My hard drive has been upgraded to paperweight
June 17, 2006 1:18 PM Subscribe
Non-catastrophic hard drive failure. Should I go to SATA? Any last minute tips?
I have a Dell Dimension 4600. This morning I woke up to the blue screen of death: Unmountable_boot_volume.
Chkdsk /p and chkdsk /r both fail with errors.
This is primarily a system drive with little data to be lost, catastrophy avoided.
A couple questions: Any reason to go SATA for the system drive? My motherboard supports it. I will have an older IDE HD on the IDE channel as well. According to this askme question the difference between IDE / SATA is a push.
And finally--Do I have any other resources to repair a file system before I chuck this installation? I'm really not in the mood for a fresh install.
I have a Dell Dimension 4600. This morning I woke up to the blue screen of death: Unmountable_boot_volume.
Chkdsk /p and chkdsk /r both fail with errors.
This is primarily a system drive with little data to be lost, catastrophy avoided.
A couple questions: Any reason to go SATA for the system drive? My motherboard supports it. I will have an older IDE HD on the IDE channel as well. According to this askme question the difference between IDE / SATA is a push.
And finally--Do I have any other resources to repair a file system before I chuck this installation? I'm really not in the mood for a fresh install.
Regarding the SATA:
It's a push if it's SATA 1. If your computer supports SATA II, it's faster than IDE. But even if it's SATA 1, as majick points out, there's no reason not to go SATA, and you have the additional benefit that the cabling inside the case is much, much smaller, and more flexible, and restricts airflow somewhat less, so you may run just the littlest bit cooler.
posted by Bugbread at 1:44 PM on June 17, 2006
It's a push if it's SATA 1. If your computer supports SATA II, it's faster than IDE. But even if it's SATA 1, as majick points out, there's no reason not to go SATA, and you have the additional benefit that the cabling inside the case is much, much smaller, and more flexible, and restricts airflow somewhat less, so you may run just the littlest bit cooler.
posted by Bugbread at 1:44 PM on June 17, 2006
Response by poster: Error reads: 33% completed. The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.
I was backing up 40Gb+ of data last night (majority of data was transferred from another internal drive to yet another external drive). What could have happened? (I'm trying to learn from a mistake here)
posted by vaportrail at 1:58 PM on June 17, 2006
I was backing up 40Gb+ of data last night (majority of data was transferred from another internal drive to yet another external drive). What could have happened? (I'm trying to learn from a mistake here)
posted by vaportrail at 1:58 PM on June 17, 2006
If your computer supports NCQ/TCQ, it'll also be faster than an equivalently-sped IDE drive. I went from IDE to SATA with NCQ and all benchmarks show a speed increase. If I disable NCQ then it's all about the same.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 2:25 PM on June 17, 2006
posted by Dipsomaniac at 2:25 PM on June 17, 2006
Consider SATA fake-RAID 0 (mirroring) if your motherboard supports it. Less chance of catastrophic problems...
posted by anthill at 2:34 PM on June 17, 2006
posted by anthill at 2:34 PM on June 17, 2006
Raid-1 is mirroring. Raid-0 is striping. Not what you want in this case.
posted by joegester at 3:10 PM on June 17, 2006
posted by joegester at 3:10 PM on June 17, 2006
You may want to try the FREEZER trick listed at this site. I just had a crash and found this inhfo after I have already moved on to reformat and partitioning. Might save your data or at least let you recover to another drive..
posted by Agamenticus at 3:43 PM on June 17, 2006
posted by Agamenticus at 3:43 PM on June 17, 2006
The drive will be more useful in the future if it is SATA. Also, drives are less hassle on dedicated channels.
Booting from SATA will require different BIOS settings, and in rare cases, finding the correct settings can be a little obscure.
posted by Chuckles at 3:44 PM on June 17, 2006
Booting from SATA will require different BIOS settings, and in rare cases, finding the correct settings can be a little obscure.
posted by Chuckles at 3:44 PM on June 17, 2006
At $89 it's a little pricey but SpinRite by Gibson Research has gotten lots of good reviews for data recovery. (I'm not associated with GR.)
posted by davcoo at 5:01 PM on June 17, 2006
posted by davcoo at 5:01 PM on June 17, 2006
I can personally vouch for SpinRite - it has in the past worked miracles for me, although it can take a LOOOOONG time to run on a big drive (days).
SATA will likely give you better performance with two drives than the same two drives on one IDE chain.
posted by Caviar at 3:20 PM on June 18, 2006
SATA will likely give you better performance with two drives than the same two drives on one IDE chain.
posted by Caviar at 3:20 PM on June 18, 2006
This thread is closed to new comments.
No, but no reason to avoid it, either.
"Chkdsk /p and chkdsk /r both fail with errors. [...] Do I have any other resources to repair a file system before I chuck this installation?"
Probably not, but: what errors?
posted by majick at 1:38 PM on June 17, 2006