External Hd Crash?

[Kira]

Symptoms:

 

When plugged in, it won't let my OS load.  Windows (XP) says it's loading, then it goes to black screen and just sits.  If I unplug it and do a hard restart, the OS loads fine.  When I go to plug in the offending HD after a good start, it kills everything on the desktop except my background picture, and if I have programs running they start to thinking really hard, and then either give up (not responding), or I do and shut them down manually.  Unplug the drive, and it all pops right back up almost instantaneously.  Could a factor be that the entire system has endured several complete power losses while running recently?  That's got to be hard on the hardware.  Gave it a good going over with the compressed air, just in case.  No change.

 

The system has twice within three days done a system check where it checks kernels et al on startup to make sure there are no problems (blue screen for an hour plus worth of checks), and it says there aren't on that drive, though I don't believe it... and the fact that it recognizes it means that something's getting though, and it knows it's there and how much is on it kb wise.  I remember saying I wouldn't, but this drive's been run fairly constantly for half a year plus, as I kept files on it that I was accessing more regularly than I thought I would.  Nothing absolutely can't-do-without critical, but would be really nice to recover, if only to get it onto a new and hopefully more stable drive and/or disks.

 

Thanks for the thoughts and ideas.

[FoolTrottel]

To me this sounds like a defective external harddisk.

 

The slowness of the system when you plug the disk in, is caused by it trying to read from the disk, as it recognizes it as a hard disk, and wants to read its contents, -even if you do not try to directly access it.

 

(You could check the eventlogs, and you will probably find a lot of errors related to the disk.)

 

Disks in a state like this probably have bad sectors on them, where the disk finds an error, and tries to re-read the sector, and re-read and re-read... this will take a lot of time. Should you be patient and wait and wait and wait, eventually you will get an error popping up, or in the end it may read the disk correctly.

But chances of that last thing happening are very small.

 

To try and save/retrieve data from it, I would try and hook it up to a different system, running a different OS (like Windows 7, or better yet Ubuntu or some other Linux variant. There's a small (very small!) chance you will be able to access files on it that way.)

 

Them external disks are nice, but also kinda prone to fail.

Especially during startup and shutdown (power on/off) and plug/unplug.

(Just yesterday at work I had a 1TB hard disk go fail, just because a disconnect / connect , it somehow wiped the entire contents of the disk... it was empty, unformatted... oh well ... I could re-partiton and re-format it in the end)

 

Your problem however sounds like a physical defect... to me it looks like disk and data will be lost... 

 

Wait for others to chime in.... 

[Jabo]

+1 FT

 

You don't mention the manufacturer of the disk Kira, but if it's a Seagate or a Maxtor d/l seatools and check the disk with that.

 

I like Ubuntu for data recovery as it will happily read ntfs disks and has better recovery properties than windows in case of a suspect drive. You can also run it from a memory stick so even if your boot drive goes bang you can still fire up the system and extract data from the other disks.

 

Good luck.

[Kira]

It is Seagate.  Seatools you say?  Looking up.  Thanks.  Got a friend who did a physical teardown on one of his and got at least a little back.  Not everything, but I've someone who's been there before so if all else fails, might be able to learn a little from him.  I'll keep you posted.