As I mentioned in another thread, my main computer at home picked up a virus from somewhere (god knows where -- I'm very careful). After I re-partitioned and re-installed XP Pro, one of the six drives installed on the computer crashed; Windows reported it as partitioned, but unformatted. I'm in the process of recovering the data from it now so, aside from the inconvenience, nothing critical was lost. However, I can't make up my mind whether to replace the crashed drive or simply repartition and reformat. I know that most people will say, "better safe than sorry," but money is very tight right now and if I can limp along with it for a while, I'd prefer to do that. I don't know whether the crash was the result of the virus (which appears to have been some keylogger trojan that interfered, rather dramatically , with Explorer), or a hardware failure that just happened to coincide with the OS reinstall.

Suggestions?

Hi;

Are you talking about 6 physical drives, or one or two partitioned into 6 'logical' drives? 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.

Without that information I could offer the following general advice.

Without delay, back up everything irreplaceable to CD or whatever.

If something is flaky, everything on that physical drive is at risk, including any logical drives on that physical drive.

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.

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.

Evaluate the type of software and data you have on the various drives. 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.

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.

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.

Fill us in on the other info and we might be able to offer more specific advice.

Cheers,

Rob

Six physical drives. I do a lot of video editing, so I have about 1.5 terabytes of storage on this machine.

See above. The drive that crashed is an 80 gigger.

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.

Yes, I'm aware of that. The question is, is the drive flaky, or did the trojan crash it? I'm not sure.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

I wondered why anyone would have so many drives, and video editing is one of the few things that would do it.

Not sure how familiar you are with these things, but in the longer term, as cash permits, you might try rigging up some sort of a RAID array. I'm sure the hardware is available for home RAID systems. RAID (Rapid Array of Inexpensive Disks), for the uninitiated, comes in several flavours, and generally speaking can be used to provide a high performance and redundance. A RAID 5 array, for instance, can suffer a failed drive without missing a beat or losing any data.

Sorry if I'm talking down to you, you may already know this stuff, but certainly something too look at in the long term for video-editing.

I'm sure wikipedia has a good article on RAID.

Good luck!

I do know this stuff, but that's okay. The drives are a hodge-podge, added to whenever I run out of room (though now I've used up all the drive bay space in the case). Raid would get me better speed and reliability, but I I'd have to start all over again with matched drives, which is way too expensive and too much trouble. On average, I hit a glitch once every 18 to 24 months, and I can live with spending a weekend every year or two putting everything back together.

Did you run a chkdsk /R on the physical drive in question?

I never got a chance. On re-install, the computer wouldn't boot until I removed the drive. I dropped it into a USB case and stuck it on my laptop (which is running Vista). It churned away for quite a bit and then showed up in Disk Management as partitioned, but unformatted. I put it back in the desktop to extract data using Stellar Phoenix (a great program -- I wrote about it in another thread). When it was done, I ran AIDA, which reads the SMART data from the drive. It reported no errors and normal parameters (and this was after a good 8 hours or so of continuous use during the data extraction), so I figured it was probably safe for the time being. I rebooted. Windows ran the chkdsk routine on its own and performed extensive repairs. Once it booted into the desktop, the drive was back with almost all of the files intact.

I don't know whether it was Vista, Stellar Phoenix or chkdsk (or some combination of all three) that fixed the disk, but it's back.

Further to Seahawk_6 advice, it would now be a good idea to manually run CHKDSK /R to see if it finds any "bad sectors". If it does, then it's a hardware issue ...

80G drives are so cheap. Heck 250G and 500G drives are cheap now.

The more drives you have, the closer you are to failure for any one of them. It's all about statistics and MTBF. If you have 5 drives, each with an MTBF of 5 years, your total MTBF for any one drive is 1 year. With 6 drives, your MTBF is less that one year.

Here's what you can do. Reduce the number of drives. Use RAID for reliability on the data server, with a hot spare that software can swap in when needed. Backup all your data (goes without saying, right?)

RAID can be done either in software or in hardware. Either one works.

-David

I'd recommend you join this list:

<[email protected]>


and read their comments and recommendations. A number of the people posting are IT, AT, or consulting types. I notice they like macs(which I do not have) for VE.

The subjects you are discussing with regard to video editing do not interest me, so I do not read them. I know they do not like raids at the mickey mouse scale. My wife regularly installed monster real raids for major clients. they cost mega-bucks. they work.

I do have experience with drives going south. your problem MAY be internal and mechanical/electrical. do not risk drive death and sector loss or worse for $30.

I bought this maxtor 100 gig:

http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=941504&Ns=p_Price_2|0&Nr=2000 00&N=267389&An=browse

from office depot. $79.95. since over $50, free shipping.
It comes with a $50 rebate. It also came with a bonus 20 gig. was 120 gig, and on the box stated "you get a bonus 20gig".