Am I really that unlucky? Two new hard drives failed within 2 weeks

[Deusdies]

Hey,

So a month ago I bought a 1 TB external hard drive from LaCie. Worked just fine for about 2 weeks, when it started failing. For example, I would be downloading something via uTorrent, and it would give me a "cyclic redundancy check" error, or some other I/O error. The CHKDSK would hang in Phase 2. Finally, it has completely failed, and now only one out of two partitions show up in Windows (this one is FAT32, only 32 gigs and nothing on it). The other one doesn't even show up, not even as RAW.

It failed, I figured. Even though it was still under warranty, I figured I'd buy another hard drive to try to backup the data somehow. So I got a Samsung Story 1 TB.

Now the story is giving me the same CRC error when downloading something via uTorrent. It still works fine and mounts fine, but I am still concerned. I ran HDD Regenerator which has found literally several thousands of bad sectors (though it recovered them all, but I cancelled the process because it was an estimate that it would take over 500 hours to complete). HDD regenerator recognizes the LaCie Hard Drive, but refuses to scan it, saying that I need to switch from AHCI to IDE control in BIOS. Did that, but Windows won't boot in that case (XP SP2).

Note one (possibly important) thing: I had a collection of about 100 movies, thousands of songs etc. on my server machine (500 gigs of data). I downloaded all those onto LaCie, which started demonstrating problems after that has happened. Then when I got Samsung Story, I did the same thing - downloaded everything from that server machine, and now it is showing problems.

Is it possible to create "bad sectors" and eventually kill the drive by copying so many files at once? It took like 3 hours for those to copy.

So, my questions are:

1) Am I really unlucky? Is it possible that both hard drives will die?
2) Can I save the Samsung Story one by reformatting it completely? Will that help?
3) Do you know a way to save LaCie hard drive (i.e. make the partition show up)?

Thank you all!

-Bo

 

[MagicPants]

Hmm that's not good. Only thing I can think of is that the 5 volt rail on a lot of power supplies tends to go out of spec if you're running near the edge of it's limit. That's the rail that supplies power to the usb.

Probably not the problem but I'm brainstorming.

 

[Deusdies]

It's plugged in into a laptop. My new desktop is coming tomorrow, so I'll test it there.

Also, a minor correction to my thread. The computer is currently running in IDE mode - if I switch to AHCI, then it gets into a reboot loop.

 

[leon2006]

Looks like an overloaded USB port. Try POWERED USB HUB to prevent overloading the USB ports of your PC.

 

[Deusdies]

Okay, so the Samsung Story one (the new one) officially died. Windows recognizes it to an extent - it shows as "Local Disk (F: )", even though my volume label is different. Other than that, Windows does not recognize its size whatsoever.

The interesting thing is that the first one (LaCie) is showing signs of life. I had two partitions on that one. The first partition (only 32 gigs) mounts perfectly fine, immediately. The second one does not mount at all. I ran TestDisk and it listed all my files, meaning they're still there (yaay!).

So, right now: what would be the best program to potentially recover a lost partition? So, not deleted, but _lost_.

 

[ozrock]

HI,

There is a free program called Partition Wizard which could get all your files back.

http://www.partitionwizard.com

Good Luck. Let us know what you did and how you went with it.

oz

 

[Deusdies]

Oz,

Great minds thing the same. Several hours ago I found that program, and it has successfully recovered my Samsung drive (though I had to reformat it), and is on the verge of recovering my LaCie drive as well!

Thank you!

 

[Deusdies]

Disregard my previous post regarding LaCie.

The Partition Wizard now won't start when the LaCie drive is turner on (it's constantly on splash screen). To make matters even more weird, it did start successfully before and was able to detect the LaCie hard drive. I deleted the partition on it and created a new one, after which it showed up in My Computer and was working perfectly fine.

However, I had 2 partitions at that point and decided that I needed only 1. So, I deleted both partitions, and created a new one out of the unallocated space. But the process hung somewhere at 70% - and now the partition home wizard won't even start.

What do I do now?