Hard drive corruption

May 28, 2004 9:56 PM

I have a Hard drive question, using XP Pro SP1, 3 hard drives, last one is a Western Digital 160GB special edition. MI (partition and file corruption)

My setup:

60GB 8mb cache primary, single NTFS 4KB partition
100GB 2mb cache slave, dual NTFS (split 50/50), 8KB partition
160GB 8mb cache primary, dual NTFS (split 50/50), 4KB partition

first two are ok.

I started losing entire directories on the last partition of the last drive. I did chkdsk, found 15GB of bad sectors. (!)

Backed up any useable data, formatted drive, wiped clean, started over. NTFS in Partition Magic 8. I moved my movies to the first partition (76.4GB, 7.06 free) and they SEEM to be ok. I am getting audio glitches but they were slightly damaged when the drive went out in the first place.

I moved a folder of shorter videos to the last partition. The videos stammer and glitch. The original videos that were on another drive don't. I used the WD program to check my disks, in quick mode and enhanced mode, did not find any errors. What should I do next? I don't know if they are corrupted, so how can I be sure?

I later found my problem was I didn't have SP1 installed, after reinstalling windows. Non SP1 windows has a 127GB limit. (I lost a lot over a simple human error.... fuck.) I have SP1 now.

posted by Keyser Soze to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Response by poster: That last line might have thrown you off. I have SP1, but video still glitches when I move it to the last partition and play it back.
posted by Keyser Soze at 4:33 AM on May 29, 2004

The videos that are glitchy--the original ones that you currently have on another drive play fine, right?

Try copying the glitchy ones to another drive to see what happens. If they play fine, then it sounds like your computer is having trouble reading off of your 160GB. If they are still glitchy, it sounds like something happened to them on their way to the 160GB. Also, is the problem only with the last partition on your 160GB? What happens if those videos are on the first partition?

You installed SP1 before you copied the files to the 160GB drive, right? If not, that could be your problem right there. Ideally, you would have installed SP1 before you even formatted and partitioned your 160GB, but I'm not sure if that is necessary if you used Partition Magic.
posted by TheIrreverend at 4:41 AM on May 29, 2004

is reformatting going to help? sounds like your drive is dying. i think you might have simply made the bad sectors invisible, without fixing whatever the underlying problem is (not that i think it is fixable). i don't know for sure, though - does anyone else do this?
posted by andrew cooke at 6:35 AM on May 29, 2004

Response by poster: Isn't Windows XP chkdsk ( /r /x /w) powerful enough to find any physical defects in the drive, and if not so, why wouldn't the Western Digital program find any in its sector to sector scan? I am rather confident the drive is not damaged, as far as I know. It is less than a year old. Computer had power issues, but they are gone now.

By the way, I transferred a video file to a seperate disk, and it plays fine. (100GB original file, tansferred to 60GB with no problems)
posted by Keyser Soze at 2:02 AM on May 30, 2004

Response by poster: TheIrreverend: I have over 95 percent of the first partition filled with Divx and Xvid files, they appear to play fine (assuming of course the slight audio glitches but those were found prior to formatting.)
posted by Keyser Soze at 2:04 AM on May 30, 2004