Andrew's Stuff

Hard_Drive -> 3.5"_Mounting_Bay_In_Sky();

Posted at Wed, 11 Feb 2004, 17:10:09

Yeah so I got home today, resumed my desktop from standby, and within 30 seconds it had frozen while trying to read a hard drive. It was at that point that I noticed a somewhat ominous clunking from the landing (where I keep the external hard drive, due to its noise when I'm trying to sleep). Immediately knew that something was up. However since then I have been unable to read or write anything to the drive and after I unplugged it Windows threw up this lovely error:

Windows - Delayed Write Failed
Windows was unable to save all the data for the file E:\$Mft. The data has been lost.

So that's my MFT gone for that drive. Acronym Finder tells me that this is the Master File Table in Microsoft NTFS drives. It sounds very much like it's something that the drive cannot do without and, as such, may well be dead even if I CAN get it to spin up and read data again.

It's currently sitting in the freezer as suggested by someone on IRC, but the past hour hasn't made it work yet, and I'm a little skeptical that any more hours in there will coax it into operation, either.

If I can only get it to work for 30 more minutes it will be enough time for me to get all my warez, videos, PSP work, and backups off it; then I can send it back to Maxtor and they can deal with it. If I can't then I lose all that stuff and I spend the next week crying miserably while downloading all my warez again. :(

I can tell you one thing; once I get this damned thing working (or replaced with all my stuff missing, but I'm really hoping it won't come to that..) I'm investing in a new IDE controller and buying a DVD burner. Of course when I say "I", I do of course mean "mum", but that's beside the point. I will no longer trust my stuff to hard drives. Not to say that DVD media is necessarily much better..

Incidentally if anyone knows of a backup application that actually works then please would they be so kind as to email me? Ta muchly. Windows' built-in backup tool seems to fail to work. All the time.

In other news my Quotes Database is coming along nicely, with the addition of a Statistics page, which I can imagine taking forever to generate on a database with more than a few quotes. I also don't really know what to do for my Computing A-level Unit 6 project. Oh well. Such is life, apparently.

Here's to hoping I can bring my sodding hard drive back to life.

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Archived Comments

Suggestions by M1471 at Feb 11, 2004 7:43:51 PM

Have you ran a CHKDSK..although im not too sure how they work with external HDD's..

When you unplugged it did you do it via the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon on your taskbar?

Ghost is the best complete backup app you can find, for making exact images of all drives of course..the best thing about it is that it can even store images on remote networked computers.. other than that if you want a not so complete backup (e.g. just a few folders you know like My Documents), something as simple as a batch file could work wonders..

I get teh delayed write failed message when I pull out an SD Card like 1 second after it's finished writing, it just means that it didnt write everything before you unplugged it..

Incidentally your not connected to it via firewire are you? SP2 seems to have buggered up my External HDD's Firewire connection so that my computer hangs too (Reverting to obselete USB1.1 seemed to fix that)