Socrates.com

[Pastorius]

As an extra precaution, I am rechecking all saves I have received from you Krys.

And I agree with anarres on the harddrive backup. I ve learnt that the hard way

[Socrates]

Additional info :

- I'm posting from work during daytime.

- It all started when I tried to save the latest save Paali sent me. I was browsing my hard drive to pick up the correct folder, and it wouldn't allow me to enter the "krys v Paali" save folder, but all others were OK !! And everytime I tried to enter it, I got a message asking if I wanted to format my HD, an offer I declined of course.

- Then after a while, the PC started to mess up the windows... And that's how it came to the status I described above.

- It is obvious that I should back up all I want somewhere else, but how can I do it if I can't enter this part of my HD ? BTW, the "system" partition is fine, as far as I can see : I can still surf on the Internet, etc... When I want to enter the ill part, it says "error of pagination" or something like that.


Now, I can't see how a physical body can be destroyed by some 1's and 0's, but if you say so. I have no close friend really "in it", so should I quickly go to a shop ? Any idea of what could have caused this ? An internal error, or a virus coming from the Net ?

[Pastorius]

Krys, I am clean. No viruses, no spyware, trojans or malware.
And I showered this morning, so I am pretty clean in the grand total of things []

This sounds a bit like something a former colleague of mine got. She had to reformat and reinstall everything. If you can - backup as much as possible, and do that. Saves you frustration of trying to clean the disk yourself.


Oh, and for the future, anyone without a virus scanner and firewall are begging for either a regular virus or worm, or a goddamn network virus or worm.

[anarres]

quote:Originally posted by kryszcztov

- It is obvious that I should back up all I want somewhere else, but how can I do it if I can't enter this part of my HD ? BTW, the "system" partition is fine, as far as I can see : I can still surf on the Internet, etc... When I want to enter the ill part, it says "error of pagination" or something like that.

This is a very clear indication that your drive is dying. In fact it looks like one of your partitions is already "dead", and non-recoverable...

However, the single line that gives us almost unrefutable proof that this is the problem is this:

quote:The PC doesn't start properly, I need to press a key to resume. It says "HD status BAD" or something similar. It wants to check the HD every time I start the PC, and finds hundreds of unreadable parts.

...

quote:Now, I can't see how a physical body can be destroyed by some 1's and 0's, but if you say so. I have no close friend really "in it", so should I quickly go to a shop ? Any idea of what could have caused this ? An internal error, or a virus coming from the Net ?

*If* I am correct then your hard drive is simply on it's last few moments of life. This is not a problem of 0's and 1's but of the drive heads literally crashing in to the drive platters. A literal "crash"...

*If* this is the case you have a very limited amount of "on" time before it dies. For example, lets say it has 3 minutes of activity before it dies completely (this is an arbitary guess btw).

In this example, when you go home and turn on your PC you have just reduced it's life by 30 seconds. You try and do some stuff like load civ, etc. Now you have it's lifespan down by another 60 seconds. Next you go on the internet and do some stuff, then you go on msm, etc. After a while you power down, but you have now managed to take the hard drive lifespan down to just a few seconds. The next time you boot up it dies before even reaching windows...

A harsh example, but DO NOT GO HOME AND TURN ON YOUR PC UNLESS YOU ARE READY TO BACKUP THE DATA OR LOSE IT.

Also....

Believe me when I tell you that this is the problem - it is almost certainly the hard drive dying and nothing else.

[Lt. Killer M]

krys,

my HDD on my laptop gave up WITHOUT ANY NOTICE - it was fine one evening, the next morning on booting it just didn't do anything.

When I opened the laptop and took out the HDD it made a rattling sound.

THAT's how sudden it can be - and as anarrres said: BACK UP YOUR STUFF b[]ASAP[/b]!!!!!!!

[Socrates]

Thanks Killer, all is not lost.

About my PC. I'm surprised, as I bought it 2.5 years ago only. I did use it quite much, but not like a bastard (read : properly). The fact that they can die without notice is really frightening, I'm even pissed. Do they need to create molecular PCs to run things properly ?

anarres, I have one question : what physically is a partition on a HD ? I only have one HD, and seperate it to have systems and programs on one part, and data on the other one. The system one is running really fine so far, whereas the data one isn't answering. If it is a physical crash (a mechanical fatigue), then why would it affect only one artificial part ? So I still doubt your explanation. And BTW, when it asks me if I want to check the volume before opening Windows (blue screen), with a 10-second notice, it displays the right name of the ill partition (whereas this name is gone in Windows proper).

And all in all, I'm still clueless to what to do, apart from going to the doctor : I can't access the ill partition, period. Without access I can't back up anything. Shit, because I had lots of downloaded concert records and other personal stuff... And to think that I was about to back up some parts yesterday.

[anarres]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash

Now to explain what a partition actually is I have to simplify a little...

Imagine a hard disk is just 1 physical disk (platter). Note that they can have many now, but if I explain for 1 just imagine 8 identical disks all with 1/8 the data each. This disk is seperated in to many thousands of seperate concentric rings, each ring can store a lot of data (0's and 1's). For this example imagine there are 300 rings - also imagine for the sake of simplicity that all these rings hold the same amount of data (not true at all, but it doesn't matter).

If you seperate this disk in to 3 identically sized partitions you will have the 100 "center" rings as partition 1, the 100 "middle" rings are partition 2, the "outer" rings are partition 3.

Now just remember that the rings are many more than that, there are several platters working in parallel, and the rings all hold different amounts of data. And there you go, a "crash" course in hard drives.


Now back to the problem:

The "bad" sectors on your hard drive (as identifed each time you boot - note that the ones noted each time are just the NEW bad sectors!! The others from each boot are marked as "bad" and never seen again - the data from them is lost (literally).

This means that depending on which parts are "bad" some or all of your drive will stop working. After a "crash" the platters are scratched but the drive (sometimes) can still work for the non-scratched parts (note that it's the condition of the head that determines if it is working - the platters are just inaccessable if they are scratched but the head can move past them to read good bits).

Some parts of each partition store the file structure itself. If this part of the partition is damaged the whole partition can be inaccessable.

It is perfectly possible for one partition to get trashed and the rest to be ok - although ANY crash imples the disk is fucked and you better get your data off quick.

[Socrates]

Posting from my father's PC...

Well, if this is what hapenned, this is really unfortunate, and I doubt I can do anything at all but throw the HD into the bin with all its data. There has been no way to access the damaged partition so far, and it's unlikely I'll find one on my own, all the more as you keep telling me not to use my PC. I'll see if I can bring it to a HD-repairer (lol), to at least save the data, but apart from that I think I can forget all the data.

Thanks for your help.

[anarres]

krys - there are *some* things that can be done as you can access the raw data on the partition itself - but they are best tried after everything else as it's fairly unlikely it will work, and even if it does it is quite complex (or at least it was several years ago when I last tried it).

First thing to do is to get data of your C@ (system) drive. Although you may think you've got it all there may be some data there:

1) default location for your documents is: "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents" (this is for Win 2000 - similar for other flavours of windows)
Check here for stuff from "my documents"

2) Outlook by default store your email in: "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst" (this is for Win 2000 - similar for other flavours of windows)
Check for this file if you use outlook - other email programs may also store on C:

3) Civ games

4) Any other PC save games (not all, but many force you to store in program files)

5) Any other application data


Once you are *sure* you don't want anything else of the C: drive ask again about getting the data from the D: drive - I need to look it up again, but once you have a new drive and windows installed we can put your old one back in and try to read the data directly from it. As I said before this isn't guarenteed because it has to work out from the 0's and 1's what it all means.

[Socrates]

1) If this is where MSN put the files you get from friends, it is empty.

2) Noted for Outlook, though I don't have much to save from my emails, really...

3) Civ games were all stored on the D part, like the game files.

4) I haven't played any game apart from Civ3 for years... Oh shit, I'll miss some vids from Snes F-Zero.

5) I kept a folder of all the applications I downloaded, so this will be easy, though not that vital.

It seems I'll have to pay for another drive, something I don't want to do. So I must force myself. Damned consumer society. And all of this is Bill Gates's fault, fucker.