emergency! "delayed write failed" ate about 15 gigs of photos. or did it???

[Steven C]

last might i hooked up a drive bay with ide hard drive up to my
computer via usb 2.0. i have never had problems with this setup on my
laptop but this new sony viao (running media center xp) was a new pc.

i went to copy about 34 gigs of files from the external ide drive to my
new viao, and this is where things go wrong.

after 20 minutes and copying about 4 gigs worth of info there is a
problem. the dialog box says that it cannot copy the files and that
they are no longer available on the source disk.

windows tells me "delayed write failed - please try and save these
files elsewhere" via a dialog baloon in the system tray. i click that
baloon but nothing happens.

i look and there are now two dozen or so folders that once had tons of
data (maybe 15-16 gigs worth) on the ide drive hooked up voa usb that
are EMPTY completely.

but... this is very important.

Where there was 34 gigs on the ide hdd before, it now reads 30 gigs on
the drive.
4 gigs transfered to the viao pc.

so where did the files go?? I know one of the folders, and old program
files folder that had 12 gigs of photos on it appears empty and windows
says there are 0 bytes in the folder, but windows reports the drive is
30 gigs full, meaning those missing files that it could not write are
SOMEWHERE.

I tried active undelete 5.1 but it found nothing.

Please help me if possible. I need to recover these files. Most of them
are PHOTOS that i really cannot afford to lose!

 

[Guest]

Were both NTFS? USB 2.0 is too buffer and system load dependent for such a
large transfer. Write of the lost data or you will make matters worse. For
USB maybe 1 or 2 gigs tops. For 34 only the Firewire 1394 can meet such
performance without crashing.

 

[Steven C]

thanks. i really really wish that windows xp would have recognized
this. it sees the drive as usb 2.0, it sees the data as too large, but
yet it just allows for that to happen.

that is a dissapointment for me, because now i have lost all that data.

 

[Dave E]

I've used zero assumption software for recoving photo's and it's worked very
well for me - it used to be completely free but the latest download
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm offers up to 4 directories
recovered for free which may suit you.

David

 

[V Green]

last might i hooked up a drive bay with ide hard drive up to my
computer via usb 2.0. i have never had problems with this setup on my
laptop but this new sony viao (running media center xp) was a new pc.

i went to copy about 34 gigs of files from the external ide drive to my
new viao, and this is where things go wrong.

after 20 minutes and copying about 4 gigs worth of info there is a
problem. the dialog box says that it cannot copy the files and that
they are no longer available on the source disk.

windows tells me "delayed write failed - please try and save these
files elsewhere" via a dialog baloon in the system tray. i click that
baloon but nothing happens.

i look and there are now two dozen or so folders that once had tons of
data (maybe 15-16 gigs worth) on the ide drive hooked up voa usb that
are EMPTY completely.

but... this is very important.

Where there was 34 gigs on the ide hdd before, it now reads 30 gigs on
the drive.
4 gigs transfered to the viao pc.

so where did the files go?? I know one of the folders, and old program
files folder that had 12 gigs of photos on it appears empty and windows
says there are 0 bytes in the folder, but windows reports the drive is
30 gigs full, meaning those missing files that it could not write are
SOMEWHERE.

I tried active undelete 5.1 but it found nothing.

Please help me if possible. I need to recover these files. Most of them
are PHOTOS that i really cannot afford to lose!

I think what happened here is the result of the 4G limit on FAT32
filesystem, not actually due to a hardware failure...the circumstances
are just too coincidental.

 

[Malke]

I think what happened here is the result of the 4G limit on FAT32
filesystem, not actually due to a hardware failure...the circumstances
are just too coincidental.

I've used PhotoRescue very successfully to rescue clients' photos on
media cards. I don't know if it would work on an external drive.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

The other alternative is to contact a professional data recovery firm
like DriveSavers. Their services are not inexpensive, but they are
wizards. Only you can decide what your data is worth.

http://www.drivesavers.com

Good luck,

Malke

 

[HeyBub]

I've used PhotoRescue very successfully to rescue clients' photos on
media cards. I don't know if it would work on an external drive.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

The other alternative is to contact a professional data recovery firm
like DriveSavers. Their services are not inexpensive, but they are
wizards. Only you can decide what your data is worth.

http://www.drivesavers.com

Do it yourself with:

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

No charge to find out IF the data can be recovered.

 

[NobodyMan]

Please respond the the orginal thread when replying, instead of
creating a new thread. You have now fragmented the original post into
two threads, each unrelated to each other and likely to go off in
different directions.

 

[DevilsPGD]

In message <[email protected]> "V Green"

I think what happened here is the result of the 4G limit on FAT32
filesystem, not actually due to a hardware failure...the circumstances
are just too coincidental.

Which is possible, except that FAT32 has a file size limit of 4GB,
nothing else is limited at 4GB.

 

[Steven C]

well here is something else strange. i went to turn off the IDE drive
and it turned off the entire pc... so i thought i DEFINATELY lost the
data, however now it seems SOME of the data is back, but not all of it.


so for example, instead of having ZERO folders in the program files
directory, there are now some file folders, some empty, and 1.8 gigs of
data.

except that now i cannot access any of it. just view the files as they
are listed in directories, not actually execute or run/edit them.