Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with harddrive

Win7, New(ish) HD: BSOD, NTLDR missing WTF!?!

DetonatedManiac — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:59:54 -0800

Have Win 7 and new hard drive installed ~1 month ago on 3 year old computer. Today, Blue Screen of Death, then NTLDR missing, got it into SafeMode... now what? Problem: My computer, with a main hard drive and Win 7 installed ~1 month ago, just had a Blue Screen of Death saying basically "BIOS problem, if this is the first time it happened please restart". I restarted. Got "NTLDR missing" twice with restarts. Turned rig totally off, waited 20 seconds, turned it back on, was able to get it into safe mode. Poked around a few minutes and decided I have no idea what I am doing. Turned it off, it hung trying to shut down for 20 minutes. Powered it off

Now I am here...(on another computer)

I'm reasonably computer savvy but I've never had any issues with computers for 3 years (see backstory). The win7 setup was done by Geek Squad (I'm lazy and more importantly I have no time). Interestingly, the rig itself is 3 years old but the reason for the new hard drive (and tangentially the upgrade to Win 7) is because the previous hard drive, when this was an XP machine, died spectacularly.

So wtf. Is this a hardware issue? is my PSU screwing up my Hard Drives? Did Geek Squad not setup Win 7 properly? Is this just bad luck?

Basically What should I do?

Back-story (excruciating detail feel free to skip):
I got a top of the line, self designed computer 3 years ago. I designed it correctly, had it built by some pros at a computer shop nearby, and never did anything stupid to it. It never had the slightest problem in 3 years. Never saw BSOD (on XP) or had to reformat, never even had a virus or spy ware problem or anything.

~4 months ago i got suspicious of PSU unit making noise. Had it looked at by Best Buy and researched online. Basically everyone says if it goes it goes, but it wont take anything with it and just replace it then. Fair enough (plus best buy tech said the PSU was upside down reducing airflow causing noise... fair enough flipped the PSU, seemed fine... then all this happened... post hoc ergo propter hoc (i know... that is a fallacy)?

~1 months ago, my Main Hard Drive, a Raptor Drive that is supposed to be overkill for personal use, died. Just Died. Took to Best Buy because I needed something quick and again, I have no time. They said the following:
- Main hard drive (raptor) was toast (good-bye tons of personal data),
- Secondary internal hard drive looked fine, but we backed it up to be safe.
- PSU was fine
- The reason of the failure was that I always left the computer on but never in sleep mode for 3 years (ok, I'm an idiot...I thought if you leave it on all the time it is good for it... oh you have to put it in sleeeeeeep... ohhhhhh)

As a result I:
- Got a new Hard Drive (the secondary hard drive was suspect since it was under the same stress as the main hard drive... also it is comparatively small given how huge and cheap Hard Drives are these days)
- Got Windows 7 (since i was getting a new Hard Drive and lost all my data anyway, made a good time to upgrade with a clean install)
- Had Geek Squad install it and tweak it etc (again, lazy and no time)

Today - Problem described above. I will note that I did notice that the new hard drive was seeming to spin up and then stop suddenly at various times, but I noticed no computer problems and chaulked it up to just a "different sound" than I was used to. Also, it seems that Win 7 has a problem keeping the computer in sleep for more than about 7 minutes. I have been meaning to mess around with that but, again, no time.

So here I am no... I am making time, I have all Christmas Break. What can I do to fix this right? Thanks in advance for any advise.

I'll wipe my ass with a roll of Intel X-25 SSD drives!

melorama — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 05:48:04 -0800

I need semi-definitive opinions regarding the real-world lifespan of an Intel X-25M Solid State Drive running in a Macbook Pro. I just couldn't pass up a $214 Black Friday deal on an 80GB Intel X25-M (2nd generation) SSD, and am excited to install it into my "early-2008" Macbook Pro (pre-unibody) w/4GB of RAM. My plan is to replace the current system drive (a 500GB 7200RPM Seagate Momentus) with the SSD, and physically relocate the Seagate drive to the Superdrive bay, using the MCE OptiBay kit.

The original plan was to install just the base OS (Mac OS X 10.6.2) to the SSD, then relocate my home folder to the larger Seagate drive. But then I got to thinking I might actually want to have everything in my ~/Library and ~/Library/Application Support/ folders to live on the SSD instead. Because I am a neurotic multitasker (I generally have over 50+ tabs open in Firefox at any given moment, just as a general reference point), my logic tells me that I would see a performance benefit from having the ~/Library folder on the SSD, since all my running applications are constantly reading and writing to this folder. So my new plan is to just leave my homefolder on the SSD, and relocate my iTunes Library, videos, pictures, etc on the Seagate drive.

But as astute followers of SSD technology know, MLC-based SSDs will burn out faster the more often you write to them. I've done a lot of searching, and have found conflicting opinions on whether or not it's a good idea to leave oft-written to system files such as the OS page/swapfile on the SSD drive, because of the accelerated wear this would cause. Because of this, many Windows users simply disable the pagefile (despite recommendations from Microsoft to keep it enabled on an SSD), but this is not a viable option under OS X. Another concern with OS X and SSDs is Spotlight indexing, the disabling of which is simply not something I'm willing to do, given how useful Spotlight is.

So the question is, just how quickly will an SSD (specifically the X25) "burn out" if I keep my Mac's swapfiles, ~/Library/* files, Mail.app mailboxes on it, with Spotlight enabled? I also run Crashplan online backup, which does realtime block-level, encrypted incremental backups of my drives up to the cloud.

Additionally, will the lack of TRIM support in OS X cause a significant slowdown in overall performance (i.e. near spinning-platter speeds) if I run my SSD in this manner?

I don't really expect this 80GB X25 SSD to be a long-term thing. I fully expect the sizes of SSDs to significantly increase in the next 12-18 months, at inversely lower prices, at which point I will almost certainly feel no remorse in buying a new SSD, regardless of the level of wear on my current X25. But if my X25 burns out in 6-10 months, that won't be worth it, either.

What say you, Mac SSD-heads?

Second time's the charm?

The Winsome Parker Lewis — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:58:36 -0800

Please help me rearchitect my Apple-specific wireless home network and iTunes library! Eleven paragraphs of geeky details within (sorry!). I have a big (~100GB) iTunes library I've been accumulating over at least a decade of ripping all my CDs and, in more recent days, my DVDs as well. That project is still ongoing and may never end. I've invested a lot of hours in encoding and cataloging my physical media, and I want to keep it safe for, well, forever. I'm motivated by a teeny bit of paranoia that my discs will scratch and I'll lose something. I keep a tidy house but I guess you could call me a data hoarder. ;-)

This summer I decided to free up room on my MacBook (occupying that much disk space just for iTunes was pretty ridiculous). I bought a WD My Book Mirror Edition and moved the library to it. I configured RAID mirroring for the dual drives so I'd have a backup in case one failed. Before the move, I regularly backed up the library onto my Time Capsule (using Time Machine) along with all my other non-iTunes stuff; the RAID mirroring made that seem redundant so I deleted the backup and excluded it from all future backups. Also, instead of connecting the MyBook straight to my computer, I plugged it into the Time Capsule USB port so I could carry the laptop around the house and still use iTunes wirelessly.

I was really proud of this setup until a couple issues reared their heads:

Latency. Playing music in iTunes over this network works mostly fine apart from the occasional stutter. There's also often a very long delay (30 seconds or more) between when I tell a new song to play and the audio actually begins. Similar delays between when I "get info" on a file and the info window appears. iTunes beachballs frequently now, completely unresponsive while it does... stuff. If I wait, it eventually takes care of whatever it was doing and becomes usable again. So annoying.

Latency's an even bigger issue when watching movies. By default, the Time Capsule was configured for 802.11b/g/n compatibility and movies were unwatchably laggy. I found that forcing pure 802.11n improved performance a lot and movies ran almost as smoothly as music, with only occasional, forgivable hiccups and long delays for play/pause, scrubbing, etc. The downside of killing 802.11b/g compatibility is that my iPhone 3G can no longer use the network, as it only goes up to g. I really miss that functionality, for things like Airfoil Speakers and iTunes Remote.

Another issue is the unfamiliarity of maintaining a network drive that's out of sight, out of mind. Whenever I want to use iTunes I have to mount the drive (I run a script to do it automatically at logon). Whenever I leave the house I have to unmount it. I've forgotten a couple times and disconnected improperly. There were also a couple times when I had trouble getting online and reset the Time Capsule, forgetting that the disk was mounted. Which leads us to the next sad, sad paragraph...

This past weekend, tragedy struck. I think it was related to an improper disconnect while data was being written. Suddenly iTunes refused to read the drive at all. Time Capsule reported a "problem" with the drive. I plugged it into the MacBook and ran Disk Utility. It failed to verify or repair the disk and said I would have to format it. What's worse, the mirrored drive was identically corrupted too. I lost my whole library and the supposed "failsafe!" Crap! I really botched this one up.

I'm investigating data recovery options. I should be able to restore my files. Not sure how this is going to play out but it makes my heart ache. Any suggestions for cheap-as-in-free ways to get my library back in working condition would be appreciated.

But what I'm really asking for in this question is the best way to prevent this from happening again and in a way that works better than my first attempt. Assuming the drive is not mechanically broken and I'll be able to get my files back, how can I redesign my network to do all of the following:

Access my iTunes library wirelessly
Minimize latency
Keep a backup of the library that's actually safe and won't give me any more headaches
Use my iPhone on the network
Require no additional hardware purchases if at all possible

I can't think of a single way to fulfill all of those requirements. Maybe it's impossible. But you are smarter than me, I trust. If it makes a difference, the MacBook is a late 2007 Santa Rosa model, 2.2 GHz, running Snow Leopard. Let me know if I've left out any other details that could be helpful. Thanks!

What are these plastic rails on my hard drive called?

billybunny — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:43:26 -0800

What are these rails which snap into the side of a hard drive and allow it to slide into a bay called? And also, where can I get some more? My computer's case has absolutely no identifying information, and hell if I can remember who the manufacturer was 5 years after I bought the thing. I tried going into a computer store to get some more, but I couldn't even figure out what I was trying to buy, let alone if they'd have any of them!

Does a 3 mm height difference matter for Macbook pro hard drives?

Phire — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:45:10 -0800

Will the 15" Macbook Pro 4.1 (early 2008) be compatible with a 2.5" Form Factor internal hard drive that's 12.5mm rather than the standard 9.5mm? I can't find this information anywhere and I'm asking for a friend. He ordered this hard drive not realizing at first that it was thicker than normal, and now he wants to know if he should go through the rather arduous process of cancelling the order and getting a new one or if the Macbook chassis will accommodate the extra height. Thanks in advance!

Wireless router that can connect to a printer and external hard drive?

Dasein — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:23:12 -0800

Please help me find a router to make my parents' lives easier. I am looking for a wireless router that will allow me to connect to a printer and an external hard drive via USB. It doesn’t need to be wireless N (G is fine), but if it’s N it needs to be dual-band. Other than the Apple Airport Extreme with a USB hub attached, what wireless routers can do this? The models from Linksys with Storage Link and D-Link with Shareport seem to be able to connect to either a printer or a USB drive, but not both simultaneously. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I'd like my parents to be able to wirelessly print and back up data to a RAID drive. They run Windows, and while I'll install Bonjour to run the Airport Extreme if necessary, I know they will be a little suspicious about the comptability of Apple products. If the Airport Extreme is the only way to do this, anything you could say that would allow me to reassure them that printing will be seamless with Bonjour would also be appreciated.

Does my hard drive have permanent issues?

R a c h e l — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:05:00 -0800

Can I remove a partition and use my hard disk as normal? Rather long explanation... So, my original problem would be best explained by this older question I asked.

Basically, my vista partition stopped booting one day, with a couple error messages when I attempted startup recovery, the most significant (I think) being "system volume on disk is corrupt". Does this mean there is a part of my hard drive that has been messed up? I've never been too gentle with my laptop, and I have dropped it 3-4ish feet onto carpet more than once (yes, I know how terrible that it. I'm completely aware).

I'm determined to use this until it refuses to turn on, though. I mean, I also cracked the screen and am losing real estate all over at a fairly constant rate. An external monitor helps with that, though. At any rate, I'd like to install a copy of windows 7 that I just bought (I've been using the beta, which I've had since March, and likes to tell me it's counterfeit frequently. This was installed on a different partition from Vista, and has worked fine since Vista stopped.)

So, in installing the copy of Windows 7, I would like to give it a bit more room than the current Windows 7 partition of 20gb. Vista has 200gb, and everything I need on there has been backed up. I know fairly well how to erase the vista partition, grow the Windows 7 partition, etc.

My question is, will I run into problems because of whatever caused the Vista failure? Is there a bad sector or something that will give me grief? Is there some sort of formatting I can do before installing windows 7 to sort of start over with the disk? (There is absolutely nothing on this computer that is not backed up that I need.)

I'm sorry for the long explanation, with probably plenty of extraneous information. Thanks very much for your help!

Dying drive?

Dee Xtrovert — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:30:34 -0800

Is my hard drive dead? Can I save it, at least long enough to back it up? I have a 500GB Lacie external harddrive. And a Mac with OSX. When I turn it on, the blue "on" light flashes, but never stops blinking (which it does when it's fully on.) It clicks every four seconds or so, the same clicking noise it makes if one turns it off manually. What could the problem be? How best to save the info on it? I back everything up, it had just been a while for this one.

Hard drive connection to my HDTV?

zardoz — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:30:32 -0800

In the market for an HDTV, but what should I know beforehand to ensure that I can connect it to a separate hard drive and watch videos already stored on the drive? I have quite a few videos backed up on my hard drive (Intel iMac), and I want to find out the most painless way to watch those videos on an HDTV. Most are standard quality, and a few are high-def videos I'd like to play at the native 720 or 1080 on the TV.

The TV and computer are in separate rooms, so my idea is to either use the external hard drive I have now (about 300 gig capacity), and unplug the thing, walk it over to the TV and connect it. Not very elegant, but I wouldn't be doing this much. Also, memory is getting cheaper and cheaper, so I'm fine with buying another separate hard drive for this; in fact, that's probably the best idea.

Past that, I don't know...anything. Are there multiple kinds of cables I could connect the hard drive to the TV? Is just a USB port an option? What kind of connection is necessary there? Is this what HDMI is for? Firewire?

And if/when I get the hard drive connected, what kind of interface would be available to "talk" to the TV? I'm guessing this depends on model and brand. It seems that lots of people use XBox 360s for this, or maybe Apple TV or an Apple Mini....would these be good purchases for this plan?

So what are the key things I need to know to get this to work?

Seagate Hard drive Mac

yegga — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:10:15 -0800

How to get a Seagate FreeAgent Desk external hard drive to work with my Mac? I have this model: Link.

The drive came without any installation disks. Apparently compatible only with Windows.

How do I get this working with Mac OSX? Help!

Ice Ice Ipod, too cold? Too cold?

arniec — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:15:32 -0800

How bad is it for me to leave my iPod classic in the car all the time? I live in the Midwest where in the coldest parts of winter temperatures average about 17 degrees F (although they can and do drop below zero regularly) and our highs in the hottest months average in the mid 80s though we do have our post 100 degree days.

I park my car outdoors in the sunshine during the day, indoors in a standard garage during the night. In the garage items like bottled water and soda rarely freeze, but have on a few occasions. (Likewise soda stupidly left in the trunk of my car has frozen and left me some burst cans full of slush).

Given all of this, how bad is it for my iPod to be left in the car at all times? My iPod is a hard drive based iPod classic that I only use in my car. My dock for the iPod is in my glove box and it's somewhat inconvenient to remove from the car regularly, and I only take the iPod with me when I want to update the music.

But I am a computer guy and part of me knows that it's unsafe to use devices that have been in the cold, and that I should worry about condensation as the item warms up, etc, etc, etc. Of course, that being said, condensation is also likely to form as I take it from warm buildings to cold outdoors to a cold but rapidly heating car, right?

If the problem is specific to the hard drive would I be better off getting an iPod Nano or something not hard drive based? Or is the problem to the electronics?

Thanks in advance for settling this issue between my wife and I (she is constantly taking it out of the car, and thus constantly leaving me music-less as I don't expect to go to the car and my iPod to be missing)

Cloned drive won't boot

willcosgrove — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:56:43 -0800

How do I get a new hard drive, that's been cloned from my primary drive, to boot as the new primary drive? A few weeks ago I started seeing the signs of my primary drive starting to fail. So I bought a new drive. My old drive was a 300GB IDE, and my new one is a 500GB Sata drive. I used DriveXML to clone my primary to the new drive. After that was done, I took out my old primary and tried to get my computer to boot off of my new cloned drive and it's not working. I can see the drive I want to boot off of in the BIOS, and I tried setting it as the first choice to boot off of (I have 4 drives in my computer). Even with that it's not working. The screen will sit there, then it says "Boot from disk:" or something of that nature, and then an Nvidia and Intel copyright something or other pops up, and then it has a very small error message, and then it just loops over and over (But minus the post. It only posts once.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

USB SATA HD WTF FTW?

Admiral Haddock — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:58:09 -0800

Is my external HD enclosure killing drives? Or is it bad luck? I use a Mac.

I have this external enclosure for 2.5" drives. I put a new drive in there last year, but didn't use it until some months later (after loaning it to a friend). Drive was dead, and Disk Utility and Disk Warrior couldn't fix it. It was an extents error, and Disk Warrior alternatingly gave these errors: 2351, -36 and 2166, 2351.

My GF needed an external drive for Time Machine, and so we dropped in a new drive. Same errors, same lack of success with Disk Utility and Disk Warrior.

In each case, there has been no data on the drive, so I'm happy to pave them down to the lowest bits and bytes. A new drive is being sent by the retailer, but I don't want to kill it with the enclosure if it is at fault.

Is this an issue with the enclosure, or is this just bad luck with two different drives (by different makers)?

Best way to store 4 TB of media?

heliostatic — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:58:36 -0800

I'm looking for reliable, scalable storage, around 4 TB. I've got the usual setup: several computers, home network, lots of media to share. Right now, I've got most of the media on a NAS (Infrant NV), which holds ~2 TB with RAID. However, I've got another 2 TB floating around, and I'd rather use the NAS for backup. I don't want to lose the media, but the current setup is expensive and doesn't scale well (i.e. cheaply). I'd be willing to add external storage to an existing computer or build a new file server, but I'm not sure what will scale best over the next couple of years.

Looking for an external hard drive

The Lurkers Support Me in Email — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:35:40 -0800

My external hard drive has been making some very odd noises for a while and I’m looking for a good replacement. Your input would be appreciated. I’ve been using an external enclosure for the last year or so, but shortly after I bought the drive it started taking a long time to spin up (10+ seconds) before making a loud click sound and finally starting to read/write, during which time the app accessing the drive beachballs. I think it would be a good idea to replace the enclosure with an actual external disk instead of the Super Nintendo-esque setup I've got now, but I'd like to run my criteria past the hive mind to get some advice first.

Key points:

I want something whisper-quiet. I live in a very small apartment and can't imagine how I used to put up with a noisy dual-GPU tower machine now that I have an iMac.

The current drive is 1TB, but I'm considering going with a 2TB drive for a bit of extra space. Depends on the severity of the price jump.

I want something reliable. My belief is that all consumer-grade hard disks are ticking timebombs that will all fail at some point, but I'd like to avoid buying another IBM Deathstar.

Physical size is irrelevant; I'll be sticking it behind my display and never looking at it again. Performance is also a non-issue as it will only be used for Time Machine backups and bulk data storage.

eSATA is unnecessary as my iMac doesn't have a connection, but it does have an unused FireWire port that I'd like to take advantage of (freeing up a USB port in the process).

I live in Canada and will probably be ordering from there, but I don't think there's much difference in cross-border product availability these days.

Mystery noises and BSOD on my newish Acer Aspire One netbook. Am I screwed?

tealsocks — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:47:12 -0800

Mystery noises and BSOD on my newish Acer Aspire One netbook. Am I screwed? I bought an 11.6" Aspire One at Staples about a month and a half ago, and the night before last it started making a clicking sound followed by a beep which I can only assume is coming from the hard drive. Sometimes this sound is followed by a blue screen of death and sometimes i can just pick the computer up and it goes away. Is this the sound of a hard drive failing? I carry my netbook around a lot, but it's always in a padded laptop bag so I'm pretty sure I haven't damaged it in any way. Do I need to get a replacement?

Where's the XP Installer's Undo?

kristi — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:17:38 -0800

A Windows 2000 hard disk got clobbered by the XP installer and is "unallocated". What are my next steps? I have an old PC running Windows 2000 (SP 4). There are 3 internal drives:

D: 40 GB (Win2K system disk)
C: 200 GB
F: 500 GB

Recently, I tried to install WinXP on the C drive so I could dual-boot Win2K and XP. I ran the XP installer (new install, not upgrade); it successfully completed but I could never boot from C; it was giving me various errors about missing hal.dll and stuff. I've basically given up on the dual boot on this machine; I don't need it badly enough to spend more time on it.

After my first attempt to install XP, I discovered Win2K no longer mounts the F drive. It still shows up in the BIOS, but not in Windows Explorer; only the C and D drives show up in the Explorer address bar now.

When I go into Computer Management, I can see the missing drive in the Disk List and Graphical View, but not in the Volume List. In the Graphical View, it shows up as

(left side)
Disc 0
Basic
465 GB
Online

(right side)
[no letter drive here]
465 GB
Unallocated

As far as I can tell from Googling around, the F drive apparently had EZ-Drive on it (I tried Partition Magic 6, and it gave me an error saying "EZ-Drive has been detected on drive 0, but EZ-Drive is corrupt. Run the EZ-Drive setup diskette to correct this problem."), and apparently XP hates EZ-Drive.

I've tried running

fixmbr \Device\Harddisk0\Partition0

(that's the device that shows up using Recovery Console's map command) from the Recovery Console, but it didn't change anything.

The Add/Remove Hardware Wizard can see the drive, too (it says the device is working properly).

I ran Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics on the drive - did the Quick Test - and got

Test completed successfully

The drive shows up in the Physical Drive list in WD Diagnostics, but not the Logical Drive list.

I'd like to just undo whatever the XP installer did to the drive and get it back to where I can read and use it again. If I have to partition it, I can do that, but I'm wondering whether EZ-Drive will remain on the disk (it sounded like that would happen, based on some of the reading I've done) and what effect that would have on anything else I need to do in the future.

I only use this machine for a couple of pieces of software and I'd like to spend as little time as I can getting it working again. If at all possible, I'd love to avoid reformatting/repartitioning the drive. It just seems like there should be SOME way to undo whatever the XP installer did.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

What caused my drive to die?

comradestu — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:22:07 -0800

What happened that suddenly caused my harddrive to not be recognized by BIOS? I fired up my computer this evening to discover that none of the SATA devices were being recognized during POST/in BIOS. This included 1 LG DVD writer, 1 Seagate 1TB drive, and 1 Seagate 500gb drive.

[After panicing] I took out all 3 devices and tried them individually in two different computers. It appears that both the 1TB drive and the DVD writer are detected by BIOS on their own, and the 500gb drive is not. When the 500gb drive is coupled with either component, nothing is detected.

No strange noises are being made by this harddrive. It does sound like it's spinning up, but I can't be 100% sure. The drive was functioning fine when I was using it last night, and nothing out of the ordinary happened during the shut down procedure.

I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64, on ~2 month old hardware. Motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P. This 500gb drive (model ST3500320AS) however, is older. I'm currently looking for the receipt to determine exactly how old it is.

Do I have any hope of prying data off this drive? I don't own a SATA enclosure for 3.5" drives, but I can probably borrow one from a co-worker tomorrow (or buy one). Since having this drive plugged in seems to cause every other SATA device to stop working, I can't use a live cd to run testdisk or similar software.

More importantly, did this drive die on it's own, or could there be something else going on? How can I test for such a possibility?

(I'll mention that I do have backups of important files, so this shouldn't be a big issue.. But who wants to download 20gb of games off Steam again?)

iTunes + new hard drive = headache

jlkr — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:58:22 -0800

MrR moved my music drive (to a larger hard drive yay!) and iTunes is not handling this gracefully at all. (He hates iTunes, will not use it, and therefore did not follow any of the procedures detailed in the answers to this question.) The directory trees are all the same, the only change is the drive letter. How do I get iTunes to look in the right place without losing all the metadata (ratings, play dates/frequency)? (PC; iTunes does not organise my library; the old drive is already removed from my computer and wiped. Changing each file path individually is functionally not acceptable (30K files!), nor is changing the drive letter.)

Hard drive reads a lit-tle too regularly.

Lord Fancy Pants — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:41:39 -0800

My hard drive reads data like clockwork. Really! What's going on here? Usually a hard drive when it reads something sounds random:

BRRP, BRP brp e drp. . .clackity clackity clack brp brp brrrrp.

But periodically my computer slips into this very rhythmic mode and the hard drive reads something small every second on the second. It's so rythmic you could almost time an egg with it:

brp. . .brp. . .brp. . .brp. . .brp. . .brp. . .

I think it slows my computer down so I might want to do something about it. I know millions of computers must do this because just about every computer I've owned or used over the past several years has this "feature."

Is this a "virtual memory" thing? A house keeping function? Does any computer maven out there know what this extremely rythmic read is?

Tell me what internal hard drive to buy for my MacPro.

Joleta — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:17:34 -0800

Tell me what internal hard drive to buy for my Mac Pro. I'd like to add a 1TB internal hard drive to my fairly new Mac Pro. I plan to use this drive for Time Machine backups. There are about a gazillion choices for internal 3.5" SATA drives. I just want to know which brand and/or model to buy. I'm interested in reliability first, price second. Personal experiences, please.

backup --> iPod

Jaltcoh — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:00:25 -0800

Trying to get my music library from my external hard drive back onto my iPod while maintaining my sanity. (Apologies in advance for the lengthy/convoluted question.) I recently started having problems with my iPod and realized I should make sure to have a perfect, up-to-date backup. I started by turning on the iPod's hidden files. If you're familiar with these hidden files, you know that they have randomly generated names like "VCKT.m4a," "BBLC.m4a," etc. (no apparent indication of which songs these are), and they're in folders called "F00," "F01," etc. (Mine go up to F49 since I have over 7,000 songs.) I copied all of these files to my external hard drive. At the time this seemed like a really smart, thorough way to do it.

Then I went to the Apple Store and got my iPod fixed, which involved them restoring my iPod. So now I need to recreate my music library in my iPod using the external hard drive.

I thought this would be pretty simple: plug in the iPod and external hard drive to my Macbook at the same time, then drag and drop all the folders -- F00 through F49 -- from the external hard drive to the iPod, right? Well, I did this, and the cryptically named files do appear in the iPod when you look at the iPod's contents in the desktop. But if you try to use the iPod as a normal music-playing device, it doesn't work -- there are no songs that show up for you to listen to (whether you're looking at it in iTunes or disconnected from the computer).

I again thought I was being smart by seeing what happens when I "open" one of the hidden files. Hey cool, a random song gets copied to iTunes! And it's a normal song -- not "VCKT.m4a" but something I can actually listen to, with a song title in English, etc. Of course, I can then drag and drop this song from iTunes into my iPod. At first I thought this would be the solution: just do the same thing for all the songs.

But there are a couple problems with that, and I'd really appreciate any help getting around them. As I said, I have over 7,000 songs, roughly 70 GB of music. My computer's hard drive has about 4 GB left. So if I were to just open all the hidden files from my iPod into iTunes at once, it'd be a disaster: at best, I'd quickly get a message telling me my computer's hard drive couldn't hold any more. (And I'd be afraid I wouldn't be so lucky -- the hard drive could get filled up and paralyzed. This happened to someone I know.)

So, should I just copy the hidden files one folder at a time? I could do that, but that would mean opening up the songs from "F00," waiting for them to get copied to iTunes, then waiting for them to get copied to the iPod, then deleting those songs from iTunes and emptying the trash, then moving on to "F01" ... and repeating that whole thing 50 times. I'd like to avoid that if I can.

So my questions are:

(1) Is there an easier way to do this? I'd love to be able to just get it started, then sit back and let the computer handle it.

(2) I already feel kind of silly for how much of a minor ordeal this has turned into as a result of my backup method that I (mistakenly?) thought was so clever. Could someone please assure me that there's a way to follow through with this that won't mess things up even further?

(In case it's relevant, my external hard drive holds about 500 GB, I have a 160 GB iPod, and I'm using Mac OS 10.4.11.)

Hard drive trouble?

R a c h e l — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:59:55 -0800

Hard drive(I think) corrupted - I'm drowning in information. Help? I'm sure this has been addressed elsewhere but since there are so many different problems that happen with computers/hard drives/etc, I'm having a lot of trouble differentiating.

Me: HP Laptop, running Vista and an expired beta of windows 7 on different partitions. Also have a recovery partition installed by HP but that's just the OS and stuff, not my stuff. I almost always use(d) Vista, and all my files are accessible from there.

Problem: Vista only starts up partway,then gets stuck with a blank screen (after the "Windows loading" screen). I eventually power it down, turn it on, and the computer suggests I try startup recovery, which fails.

Oh: a note: my dad may have been the last one to turn on my computer before this happens, and he said it said something about installing an update (I think he said a service pack, but there hasn't been a new one recently - why would this be installing now? I usually just let the automatic updaters work their mojo, don't pay too much attention to it, so I can't provide more detail, sorry)

In the 'details' section, the two tests that startup recovery said failed were Unknown bugcheck: Bugcheck 50 (with some parameters listed - I can provide those if it's helpful) and then it said repair action: system files integrity and repair. Result: failed. Error code: Ox2

Then, the other "root cause found" by startup repair was "System volume on disk is corrupt. Repair action: File system repair (chkdsk) Result: completed successfully Error code: OxO

It tells me that startup repair failed. If I power it down and start again, the same thing happens.

Windows 7 works fine, if that's relevant.

So, my question is multifold(Is that a word?): Can this be repaired? Can I recover my pictures etc on my harddrive (yes, I know I should have backed them up, was actually external harddrive shopping the day that this happened)? I have another, legal, copy of Vista. Can I install that(after recovering my data)? About how much will data recovery cost?

Thanks so much, this is my first Ask MeFi question so I'm a little nervous. Do let me know if I did anything wrong!

What are my options with a dead external drive?

neewom — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:05:00 -0800

Stupid computerfilter: I didn't back up, and now the external drive seems dead. Options? I have a 150GB acomdata external hard drive ... not sure how old it is, really, but it's lasted a hell of a lot longer than I think is reasonable to expect. I bought an iomega to replace it, but when I moved I lost the cables. Today, I found the cables, and was planning on doing a backup tomorrow.
Unfortunately, sod's law has struck and I have a dead drive. There is no discernible spinning when I try to boot the drive, my OS is not mounting the drive...
I've scoped out a few other AskMe's, came up with Data recovery on the cheap. The freezer trick is out, as I really do not want to ruin the drive before I've exhausted all other options. Gillware seems to be a fairly good, not-local option, are there other options I should consider?

Details:

I am pretty sure this is a mechanical failure, not a logical failure.
Professional data recovery services are expensive. I am currently unemployed and would prefer to avoid professional services, but willing, depending on a reasonable price.
The power supply seems fine, but I don't have another one to test with.
I'm using a dual-boot Windows XP / Ubuntu 9.04. I have tried mounting the drive in both systems and windows recognizes there's something there, but cannot start it.
When I boot the drive, there is no spin, no noises unless I put my ear to it. Putting my ear to it gives me a high-pitched click, then two identical, lower-pitched clicks ... spindle motor not running, I'm guessing.

So, I think I have two options:

Open the case and tinker. I would really, really rather that I didn't have to do this, but I'm happy to try if necessary.
Take it to a recovery service and hope they aren't going to charge a grand.

Querying the hive for next-to-last-ditch options and suggestions.
If I have to take it to a recovery service, can any of you recommend a reliable, cost-effective service in the Atlanta, GA area?