Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Hey guys,

I'm having more HD issues and this time its in the worst possible period as I have many projects due in the following 2 weeks.

My setup in terms of HD's is 3xWD640GB Caviar Black (no raid or anything). I bought one of the drives a year and a half ago, and the other two drives were bought this time last year.

I have Win7x64 installed on a partition of one of the new drives. In a bonehead move, my photos and music are also stored on this drive, but on a separate partition. On the second of the newer drives, I have movies/other less important data (downloads, etc) on one partition, as well as a separate scratch partition. For the third, older, drive, I only recently (within the last couple months) set it up and am using it to backup important data (the windows backup scheduler) from both drives.

Last night, I was experiencing symptoms of HD failure (intermittent hangs, etc) and I actually BSOD'd and when I reboot, I was unable to boot. It got past the POST, but when windows was supposed to load with the "Starting Windows" screen, nothing came up.

Since I'd experienced HD failure before, I suspected it might have been one of my drives (the older one). I unplugged it and tried to boot again, and this time my Windows almost boot, but basically hung on the Starting Windows screen (there was no animation).

I was finally able to boot this morning with the third older drive unplugged (after trying other combinations), although the machine is quite slow (I'm not experiencing the intermittent hangs, though). I ran the Seagate tool to test my drives and it one of them has failed the short generic test, while the other passes.

The problem is, since they are identical models, I don't know which is the drive that failed the test. The tool provides me a serial number, but I can't seem to find the equivalent type of ID in the Windows Disk Manager (not the volume ID) so I can't tell if it is my system drive, or the one with less important data.

Question I have is if I was experiencing these problems with booting up, does that mean it MUST be my system partition (I have a feeling my older drive has no problems)?

Since it's hard to determine which drive it is as you mention, I'd elect to go and start copying your data to a different drive with the original source drive hooked up to another computer via USB or whatever.

Perhaps what you could try and do is pull the SMART data for the drive itself. If it's showing up as disk 0 or 1 for example, use diskmgmt.msc to see what partitions/drive letters are associated with that disk, then go from there.

How are your drives mounted physically? Is it getting enough ventilation?

As noted by Tanner it looks like you are having issues identifying the drive that is the issue.

However, the BSOD you are having would lend itself to the main drive with the OS (and your pics).

The question is does your windows back up (on disk 3) include the partition with your photos?

In any case, grab a notebook or another computer. Take the Main OS drive and connect it to the notebook via a external enclosure / adaptor or connected it to another desktop (insure that the drive is no configured to boot from in the Motherboard's BIOS setup).

...and start to copy as much as you can. The key here (assuming its about to die) is to try your best to keep the drive as COOL as possible. The issue will be with the amount of data you are going to want to move, its going to heat up. Open a window, get a fan going on the drive, etc.

Thanks for the advice.

So the basic possibilities are that
1) the drive with my system partition is dying
2) the drive with lower priority data is dying

AFAIK, neither drive is near full and I could probably move the data into one drive

My plan is to find out which drive is bad and which is healthy and move my files to the healthy one first.

If it turns out that my system drive is bad, I may look at bit by bit copy utilities to preserve everything (will this have implications with corrupt sectors?) to a new drive. I have a third drive as I stated earlier but it's not plugged in and I'm afraid to reboot without backing anything up.

With regards to bit by bit copying, do the source and destination drives have to be identical? or can they be diff model/size? does anyone have any recommendations for a utility?

Does matter what drive you use, a drive is a drive to the OS.

Just drag and drop the folder over to the new drive.

My backups do include the partition with my photos, but the weekly backup process (last successful backup was last thursday) was cancelled yesterday by myself when I started experiencing problems. I'm not sure how the files are backed up so I don't know I cancelling would compromise the previous successful backup.

Also, since I have 2 drives hooked up at the moment, presumably with only 1 dying drive, if I identified the failing drive would it be safe just to copy the data to the other healthy drive?

Most likely but don't take our word from it!

I assume that you have checked the other two drives' SMART data and it's all okay.

From what I understand, when checking SMART data, I'm looking to see the # of reallocated sectors?

That counter could indicate serious issues coming or already happening. other counters identified in the following link should be looked at also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Also, I'm not sure exactly what the warranty is for the Black series but something to look into:

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

When this is all said in done...it may be time to invest in some sort of a mirrored storage solution.

HDs are cheaper then ever.

I have 4 x 2TB drives in 2 Mirrored Setups. A bit overkill, but safe none the less.

Thanks guys

I identified that it is my system drive that is failing.

Since I am afraid to reboot right now and my third drive is not plugged in, I am considering going out to buy the "same" drive and use Acronis to image back the drive. If I have some reallocated sectors, does that also get imaged to a new drive? Also, do I need to have the exact same drive as my destination? (including revision? I'm not sure if they still have the rev of the 640 caviar black that I have, AALS-00J7B1)

You don't need the exact same drive. Any brand...etc.

You just need a drive that is large enough for the data.

The software will adjust if the destination drive is bigger.

What OS are you running? You may not have to buy software.

win7x64

I found that WD offers a "WD edition" of Acronis True Image which I am currently installing.

Does anyone have experience cloning drives with this? My current plan is to go out and buy a new HD (be it bigger or the same), and try to clone the drive.

AFAIK, this will require me to get the new drive and hook it up and reboot into Acronis to let me clone?

BTW, if I already have reallocated sectors, will these be "cloned" too?

I have used arconis before. It will be extremely straight forward. It will need to be connected at the time you boot up Arconis.

Relocated sectors are handled by the drive itself, specific to that drive only, and transparent to the OS so these don't get carried over.

So I think I've got the problem solved.

I went out to pickup a new drive (1TB Caviar Blue) and cloned my old drive with Acronis. I've got it running now.

I think I might hold off for a week before I send in the failed drive for RMA, in case something happens.

You've probably solved your problem alright but I would check the power supply unit is not dying. I thought that was the problem.