Originally Posted by
AC110
Hi;
Are you talking about 6 physical drives, or one or two partitioned into 6 'logical' drives?
Six physical drives. I do a lot of video editing, so I have about 1.5 terabytes of storage on this machine.
By logical drive I mean drive letter. Can you tell us the size of each physical drive installed and the size of each logical drive? It would also help to know what type of data is stored on each logical drive. Six physical hard disks installed on one machine would be pretty unusual to say the least.
See above. The drive that crashed is an 80 gigger.
Without that information I could offer the following general advice.
Without delay, back up everything irreplaceable to CD or whatever.
Done as part of my usual working methodology. However, video data is so large that backups are not feasible. A single project results in 60 to 80 gigs of data by the time I'm done. Once I'm finished with a project, I archive the edited video to tape and, of course, store the original tapes with the raw video as well.
If something is flaky, everything on that physical drive is at risk, including any logical drives on that physical drive.
Yes, I'm aware of that. The question is, is the drive flaky, or did the trojan crash it? I'm not sure.
Watch your bootup for error messages, and monitor your event logs (Start, Run, eventvwr.msc, OK - then look at the system log) for a while.
That's a good idea (re: the event logs). That should give me an early warning if the drive is going to fail again.
It's unlikely that the virus is causing this problem, no virus can survive a formatting of the system drive containing the operating system, and it sounds like that's what you did.
It's possible that the virus took out the drive before the re-install. When I realized what was going on, I had already lost the ability to access some of the drives on the system.
Evaluate the type of software and data you have on the various drives.
Five of the six drives are data, only. The physical boot drive is partitioned into two logical drives. Programs go on one, "permanent" data goes on the other. The permanent data partition survived just fine, of course. I deleted the system partition and then installed it again.
In general terms, I would be inclined to put the operating system and applications on the suspect physical drive and my data on safe physical drives until I was able to replace the physical drives.
Unfortunately, that's not an option. The physical drive with the system and "permanent data" partisions is 100 gig, of which about 80 gig is used. The flaky drive is only 80 gig and not large enough to hold everything.
It really depends on how critical the data is. You can rebuild your operating system drive in a couple of hours, but the final draft of your PhD thesis can't be replaced so easily. Find the money if your data is critical. Otherwise you can get along for the time being by being more frequent with backups.
The drive that crashed had a finished video project that had been burned to DVD, but which I hadn't yet had an opportunity to archive to tape. That's why I'm bothering to recover it. Otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered.
By the way, I accept that money is tight, we've all been there, but watch the ads for major electronics chain stores, they sometimes offer door crasher specials that can make a new drive affordable. Some white-box computer retailers will also sell you a used drive which might be an option. Replace the suspect drive as soon as you can afford to.
I don't want to get a used drive -- it's just inheriting someone else's problems. CompUSA has a nice 250 gig ATA drive on sale for $79 after rebates, but I just can't afford to do it. I bought a new laptop last week for $2200 that my wife is less than thrilled about. I've also had to buy a couple of power supplies for it, a new docking station, etc., and I just upgraded my WiFi access point and bought a gigabit switch. If I come home with one more box, my wife just might leave me.
Fill us in on the other info and we might be able to offer more specific advice.
Thanks, Rob. I think I may install the flaky drive and not put anything on it for a while. I have a couple of programs that monitor the SMART settings and that, along with the event logs, should give me some indication if the drive is going to fail. For what it's worth, the SMART reports indicated that everything was normal last time I checked (a couple of weeks ago).