thecomputerdude

Hey,
Last night my Raptor, which is my main drive, died during a backup. Ironic that it would die while backing up, yes, but the files I needed most didn't make it onto the backup drive. It's only 7 months old, I don't know why it should die so soon. All my schoolwork is on this drive, as well as my photos, and I need them back ASAP.

Anyways, the bootsector and apparently the partition tables are jumbled, but most of my data appears intact...I think. I was sucessfully able to "read" the folders with Unerase but the computer has started crashing whenever the drive is accessed. I think the controller doesn't like the Raptor anymore, as the bus is having IRQL failures during device accesses.

I have 2 250gb drives, a 160, and the 80GB Raptor. All are SATA non-RAID (NVraid is a pain in the butt) so I've been using a sort of dynamic multi-drive manual backup protocol to prevent such happenings. It's been too long since I backed up though so now I'm in deep poop.

I have tried Spin-Rite 6.0 on the Raptor, no luck. It doesn't get past the bootsector. It works great on the other drives though. The Raptor also just makes the click/clack of a Floppy drive while Spin-Rite is running. I take it that means it's pretty dead. It still spins up pretty well when I power it up and down and it reads nicely (or at least reads quitely, but later the computer freezes up) when I use Stellar NTFS on it, so I don't believe it's physically obstructed inside.

SpinRite also reports, thru SMART, that the drives all like to hit 140*F+ or so, and warns that 131*F is the max safe temp. I wonder if that had anything to do with the early death?

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Digitronical

just a suggestion, you could try installing your OS ona different drive then run the raptor as a sort of slave drive and see if you can access the files that way.

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thecomputerdude

Been trying it like that, Windows sees the drive as being unformatted. It's also been dragging the OS down, I don't know why, but the computer acts boggy every time I hook the drive back up.

I see you have the same drive I do. Mine's really closer to a 74GB even though it's advertised at 80GB.

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RonindeBeatrice

You let the raptor get how hot?

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thecomputerdude

About 140*F, according to SMART. I didn't know it was getting that hot at all, there's plenty of forced ventilation I think. I don't know how hot it was when it crashed the first time, as there doesnt' seem to be a Windows warning about hot hard drives.

All my drives are sitting at about 125*F right now at idle.

Both my Western Digital 250's got up to about 139*F while I was running Spinrite in SMARTmonitor mode (I told it to override it's 131* halt instructions) at which time I just powered the computer off.

__________________
I AM THE TYPO POLICE. IF I PULL YOU OVER, IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT.

anticrainbo

I have had much success using R-undelete. Have you tried it?

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thecomputerdude

I'm using a demo of R-Studio right now, I'll try the Undelete version.

EDIT: R-Undelete seems to be reading the drive without errors, and is indicating it's finding files. Hope it's actually working lol.

__________________
I AM THE TYPO POLICE. IF I PULL YOU OVER, IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT.

anticrainbo

Sweet! R-undelete is magic.

If you didn't purchase a copy you might not be able to fully recover what it finds until you purhcase.

Good luck! Let us know about the results.

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3508- Stable

Digitronical

great to hear, i'm sure we all know how crappy it is to lose a drive with valuable info on it.

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thecomputerdude

If it finds what I'm looking for I'm more than willing to pay for a full recovery. Spinrite was supposed to the pretty good, I'm surprised it didn't pan out this time.

EDIT: Looking good so far, at 27% and still going. By the graph it's found a lot of stuff.

__________________
I AM THE TYPO POLICE. IF I PULL YOU OVER, IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT.