Hi All, So weird, my laptop crapped out the 2nd day into our 2 week vacation. Had network trouble, rebooted, and got the "no operating system found" message. Went to BIOS and saw HDD0: <blank>. Was on the road from Col. Springs that morning heading for Estes Park, had to get off in Monument to go back roads and saw a Staples sign. The wife pulled over in a strip mall so I could locate it on the phone, while I'm doing that, she says "look, there's a computer repair shop straight ahead"! Only 15 mins from opening, so I waited until he opened up. He installed a new 1T drive and burned the Acronis repair ISO on my removable backup HDD to a CD and we were on our way by 10:15. Got to EP later that day and was able to get up and running in less than an hour. Now here's the question! I used the Acronis utilities to initialize and partition the new drive. The default type was "primary" until the 4th partition, then they go to "logical". All my partitions were in the same (apparent) place with the right drive letters and all. This morning I checked my nightly backup to find it had failed. When I looked at the options, it only had C & D checked. When I tried to check E, F, & G, it said "partitions not found" even though they are there and accessible for read/write. So, I went back through the whole routine again but did the partitions as all logical. Now I can check the E, F, & G boxes w/o errors ( won't know if it works until in the morning). My 1st attempt using primary, Windows took care of hiding the reserved partition, the 2nd try using logical, I had to manually adjust drive letters. Here are screenshots of Win's disk manager which looks the same as it always has, and one from "Active Partition Manager" which is completely different, Drives are out of order, there are 2 blocks showing unallocated, the boot partition is in the middle, etc. Can anyone explain what the APM is trying to tell me? Russ
Well, whatever happened, laying the drive out as c - primary, and a single extended containing the rest of the partitions as logicals works fine now. Would still like to know what's up with the graphic of the APM... Russ
Bought a USB enclosure (connection LED is lit) for the failed drive to see if it can be resurrected. BIOS does not see it, Windows sees it but - the size is wrong, no drive letter, not initialized (tried initializing it but always fails). Various (Win) partition programs see it but can do nothing with it. Boot partition programs like G-Parted don't see it. SMART monitoring showed a caution mark and said it had too many bad clusters for awhile before it failed. Diskpart only shows "disk 0", but I can "select disk 1" and it says disk 1 is now active. can't get any further. Are there any tools that can at least check / defrag / read / etc without seeing a drive letter? Pretty much doing this to see if I can, there's not much point to it other than that... Russ
It might be worth a try to make a live Linux USB drive and see if Linux can read the drive. I once had a portable hard drive go raw. I could not get anywhere with Windows. I made the Lunus USB and was able to retrieve all my personal files
I'm running "HDD Raw copy". It sees the drive and seems to be working, albeit sloooowly. After 20 hrs, it's at 15%, so prolly 3 more days to see what happens...Not much, I'd imagine, as every cluster so far has thrown a read error and there's zero recovered so far... Russ
That sounds like a defect spindle (rotation) or tracking (head movement) servo. In other words, if the head cannot move anymore to read anything, every sector will just throw a read error (after a lot of retries). I cannot imagine that the whole plattern surface just got bad, all at once. If the drive cannot seek, no way to recover anything (except for expensive forensic labs).
It ran for 24 hrs, then blue-screened. My "fun meter" finally ran out, ended up taking the HDD out in the garage and ball-peening it into pieces... Russ
Laptop HDDs fail more often. - They are smaller, means less robust parts and more heat. Not to mention much more data on less space. - They run in a restricted space with less adequate cooling. - They are exposed to much more movement and shocks, by nature. Give it a good funeral. Desktop HDDs, especially the older ones with less capacities, are much more robust. Still have ones from the 90's and they still work as swap disks (340MB).
Yup, this is the only HDD I've had fail since my first computer in 1991. Not too bad. Thank God for a good b/u program! Russ