Help with Error Message

cdonovan

My external hard drive halted my boot up this morning it said that there was an error, it had to fix a few clusters in a few folders, it did, and then booted up. Some of the files that I have were available some were not and stated an I/O error.

I shut down my system, and booted back up, now I can see the files, but can't always use them. I'm trying to burn some to disk, some are availabe, some not. I don't want to turn the system off incase I loose everything.

It all started last night, when I saved a couple of files(jpegs), which appeared correct, and then after going back into the file folder, it showed half the image, and the other half was blank.

I have blood pressure through the roof. Some of these pictures are not backed up yet. I am not sure what to do.

Can anyone help/make a suggestion? Other than the obvious, you should always back up right away...please don't rub salt in my wounds:cry

MikeKelly

what is your OS? Mac or Windows?
Have you heard about Disk Warrior?
google it, if you are in Mac OS, DW4 saved me once to rebuild the file directory. Also, if you are using any exterenal drive, you need to make sure it's not power supply problem that may corrupt the file or directory table.

cdonovan

I'm using windows. I left the computer on last night as I hadn't gotten anywhere with google searches, in the middle of the night we had a thunder and lightning storm which cut the power anyway. So the only way that I could reboot my computer was to have completly disconnected the hard drive that was the problem. It is an external harddrive.

I've never heard of disk warrior, I'll see what I can do with that. thanks, anyone else with suggestions. I haven't been brave enough to try reconnecting it now that my pc is up and running :cry


I feel like I 'm going to be sick.:cry

cmason

Disk warrior is Mac only.

I recommend checking out SpinRite: http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

geospatial_junkie

There are numerous recovery software out there and some are definitely not cheap! I've never had an I/O error however, judging from the behaviour of your machine, you'll need it. For future reference, defraging once per month should cure you of this ever happening again. Many people don't realize that if you have a lot files such as jpgs or mp3's it is really critical to defrag frequently as you are constantly moving around files.

I've had a similar corruption problem with an external hard-drive that had several thousand photos and I had to use recovery software. The problem with this is that not all recovery software works. I had to try three separate software packages before I found one the actually managed to see the files on the drive and recover them.

Richard

geospatial_junkie wrote:

For future reference, defraging once per month should cure you of this ever happening again. Many people don't realize that if you have a lot files such as jpgs or mp3's it is really critical to defrag frequently as you are constantly moving around files.

Fragmentation is a performance issue, mainly. It should not create corruption.

geospatial_junkie

What could have caused it then? I don't want the same thing happening to me?!

pyry

I'd say that drive is this >< close to giving up the ghost completely. Back up everything you can get out of it and replace it.

You can get external storage devices that have two HDs inside that can be set up to run in mirror mode. Those devices, running mirroring, can get past one failed drive without losing data. You can then replace the defective one while running on the other.

Richard

geospatial_junkie wrote:

What could have caused it then? I don't want the same thing happening to me?!

There are many possible causes of drive corruption, but the most likely source is simple hardware failure. It doesn't happen often--I have never had a drive failure in 25 years of heavy PC use--but it can happen any time. The best protection is to always have two copies of everything you value on separate media.

cmason

Richard wrote:

There are many possible causes of drive corruption, but the most likely source is simple hardware failure. It doesn't happen often--I have never had a drive failure in 25 years of heavy PC use--but it can happen any time. The best protection is to always have two copies of everything you value on separate media.

Funny, I have had four fail on me. Two failed due to the drive controller, two due to something on the drive itself. Drive controllers used to be cards you plugged into the PC, but of course now they are part of the motherboard. My last failure was due to motherboard.

In your case, since this is an external drive, it probably isn't a controller, unless other USB devices are also wonky. Again, not likely.

Harddrives are extremely fragile, with amazingly tight tolerances. It doesn't take much to have them fail. The industry states Mean Time Between Failure for harddrives saying they will last years. Just remember that this is average across all harddrives they make. Some last longer, some have much shorter lives. If you ever wondered why hard drives in say Best Buy are so inexpensive and those for the commercial market (like Raptors) are so expensive, it is for this reason. Home drives just are not as durable, and it is assumed you wont use them much.

Harddrives can fail for internal reasons: If a region gets damaged, it can cascade around the drive as the internal drive software attempts to try to recover. It also occurs when the internal hardware goes bad, and the hard drive just gets confused. In the first case, the software I recommended above can help. In the second case the only thing that helps is a backup and new hard drive.

cdonovan

I was away for the long weekend and came back yesterday, I made sure all the plugs were ok, booted back up and the ckdisk wanted to replace bad clusters on that drive again, I stopped it and continued to boot up, I was able to access the drive like nothing bad had happened, I'm currently in the process of backing up all the files on disks, all except that file that was saying there were errors in it.

I wanted to run the disk defrag, but it told me that it didn't need to be run, but I ran it anyway. I'm going to continue backing up, but then when I'm done, should I just shut down the computer and boot back up letting the chk disk do it's job on the clusters? I have a second copy of the originals in this corrupt file, but not the edits....no big deal, I'm happy to re edit as long as I haven't lost everything!

What do you folks think!?!

Richard

cdonovan wrote:

should I just shut down the computer and boot back up letting the chk disk do it's job on the clusters?

Yes. If the problem was just a few bad sectors, chkdsk can usually fix it. It will not recover data that may have been lost in the bad sectors, but it will restore integrity to the file system.

cdonovan

Oh crap

Well I thought it was ok.....it was until I went to save something new to it. The jpeg was fragmented, and now I'm getting funky error messages and stuff again.

I'm going to have to do something with it, but I'm not sure what.....It's a Mybook by WD. If I get a new one, should I move the files on it to the new HD? Or will that bring whatever problem I had to the new one as well? Should I just load the files from the back up disks that I have created instead!? I don't know where to start.

I bought from Costco, so I am pretty sure they will take it back and exchange it, but I want to be sure of what to do with the old files on it before that happens!

Scott_Quier

Since it's an external drive, I'm assuming you don't have O/S files on it. Since you've already gone through the process of backing up all the data, and found that you get errors when writing to the drive I think you have two options:

1. Re-partition the drive, re-format it (the slow re-format), and restore all your data. Now run chkdsk on it and see if it reports any errors. If not, you are probably pretty good.

2. Return it to CostCo. Before returning it, I would re-partition and re-format it (as above). That should wipe the data from "most" prying eyes. Of course, you could get one of those programs that "securely" over-writes all data locations multiple times with random ones and zeros - but that's probably over-kill.

I've not yet had the opportunity/need to return electronics to CostCo. I have friends that have and they didn't get any argument.

cmason

Scott_Quier wrote:

Since it's an external drive, I'm assuming you don't have O/S files on it. Since you've already gone through the process of backing up all the data, and found that you get errors when writing to the drive I think you have two options:

1. Re-partition the drive, re-format it (the slow re-format), and restore all your data. Now run chkdsk on it and see if it reports any errors. If not, you are probably pretty good.

2. Return it to CostCo. Before returning it, I would re-partition and re-format it (as above). That should wipe the data from "most" prying eyes. Of course, you could get one of those programs that "securely" over-writes all data locations multiple times with random ones and zeros - but that's probably over-kill.


I've not yet had the opportunity/need to return electronics to CostCo. I have friends that have and they didn't get any argument.

Unfortunately, it sounds as if you have much deeper level issues with this harddrive. chkdsk is actually a very poor utility, it does actually very little other than finding clusters of data that do not relate to others. It doesnt actually 'fix' much of anything. Formatting will clean up any directory errors, as well as help the drive to map out any bad sectors.

But it sounds like your drive has more hardware issues: you are getting I/O errors, and seemingly random issues with accessing files. At times files appear to be corrupted. This sounds like issues with the drive having issues accessing the data on the disk, which can mean the data itself is bad, or it can mean that the disk just can not get the data off. The files may be fine on disk, but the errors get introduced when the disk tries to read and transfer the data off the drive.

The Spinrite program I referenced earlier is famous for helping to correct similar errors, since it actually does a bit level correction of the drive, mapping and replacing sectors as it goes. But since you have the data backed up, and you have the option to replace the drive, that is the route I would go, simply to save the $80 that Spinrite costs.

I would recommend that you replace the drive, attempt to copy files from it to the new drive (if possible). If the drive can not access the file, or accesses it incorrectly, you may get a bad version of the file on the new drive. So, if copying fails, then simply apply your backup to the new drive and get on with the photography.

cdonovan

cmason wrote:

Unfortunately, it sounds as if you have much deeper level issues with this harddrive. chkdsk is actually a very poor utility, it does actually very little other than finding clusters of data that do not relate to others. It doesnt actually 'fix' much of anything. Formatting will clean up any directory errors, as well as help the drive to map out any bad sectors.

But it sounds like your drive has more hardware issues: you are getting I/O errors, and seemingly random issues with accessing files. At times files appear to be corrupted. This sounds like issues with the drive having issues accessing the data on the disk, which can mean the data itself is bad, or it can mean that the disk just can not get the data off. The files may be fine on disk, but the errors get introduced when the disk tries to read and transfer the data off the drive.

The Spinrite program I referenced earlier is famous for helping to correct similar errors, since it actually does a bit level correction of the drive, mapping and replacing sectors as it goes. But since you have the data backed up, and you have the option to replace the drive, that is the route I would go, simply to save the $80 that Spinrite costs.

I would recommend that you replace the drive, attempt to copy files from it to the new drive (if possible). If the drive can not access the file, or accesses it incorrectly, you may get a bad version of the file on the new drive. So, if copying fails, then simply apply your backup to the new drive and get on with the photography.

I purchased Spinrite, and I'm really not sure how to use it. I don't have a floppy drive, so i purchased it and placed it on a disk as a img file. I have tried (unsuccessfully) since then to use it, it won't open for me at all but i am sure that' my fault and not the program
I have to go to costco in the next day or so anyway, so I'll check their return policy at the same time. Have never had problems with anything like that there before, I'm more worried about data loss and recovery than anything

Incindentially, does weather play much into this, I know moisture is never good for electronics, but we've had more rain this summer than I can ever remember, things don't usually get time to dry up outside before it's raining again. Helps with my mood too

cmason

cdonovan wrote:

I purchased Spinrite, and I'm really not sure how to use it. I don't have a floppy drive, so i purchased it and placed it on a disk as a img file. I have tried (unsuccessfully) since then to use it, it won't open for me at all but i am sure that' my fault and not the program
I have to go to costco in the next day or so anyway, so I'll check their return policy at the same time. Have never had problems with anything like that there before, I'm more worried about data loss and recovery than anything

Incindentially, does weather play much into this, I know moisture is never good for electronics, but we've had more rain this summer than I can ever remember, things don't usually get time to dry up outside before it's raining again. Helps with my mood too

You need to burn the ISO to a CD, then boot from your CD drive. Spinrite has its own OS and boots from that. So take the image file, and follow this to get the ISO on a CD:

http://www.petri.co.il/how_to_write_iso_files_to_cd.htm


Then reboot your machine, making sure that you have it configured to boot from CD.

Choose the second option in Spinrite, let it go, it could take a long time.

weather does not play a role in this, harddrives are fairly well sealed and dry inside since the tolerances between the head and the platter are in the micrometers.