ONTRACK harddrive diagnostic report?

[sethfp]

ONTRACK Data Advisor harddrive diagnostic Results--what does this mean?



ONTRACK Data Advisor
V5.00 ENGLISH

Diagnostic Results:
Drive 1 (WDC WD400EB-00CPF0)
SMART Status Check Result: Passed
90-Second Test Result: Passed
File Structure Test Result: Unsupported
Partition 1
Not Checked. Unsupported (or Unknown) Partition
Complete Surface Scan Result: Passed

Drive 2 (SAMSUNG SV1824D)
SMART Status Check Result: Passed
90-Second Test Result: Passed
File Structure Test Result: Failed
Partition 1 (18GB) Result: Invalid media descriptor
Complete Surface Scan Result: Passed

******************************************
Diagnostic Summary:
System Memory Test Result: Passed

Drive 1 (WDC WD400EB-00CPF0)
SMART Status Check Result: Passed
90-Second Test Result: Passed
File Structure Test Result: Unsupported
Complete Surface Scan Result: Passed

Drive 2 (SAMSUNG SV1824D)
SMART Status Check Result: Passed
90-Second Test Result: Passed
File Structure Test Result: Failed
Complete Surface Scan Result: Passed

[AlienDyne]

In a few words, it says that both your drives are physically OK. No bad sectors or other physical errors. But you should perform a Scandisk on both drives.

[sethfp]

In a few words, it says that both your drives are physically OK. No bad sectors or other physical errors. But you should perform a Scandisk on both drives.

What would cause these errors? Is the FAT32 table, partition, or harddrive
itself screwed up? How can these errors be repaired?

[Platypus]

sethfp, as AlienDyne says, if possible run Scandisk/Chkdsk on both the drives. Can you access the Samsung drive? If it really has an invalid media descriptor I would expect the OS to throw up an error.

In the absence of any OS info, I assume you're running Win2000 or XP, with the WD drive formatted NTFS, which file system Data Advisor 5 doesn't support. If this is correct, run Chkdsk /f as per details here:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...us/chkdsk.mspx

If you have done this Data Advisor check because you couldn't access the Samsung drive, then there may be some data corruption on the drive which could extend beyond just the media descriptor. In this case you may need to try some recovery software to attempt to recover the file structure, whether it is just the media descriptor, or more besides. But again, as AlienDyne observed, the drive passed the complete surface scan, so it would seem likely to just be some data corruption in an awkward place.

[sethfp]

sethfp, as AlienDyne says, if possible run Scandisk/Chkdsk on both the drives. Can you access the Samsung drive? If it really has an invalid media descriptor I would expect the OS to throw up an error.

In the absence of any OS info, I assume you're running Win2000 or XP, with the WD drive formatted NTFS, which file system Data Advisor 5 doesn't support. If this is correct, run Chkdsk /f as per details here:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...us/chkdsk.mspx

If you have done this Data Advisor check because you couldn't access the Samsung drive, then there may be some data corruption on the drive which could extend beyond just the media descriptor. In this case you may need to try some recovery software to attempt to recover the file structure, whether it is just the media descriptor, or more besides. But again, as AlienDyne observed, the drive passed the complete surface scan, so it would seem likely to just be some data corruption in an awkward place.

Am using Windows 98 SE, with FAT32 partitions.
Scandisk and defrag won't run.

[AlienDyne]

A good thing to do is to boot into DOS and type "scandisk /all /autofix" (without the quotes). Scandisk will perform the needed tests and it will fix any data error found on each drive.
These errors are not physical. That means there are no hardware errors on the drives. They are probably lost clusters which are not useful and have to be deleted. They are mostly caused by installation and uninstallation of software.

[Platypus]

Am using Windows 98 SE, with FAT32 partitions.
Scandisk and defrag won't run.

Ah OK, we're guessing a bit without much info about your system or any detail of problems you're trying to diagnose.

As I see AlienDyne posted just as I started typing this post, then I had to go do some other stuff, so I'll ask if you mean Scandisk & Defrag won't run from DOS or from Windows?

If you mean from a DOS boot disk and you can't access the drives, or run those utilities to check them, then the most likely possibilities that come to my mind are a boot sector virus or the drives may have been prepared with DDO (overlay) software. Both of these can prevent DOS based utilities from accessing the drives, although there is nothing physically wrong with them.

Can you boot into Windows on the system? Please give as much background information as you can so we can get a better idea of what the enquiry is really all about.