Hdd issue

Andrew_G 2008-10-20 20:03:21 UTC #1

[qanda]This thread is about the Hitachi DeskStar 7K250 - hard drive - 250 GB - ATA 100. Click here to see full specs[/qanda]hi all.
My name is Andrew (duh) and I am new here. I have to admit I joined specifically to ask this question pertaining to my 1.5 year old hdd. It asked me this already but I will mention that it is a hitachi deskstar 250gig. I was using it for mass storage of digital photos and videos. There was a 48 gig partition and a 200. What would happen is that after a few days w/o a reboot, the drive (and the cd/r that was slaved in on my pata channel) would just disappear. on reboot they would be back, no problems. About a week ago, I noticed they were gone and rebooted to get them back. Nothing. AT first no big deal, I didn't think about it again until I realized the implications of what was on the drive.
first I swapped the cd/r and the hdd as slave/master and could then only see the cd/r. Then I took the cd/r out all together and got it to SEE the drive... But with a catch. If you right click it and select properties, it shows it as being in RAW format and having 0 bytes used and 0 bytes available.
I went into control panel/admin/comp management/ disk management and there it shows up as a single 31 gig partition with no label (the volume was labeled prior to this debacle). If I try to look at it in my computer it gives me the whole "drive is not formatted, would you like to format now?" hoopla.
I see this drive as a master on the ide channel on the bios flash during boot up. I have read a bunch of crap about freezing drives and doing all sorts of esoteric things to them to get 20 minutes out of them to retrieve data. And for the contempt I feel for those solutions will not deter me from trying them if enough people tell me it's the thing to do. I know the data is still there, I would appreciate any suggestions anyone had to offer.

Thanks in advance...

StormJumper 2008-10-20 20:32:41 UTC #2

This is a slave HDD right ?, if so
Try disconnecting the drive from the computer and reboot the system with it disconnected, after the system starts up and all is running/loaded shut it down and reconnect it the system will reinstall it.

Andrew_G 2008-10-20 20:40:54 UTC #3

I will update this tomorrow. I am going to try slaving it into another system. Thanks for the input. How odd that you’re from the same town as my first wife. Not a common town to run across.

StormJumper 2008-10-20 21:20:20 UTC #4

From your first post
"I see this drive as a master on the ide channel on the bios flash during boot up"

If your operating system is not on this drive then it should be set as slave–>connected in the middle of the IDE cable the one at the end is for the master HDD(Operating System)

Andrew_G 2008-10-21 04:33:51 UTC #5

It was set up as a master on the PATA channel. It has been there and stable for a year +. I don’t know, but I think on a SATA mobo with a PATA channel, one of the devices has to be mastered to utilize it’s IDE controller. In other words, I think it knows it’s place. In any event: I have had the jumpers on every setting trying to get it to do anything. When I set it on FORCED DEV 1 it DID try to boot from it, making me think perhaps I will try to boot with an xp cd in and set it up on the 50 gig partition just to get the data off of it. The second I get this done, the drive is scrap anyway. I don’t trust it now.

StormJumper 2008-10-21 10:46:17 UTC #6

If your operating system is on a hard drive that is being seen has a slave you can and really should make a change in BIOS, leave the hard that has your other data disconnected.Set the jumper to master on the hard drive that has the operating system on it and connect it to the end of the IDE Cable, start your computer in BIOS and make the hard drive that is seen the masater and save the changes and exit when your system restarts your system you can then shut it down and re-connet your other harddrive as the slave… this is the way your hard drives should be for preformance reasons.

Have a nice day

Andrew_G 2008-10-21 16:16:24 UTC #7

I don’t think I can do that. The drive that has my OS on it is a SATA drive. It doesn’t have jumpers on it that I am aware of. The slave master set up I was referring to was on a PATA port that I think they give you just for the sake of backwards compatibility. Maybe my wording in my initial description was fuzzy. My understanding was that even on a pata channel, with more than one IDE device that one of them had to be a master and the other one a slave. I have my BIOS set to boot from SATA. The PATA channel I used for a cd/r and a hdd (the one that failed) strictly for mass storage.

StormJumper 2008-10-21 16:40:38 UTC #8

Oh sorry didn’t know or see anything about it being SATA, and at my age things get a little fuzzy anyway without the fuzzy descriptions

Have a nice day
you should still be able to set the HDD with the operating system as master in BIOS just put the jumper on the other HDD as cable select and connect it to the center connection on the IDE cable and make sure it is set as slave in BIOS

Andrew_G 2008-10-21 16:54:31 UTC #9

Will do that sir. Thank you for the help.
Update is that I slaved it into my sisters comp and got the same thing. Shows up as RAW format. I know it’s spinning up, but the heads don’t seem to be moving.
Have a nice evening.
UPDATED update: I just found this program http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download and am more than likely going to torpedo my disk right now. This has become man vs. machine to me, and I MUST win.

debro 2008-10-21 21:57:57 UTC #10

… when you were messing with the jumpers, you didn’t accidentally set it to “Compatibility” mode … which sets it to 32GB for compatibility with REALLY OLD motherboards & bios’ … right?

Andrew_G 2008-10-22 00:28:52 UTC #11

Ha, good thought. I have had the jumpers in every combination known, and if they would have fit, I would have run them diagonally as well.
That program I just finished using really took it apart. Of course the pictures I was originally trying to recover which were stored at about 2 mb a piece, now seem to be way smaller, but at least I have all of the files to try and do something with. So far none of the videos, but I have gone through a fraction of a percentage so far, so I remaim hopeful of finding them.

debro 2008-10-22 14:38:29 UTC #12

[QUOTE=Andrew G;2144831]Ha, good thought. I have had the jumpers in every combination known, and if they would have fit, I would have run them diagonally as well.
That program I just finished using really took it apart. Of course the pictures I was originally trying to recover which were stored at about 2 mb a piece, now seem to be way smaller, but at least I have all of the files to try and do something with. So far none of the videos, but I have gone through a fraction of a percentage so far, so I remaim hopeful of finding them.[/QUOTE]
Do you think reducing the addressable sector size from 250GB down to 32GB (aka 1/8ish) may have something to do with it?

Previously I’ve found that changing the setting of the size limit jumper on an occupied drive rendered it unreadable … maybe Hitachi do something different?

Have you actually looked at the images to see if they are actually recovered? Or is the drive recovering gibberish?

Andrew_G 2008-10-22 16:02:06 UTC #13

I didn’t see a jumper setting to limit the size, and believe you me, I have been all over the documentation of this drive to see if I’m missing anything.
What my recovery process rendered was 148 recup.dir files that take up about 100 gigs. I have looked randomly though a dozen of them. Lot’s IS junk, text files and want not. But I am encouraged to have found a few audio files that work and so far ONE pic. This will take DAYS to go through (for a working guy in his spare time).
What I have found that is DIScouraging is that some of the pics I found were TINY (as in like 15k pic tiny) which I don’t really get, as my pics are all in the 2 mb range.

Also ALOT of stuff from previous formats, when that was my OS drive. I guess windows just changes the first letter of a file name and then overwrites it down the road.

I’ll update when I know more of what I got off of it.
But I have disconnected the drive and if I find a better utility I will try again.
Dude, I LOVE that sig! I choked I laughed so hard.

debro 2008-10-22 20:31:13 UTC #14

If you know anyone that runs linux (or you feel tempted to install) it can often mount things that windows doesn’t like
DON"T WRITE OVER YOUR HDD

It may just be that the HDD is working fine (?) and the partition tables are all screwed up.

I froze a drive once … it does work … until it unfreezes - which gives you about 10minutes after windows finishes booting, to get all your stuff off it.

It was a 80GB HDD, and I estimate that I got about 2GB’s of the 70ish GB’s that was on it before it unfroze.

And it never worked again …

Andrew_G 2008-10-23 02:11:56 UTC #15

Yeah, the ol’ freezer is in this drives future, but not until I have found a few more utilities to try to force the stuff off. When I am satisfied that I have explored all software options I will soak it in liquid nitrogen if I have to.
Thanks once again everyone for the great input on this (have I even SAID thanks?)
Have a great day…

tropic 2008-10-23 03:27:47 UTC #16

If you’re able to recover even a handful of files and the drive isn’t causing Windows to crash, I suspect your only problem might be damaged partition info. It happens, especially when a drive with write caching enabled disappears from Windows Explorer but reappears after a reboot. The cause could be an aging or inadequate PSU, bad cables or spotty connectors, voltage fluctuations, bad/corrupted controller drivers, etc., and not necessarily a damaged HDD.

I’ve used GetDataBack in the past to recover data from toasted partitions. It basically scans the drive sector by sector to recreate the missing partition–by reading the drive using this partition overlay, you can copy your files onto a known good media.

Anyway, just letting you know what’s worked for me.

Andrew_G 2008-10-23 18:01:00 UTC #17

Well, it can’t hurt. I’ll give that a try. Voltage fluctuations I could see being the problem, but not so much the other hardware things.
Controller drivers? Aren’t these a windows plug and play deal?
Thanks for the info sir, I will give that program a shot.