Hard Drive Problem

[superflybribri]

Hello Everyone,

I have been using the same 120 GB Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB-00FUA0 for some time now. It has just been a general media hard drive for my files for work and school among other things. A little over a month ago I had upgraded the computer replacing the motherboard, CPU, and the memory. Here is my current configuration:

Motherboard: Asus A8V Deluxe
Processor: AMD Athlon X2 3800+
Memory: Kingston 1024 MB PC3200 2 Pcs
Graphics Card:ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 9600 XT
Primary Hard Drive: 30 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA III ST330620A
Media Hard Drive: 120 GB Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB-00FUA0
Optical Drive: Sony DVD-RW DRU-700A
Power Supply: Antec 350 Watt
System Casing: Antec SLK2650-BQE
Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Primary Monitor: Dell 2005FPW
Secondary Monitor: Aquaview 7RS
Input Devices: Logitech Cordless MX Duo

Once I had made these changes and got the system up and running I had run into a couple scattered problems. With the hard drive, they would both work fine. Then one day the media drive D: didn't show up. I restarted the computer and it was there with no problems. This happened maybe two more times in the past two months. Then one day the drive showed up but without the proper name and when I double clicked on it, Windows asked me to reformat. I declined and restarted the computer and all was fine again. I started shopping for a new hard drive just in case something was to happen and was looking for a good price on some hard drives to put in a RAID configuration. Just today I started up my computer with no problems and starting playing music. During one of the songs all of a sudden it begins to sound weird. I tried playing another song and it does the same. A little bubble popped up from the taskbar saying that the file was currupt. I closed down Winamp and started it back up but had the same problem. I decided to restart my computer and in doing so it asked to check the consistancy of the D: drive. I declined at first put that made the computer boot up weird with a green screen for a couple seconds. I restarted and allowed it to check for consistency this time. It did so and said that it found some corrupt sectors. It said that it was deleting corrupt files and then went onto the next step but had a problem. Now the computer is booted up but certain files cannot be accessed because Windows says they are corrupt. So in attempting to make backups of what I could I just find scattered files that are said to be corrupt. I was wondering if there is anyone might have advice for what I should do at the present moment to either save whatever I can or possibly recover it all. There are plenty of school and work files that I would not like to lose. It is also hard to try and backup whatever I can because once it finds a corrupt file it won't continue copying the rest of the directory. Is there any way to go through these files and recover everything that isn't corrupt? Any help would be greatly appriciated as you can imagine that I am freaking out right now. Thank you.

-Brian

 

[Ned_Flanders]

Bad sectors on the harddrive, buy a new harddrive, and attempt to copy over what you can (You'll only be able to get what isn't partially / fully stored on a bad sector). Hurry though, that drive isn't well as I'm sure you realise.

 

[superflybribri]

Hello Again,

I went to the store and bought a new hard drive and have backed up all of my important data. I had read something in the Western Digital documentation saying that if I ran their diagnostic utility software and passed on all tests then it might not be a bad sector and actually a virus that caused my files to become corrupt. I don't know if this is the said problem that I was having before. I use Norton Internet Securities 2005 Anti Spyware Edition. I ran it before and there showed no viruses at all. So I installed the new hard drive and it works but it seems to have brought a new problem with it. The hard drive that I bought was a Western Digital Caviar SE 320 GB. I got it up and running but everytime that I boot up my computer, between the part where it shows the Windows XP logo loading and then the Welcome screen, there is a black screen on the monitor for around one minute. This only started occuring with this new hard drive. It takes so long for the black screen to go through that the second monitor that I use went into energy saver. I have never heard of such a problem so if anyone knows what this might be caused by could you please let me know. Thank you very much for all of your help so far.

-Brian