Inexplicable data loss on WD Hard Drive

[Ryan DiGiorgi]

If anyone has the slightest idea how to resolve, or even explain, this
problem, I'd be very grateful. I have two hard drives, a 10gb Maxtor
primary with Win2k installed, and a 160 gb Western Digital slaved to
it. I needed to wipe the maxtor and reinstall windows, so I copied
all my critical data to the WD. I checked the copied datat to make
sure it had the same size and number of files. Then I wiped the
Maxtor and reinstalled windows.

I'm sure you can all see where this is going. When I slaved the WD,
it was missing some of that critical data. Here's the thing, it's not
missing any of the data that I usually stored on that drive. All the
missing files are from the recently added backed up files. I'm
missing about 2gb of the 4gb I copied over. To me, it seems like only
one of the sectors went bad. I booted with Knoppix and that didn't
allow me to see any of the lost files. I loaded up Filerecovery basic
and that saw about half a gig of the lost files, which I recovered.
But that still leaves a lot of missing files. I got a demo of
Filerecovery Pro which did see all of the lost data, but of course it
will cost me $100 to actually recover it.

Also, Windows keeps wanting to run chkdsk on this disk on startup, but
I cancel it because I'm afraid there's a chance that will cause more
problems.

Before I pay $100 for the slightly better version of the software I
already own, is there anything I can try here? More importantly, what
could have possibly caused this data to just become corrupted between
my copying it over and my reloading the drive? Should I worry about
this drive failing? The filesize of the drive reads correctly by the
way.

--R

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

[This followup was posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage and a copy
was sent to the cited author.]

If anyone has the slightest idea how to resolve, or even explain, this
problem, I'd be very grateful. I have two hard drives, a 10gb Maxtor
primary with Win2k installed, and a 160 gb Western Digital slaved to
it. I needed to wipe the maxtor and reinstall windows, so I copied
all my critical data to the WD. I checked the copied datat to make
sure it had the same size and number of files. Then I wiped the
Maxtor and reinstalled windows.

I'm sure you can all see where this is going. When I slaved the WD,
it was missing some of that critical data. Here's the thing, it's not
missing any of the data that I usually stored on that drive. All the
missing files are from the recently added backed up files. I'm
missing about 2gb of the 4gb I copied over. To me, it seems like only
one of the sectors went bad. I booted with Knoppix and that didn't
allow me to see any of the lost files. I loaded up Filerecovery basic
and that saw about half a gig of the lost files, which I recovered.
But that still leaves a lot of missing files. I got a demo of
Filerecovery Pro which did see all of the lost data, but of course it
will cost me $100 to actually recover it.

Also, Windows keeps wanting to run chkdsk on this disk on startup, but
I cancel it because I'm afraid there's a chance that will cause more
problems.

Before I pay $100 for the slightly better version of the software I
already own, is there anything I can try here? More importantly, what
could have possibly caused this data to just become corrupted between
my copying it over and my reloading the drive? Should I worry about
this drive failing? The filesize of the drive reads correctly by the
way.

For Win2K SP3+, or XP SP1+, you must set a registry value to enable
48-bit LBA. Without that, Windows cannot access beyond 137G. Previous
versions will probably not work, or will require special drivers and/or
BIOS support. For Linux-type OS's, I guess it depends on your BIOS and
the drivers. Just because your computer recognizes the full 160G doesn't
mean it has the BIOS support to fully access it.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;331958

 

[Ryan DiGiorgi]

Thanks for the help, I was eventually able to fix the bad sector and
get all my data back.

--R