOS sees
the drive--which I assume is normal, but nothing else does.
There appear to be no driver issues under device manager in XP. I assumed
this was a driver issue in Vista since the problem only started after
installing the add-on capture card. XP did not appear to have this
issue--and can still use the capture card with no problems.
This morning, XP noted that it needed to run scan disc on the drive while
booting up--this was after failing to recognize it several times. It
appeared to fix issues during step 3 (of 3), security issues(?)--can't
recall. Either way, after the fixes were applied, the drive still fails to
show up.
It contains all of my family home video waiting to be burned to back-up
discs. I do believe the drive is viable and suspect configuration issues. I
built this computer myself about two years ago, but I'm not knowlegeable at
all levels of driver/hardware configuration. Still, if you can point me in
the right direction or flat out tell me what to do, I believe I can tackle
this .
Any suggestions on where to start looking?
Thanks in advance,
Miles

 

[Paul]

I have a data hd for video of 500GB capacity. I have used it for storage
regularly for two years. It is currently about 3/4 full, maybe a bit less.
After installing a video input for my ATI hd card, Vista often failed to
recognize the drive--even in device manager. XP had no issues recognizing
the drive and worked better with video capture. So, I switched to XP.
After using for a few days, capturing to the drive, transferring to the
drive, XP now fails to recognize it--even in device manager. The BIOS sees
the drive--which I assume is normal, but nothing else does.
There appear to be no driver issues under device manager in XP. I assumed
this was a driver issue in Vista since the problem only started after
installing the add-on capture card. XP did not appear to have this
issue--and can still use the capture card with no problems.
This morning, XP noted that it needed to run scan disc on the drive while
booting up--this was after failing to recognize it several times. It
appeared to fix issues during step 3 (of 3), security issues(?)--can't
recall. Either way, after the fixes were applied, the drive still fails to
show up.
It contains all of my family home video waiting to be burned to back-up
discs. I do believe the drive is viable and suspect configuration issues. I
built this computer myself about two years ago, but I'm not knowlegeable at
all levels of driver/hardware configuration. Still, if you can point me in
the right direction or flat out tell me what to do, I believe I can tackle
this .
Any suggestions on where to start looking?
Thanks in advance,
Miles

If the drive is viable, then the SMART data will have OK values.

Give HDTune a try. It has a "health" tab with the SMART data, if that
data is available. There is also an option to check for bad
blocks, while reading the entire disk surface.

(Version 2.55 is free)
http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

SMART status is not a guarantee of anything, but if it shows bad,
then you know the drive is not likely to be in good shape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

I would not bother with the benchmark window, since the seek test will
rattle the heads a bit. The error scan for checking for bad blocks,
is gentle and shouldn't hurt it.

If at all possible, you'd want to back up that disk, in case hardware
failure is imminent. You should always keep spare disks handy, for
emergencies like this. The spare should be a little bigger than the
operating drive, so there is always room for a backup.

If I suspect severe corruption, I might use "dd" or "dd_rescue" and
a Linux LiveCD, to copy every sector from one disk to the other.
"dd_rescue" has the ability to ignore unreadable sectors, which
is better than "dd" grinding to a halt because the backup is going
so slow. By copying every sector, you know everything there is to
salvage from the drive, has been captured. If the file system was
damaged on the suspect disk (such that a regular file based backup
won't run), then having a sector by sector backup means you've
still captured as much info as possible, before the drive fails
completely. Big disk mechanisms are cheap, at $100 each, so if
the data has any value at all, spend the money.

If you don't like the idea of Linux, there is a port of "dd" for
Windows. I've discovered a bug in it (problem detecting the end of
a USB flash stick), but it'll probably be OK for copying a regular
hard drive.

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

You use it in a MSDOS (command) window. The "dd --list" command,
gives the names of all connected drives. Then, to back up one
disk to another, it would be something like.

dd.exe if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0

Partition0 represents the whole disk, while partitions 1..n are
the separate partitions on the disk. Using Partition0 copies the
whole raw disk. That command copies Harddisk0 to Harddisk1. To
know which disk is which, you look at the list of partitions.
(For example, my boot drive has four partitions, my spare drive
has one, so I can tell them apart in a "dd --list" output.)

The above command works properly, as long as the output device
"of" is larger than the input device "if". There are "bs" and
"count" options, for precise control of transfer size. But for
an emergency backup, where you just want a safe copy, as long
as the output device is a little bigger than the input, no other
parameters are needed. As written above, the transfer rate might
be 13MB/sec, so it is still going to take a while. (Careful crafting
of bs block size and count options, can cause the transfer to
run faster.)

And by all means, do the backup as quickly as you can arrange it.
You never know how much time is left, before the drive "goes boom".

Using "dd" is dangerous, because you can easily erase the wrong
disk with it. Imagine if I copied Harddisk1 to Harddisk0 - I'd lose
my WinXP partition and my other partitions. So you must be absolutely
certain of the syntax of the command, before proceeding.

If you had regular file by file backups, using some utility with
a nice GUI on it, then none of this low level stuff would be
necessary...

I believe in "safety first" when it comes to disk maintenance.
Which is why I advocate copying the disk someplace safe. If
I knew of a trustworthy utility that did all this stuff for you,
I'd be the first one to recommend it. But a lot of the available
utilities, are more interested in file by file operation, which
only works for as long as the file system is healthy.

Paul