Multiple hard drive problems.
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Thread: Multiple hard drive problems.

  1. #1
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    Multiple hard drive problems.

    Alright, the computer at the place where I work is having some trouble, and it seems to have fallen to me & one of the other workers to get it working again... I'm out of ideas though.


    First of all, here's the setup:

    Intel D850EMV2 Motherboard
    Pentium 4 1.8ghz
    1gb RDRAM
    4 Plextor 12/12/32S SCSI CD burners on a PCI SCSI Adapter
    DVD Drive
    4 (hopefully 6) hard drives (see below)


    Now here's the current setup for the hard drives:

    Primary IDE Channel on Motherboard:
    Master: Hard Drive 1 (C:\)
    Slave: DVD Drive

    Secondary IDE Channel on Motherboard:
    (doesn't work, see below)
    Master: Hard Drive 5 (new)
    Slave: Hard Drive 6 (new)

    Primary IDE Channel on PCI IDE Controller:
    Master: Hard Drive 2 (D:\)
    Slave: Hard Drive 3 (E:\)

    Secondary IDE Channel on PCI IDE Controller:
    Master: Hard Drive 4 (F:\)
    Slave: empty


    Now, on to the problem. A little while ago, we had 4 hard drives, 1 one the primary IDE channel of the mobo with a DVD drive, two on the secondary channel, and one on the PCI IDE controller. Then we decided that we needed two more. So we bought them and tried to install them. During the process of installing, we had to move stuff around inside the case to get it to fit, which required unplugging drives.

    Unfortunately, we forgot which drive went to which plug. Once we got it mostly straightened out, we discovered a few problems.

    1) The Secondary IDE Channel on the motherboard no longer works. If any drives are connected to it, Windows 2000 will hang at the splash screen. Therefore we can't hook up all the drives. Is this a problem with the motherboard, or maybe the drives? I'm stumped on this.

    2) When we got the D:\ drive connected, it wouldn't work... it would show up under My Computer, but you couldn't access it. We ran scandisk, and it created 10,000 .chk files on the drive... We can now use the drive, but all the data is lost. What can we do to prevent that from happening in the future? What may have caused it? Also, there are only about 20gb of files on the drive if you add up the file sizes, but if you view the drive properties it says that there is only 1.4gb left out of 100gb. Is there a way to fix this? Will formatting do it?


    I think that's it. If I think of anything else important, I'll edit the post. Thanks in advance.
    [steve]
    Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

  2. #2
    Driver Terrier NooNoo's Avatar
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    Re: Multiple hard drive problems.

    Originally posted by groundzero
    1) The Secondary IDE Channel on the motherboard no longer works. If any drives are connected to it, Windows 2000 will hang at the splash screen. Therefore we can't hook up all the drives. Is this a problem with the motherboard, or maybe the drives? I'm stumped on this.
    2k is very sensitive to hardware changes, especially boot changes. By swapping everything about you got 2k's knickers in a twist. So question 1 - does the drive (or any device) connected to the secondary ide show up correctly in bios?

    What make/model hard drive, how is it jumpered?

    What was previously on the drive?
    Originally posted by groundzero
    2) When we got the D:\ drive connected, it wouldn't work... it would show up under My Computer, but you couldn't access it. We ran scandisk, and it created 10,000 .chk files on the drive... We can now use the drive, but all the data is lost. What can we do to prevent that from happening in the future? What may have caused it? Also, there are only about 20gb of files on the drive if you add up the file sizes, but if you view the drive properties it says that there is only 1.4gb left out of 100gb. Is there a way to fix this? Will formatting do it?
    Chkdsk will create those files as a result of various errors on the drive, partition or fat tables screwed etc... it sees them as saving the data The data is there, you just have to go through and pull it out of the files... rename them to what they were. It would help if you knew what was on the drive. You could also try a drive recovery program, there is a free one called pc inspector available from www.webattack.com. Something like getdataback or easyrecovery might be a better bet though, but they cost... how is your budget?

    Future prevention.... backup backup backup

    And don't pull a machine to bits if you haven't made a note of what goes where!!
    Never, ever approach a computer saying or even thinking "I will just do this quickly."

  3. #3
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    Re: Re: Multiple hard drive problems.

    Originally posted by NooNoo
    So question 1 - does the drive (or any device) connected to the secondary ide show up correctly in bios?

    What make/model hard drive, how is it jumpered?

    What was previously on the drive?
    Yes, the drives show up in the POST screen for the BIOS. That and the fact that it hangs at the Win2k splash screen make me think that it's something with Windows.

    We have several different hard drive models:
    Two Western Digital 100gb Caviar's
    Two Western Digital 120gb Caviar's
    Two Maxtor 120gb Ultra Series' (the new ones)

    I believe the jumpers are all set to master/slave as needed. When I get a chance I'll double check them.

    The drive the lost the data contained mostly mp3's.


    Originally posted by NooNoo
    The data is there, you just have to go through and pull it out of the files... rename them to what they were. It would help if you knew what was on the drive. You could also try a drive recovery program, there is a free one called pc inspector available from www.webattack.com. Something like getdataback or easyrecovery might be a better bet though, but they cost... how is your budget?

    Future prevention.... backup backup backup
    We know that the .chk files are the data, since we can open some of them and see pictures that were there. The problems with this are:
    1) We'd have to rename 10,000 files.
    2) We wouldn't get the directory structure back.
    3) There were about 20,000 files on the drive... so only half of them were .chk'ed at most.

    We do have backups... because of the crash we only lost a hundred or so files, so it's not a disaster, just a setback, and it's not worth it to spend money to recover the few files that we lost. I'm just wondering what caused this so I can prevent it in the future.

    Originally posted by NooNoo
    And don't pull a machine to bits if you haven't made a note of what goes where!!
    We didn't plan on doing it, but it turned out that we had to shuffle stuff around once we got in there to make it all fit, and never even thought to make the notes.

    Thanks for the help.
    [steve]
    Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

  4. #4
    Driver Terrier NooNoo's Avatar
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    OK a point about WD drives. If they have no slave or the slave is an optical drive - then the best jumper setting is NO jumpers at all.

    The cause could be that you had drives setup and moved them, 2k doesn't like you doing that if they were dynamic....

    Or you got yourself a nice virus from one of those mp3's or a mains spike well the list goes on...

    Suffice to say you will never prevent it happening in the future, you can only lessen the risk.
    Never, ever approach a computer saying or even thinking "I will just do this quickly."

  5. #5
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    I never knew that about WD drives... I'll have to give that a go.

    I'm still wondering what to do about the secondary IDE channel on the motherboard not working, and also about why the numbers for the space on the drive that crashed don't add up.



    Thanks.
    [steve]
    Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

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