Well, this will be the last time I mention this for a while, as quickly as the problems came, they’ve gone again. After the Boot and Nuke, everything appears to have cleared up. The drive formatted under Linux, and it installed the OS to a degree. It failed while installing some libraries ironically relating to flickr, but that was because I possibly downloaded the wrong disk image.

Either way, it booted up, and I returned to Windows thios morning, and the drive is successfully formatting. It’s up to 14% as I type. The question is, who’s to say that the same failure doesn’t happen during normal use another couple of months down the line. It is, yet another one of those damn annoying computery issues that appear one day, and then disappear the next.

It’s even passing the bad block test on HD Tune now. The big blocks of red have all disappeared.

The question lies, however, if I should trust this drive at all. I might make it last until payday, and then rip it out and get a new one.

Oh, and I know that some of you clearly don’t like hearing about my electronic escapades and malfunctions (Back so soon off your holidays Chad?), but meh. I don’t just type this to comment on everything I do. I type it do that it’s a reference point should the same thing happen somewhere down the line, and also if someone comes here from a search engine, there might be a few helpful tips on getting the drive working.

Therefore, in this situation, my solution… if the failure doesn’t sound mechanical (no clicks from the drive, etc), give Boot And Nuke a try. Yes, you’ll have lost all of the data on the drive (which I’m sure you have backed up all safely, yes?), and yes, it will take upwards of 6 hours, longer if the drive is bigger, but it might just revive a failed HDD.

We shall now return you to your scheduled programming. Or at least we will next time I need the toilet. I shall describe the visit in all of its intricate details. Or not.

UPDATE THE SECOND… Oh, okay, it’s not about my toilet movements, I’d just like to point out just how important it is to do regular backups! Remember my broken laptop? I backed up my entire picture folder (several gigs) and my MAME folder (even more gigs), on the hard drive I removed from it, both of which have been restored. Although, yes, it’s a small proportion of what was on the drive originally (the rest will be restored soon), I can’t help thinking that all of my worrying, and backing up *just in case*, has been worth it.

UPDATE THE THIRD, 16th Jan, 9:30AM

I’ll not create a new post, though I have just started restoring from the backup, and it’s going to take a while to restore. The backup drive runs Ubuntu, and also acts as the OS, which means that there’s a fair bit of disk thrashing going on, And, seeing as doing this blog hardly constitutes high CPU usage, I thought I’d continue. What IS taking up all of the CPU usage, however, is the… thing… that allows Linux to write to NTFS disks. It makes me wonder if this is what caused all of the problems in the first place.

A couple of days before, I’d been using Linux to write out some DVDs. Not important stuff, just things that had built on the hard drive over time. I had a little bit of a thought…. it wasn’t that long ago that Linux couldn’t even see NTFS partitions correctly, never mind write to them… it made me wonder if there were any “bugs” involved. Of course, I don’t know whether this was the case, as the whole logical structure of the drive appeared to be corrupt. Boot And Nuke must have restored order to some degree, by resetting and wiping everything. I like Linux, but I’m going to like it less if things like this keep happening…

Technorati Tags: boot and nuke, crash, fail, fixed, hard drive, Linux, ntfs, western digital, wiped

Well, I left it to do the disk check overnight, but during that time it crashed. Oh, the joy.

I managed to get the system back up and running (Firefox is installed on the C drive and is working OK, which is why you’re seeing this), but the integrity of the D drive is non-existant. Occasionally, I get the message that D is not formatted.

Formatting is going to be my next step. Hopefully this may help with it. I have a feeling it won’t.

Aaaaaaaaaand, it won’t format. This drive is goosed, by the looks of it. I’m going to reboot into safe mode and try from there…

UPDATE:

Well, the computer won’t even START in safe mode. I’m guessing that’s down to the bad drive in some way. I also swapped over the SATA cables, just for dafties, to make sure there wasn’t an issue there.

UPDATE 2 @ 7:30 AM:

It still doesn’t want to work. At all. Still not formatting. This means, however, that I came up with a plan so fiendishly clever that Columbo himself wouldn’t have thought of it. And, it involves my old friend Linux. I actually came up with this idea a few hours ago, but ran into problems executing it.

Despite the fact that I’ve been pricking about with Linux for years now, when it came to finding a bootable disk, I had nothing but problems. My DVD writer truly sucks, as it doesn’t read CDs correctly, and all of my Linux ISOs on DVD appear to have vanished, they’re nowhere to be seen. Therefore, I’m having to download a new one. All 4.4Gb of it.

Thankfully, for the first time ever, my internet connection is behaving itself, and I appear to actually have full speed!!!

More coming soon when this ISO finishes.

UPDATE 3 @ 8:43 AM

It’s goosed.

UPDATE 4 @ 6:17 PM

I’ve done a lot, and actually typed a lot about this, but woefully, it seems to have been lost in the ether somewhere. Anyway, tocut a long story short, I downloaded the ISO, didn’t work. It hung up when trying to detect the hard disk.

I booted back into windows, using the WD Recovery tool thing, managed to get the drive to format, to a point. Still couldn’t do anything with it. I ran HD tune on it, and got this…

Yes, more bad sectors than you could shake an infected stick at. I had one last idea. Boot ‘n’ Nuke. The handy little utility that wipes every last bit of information from a drive so you can start from scratch. Could this do anything?

Well, it would take 7 hours approximately, so I went to bed. I awoke to find the drive successfully wiped! Hurrah.

I inserted the Ubuntu disk, and whaddya know? It detected the drive. I aborted the installation, and went back into Windows, and it doesn’t see the drive. At all. Not in Device manager, not in Computer Management, nowehere. Buggery.

Currently, I’m back in Ubuntu, allowing the whole thing to install, though I doubt I’ll get to see it all set up as I’m off to work in a few minutes

Oh, and I’ve fixed the broken image. Ta Glen.

Technorati Tags: boot and nuke, crash, fail, fixed, hard drive, Linux, ntfs, western digital, wiped

So, it looks like Beastbits, my main PC has gone the journey.

I will update as soon as I know more… still running a disk check at the time of typing.

UPDATE @ 23:35. Got bored of the disk check and so rebooted it. System failed to load properly with the D drive connected, so powered off machine and disconnected it.

I think the best plan now is to just replace the drive. If it’s faulty, then great. If it’s not faulty, and this is some other error I’ll just format it and use it as a data drive of some sort.

UPDATE: Oh, wait. I don’t have the money to replace a drive. Bugger.

Technorati Tags: beastbits, broken, computer, crashed, failed, hard drive, knackered

As promised yesterday, I made a video to show just exactly what happens..

Apologies for the sound and the commentary. I recorded this on my Acer camera, it’s great at photos, but the video and audio is truly abysmal.

Seconds ago, listerally, things have just gotten a little more interesting. There is still life in it, but only when it comes to the battery section. After I made that video, I just left it exacly as it stood, and forgot to turn it off. I looked over and noticed that the battery was flashing, indicating that the battery was low. It even beeped to alert me to this.

So, the circuitry that operates the power switch, LEDs, battery meter and audio warnings is still alive. It’s just a shame that the rest of the system is dead.

I’m just going to cut my losses and abandon it. We gave “her” a proper send off in the pub today, as it made a good excuse to go out and have a drink. I have also ordered a 2.5″ hard drive enclosure from ebay, so her spirit may live on in the form of a 60Gb external drive. Of course, this also doubles up as an opportunity to rescue any data that may still be on the drive. Therte won’t be anything earth-shatteringly important on there, as I always had a preminition of something like this happening (remember, the laptop was 2nd hand anyway), so I tried to keep clutter down to a miniumum. Also, it slowed down drastically when there was a lot of stuff on the drive anyway.

Of course, the trip to the pub also allowed me to walk home, and check up on the status of the Raby Road demolition. The following photo was taken a couple of weeks ago…

The Chester pub can be seen in that picture, up until now, it has had buildings on both sides of it. Now, for the first time, it’s completely isolated, as the shops and houses have been flattened to make way for the new development.

I was also in the chippy on the way back home, and overheard a conversation that there may be some of the other houses in Raby Road demolished, due to subsidence. They (the owners) were expected to find out today if that’s the case. I’ve taken a number of photos over the last few weeks regarding this, which can all be viewed here.

Technorati Tags: beep, broken, dead, demolition, faulty, hartlepool, laptop, part 2, properties, raby road

You can’t have failed to notice my post no more than a few months ago, when the memory card for my camera decided to die inside my laptop. Well, exactly the same thing happened tonight. Grrrrr.

As mentioned yesterday (or the day before yesterday as it will be when you get to read this), I typed about getting rid of the car. The poor little bastard’s had its time.

Myself and Daddykins went down and got it back from the garage, with the emergency work done on the brakes. It needed new brake shoes as the brakes themselves had siezed. And the handbrake cable had snapped. Oh dear.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I went to the garage too, and, what could very well become my catchphrase, after three… “needless to say, I took my camera”. I took photos of the “final” journey home in it, as it was a journey this car will never make again. Never will its grippy Michelin tyres feel the soft caress of the West View tarmac. Oh, it was an emotional experience. Not because of the journey, but because I found out that The Touchdown pub has been renamed “The Wok Inn”… clearly, it’s going to be a chinese, but the name? What were they thinking? I can’t help but look forward to visiting it though, if and when it opens.

I never went into The Touchdown. I always considered it a bit rough, though seeing as I never went in there, it could have been the nicest pub in the world. I will never know.

So, we arrived home, and began to clear the car out of its worldly possessions. there were a strange amount of cassettes inside it. Considering that there’s not been a stereo that plays cassettes in it for about 4 years, this was an indication on how often it got cleared out. That was about to change, however.

Everything that wasn’t screwed down, went into a series of boxes and carrier bags. Most of it, just like those cassettes, are probably complete junk. The next thing to be removed was the CD player. For the record, the last complete song to ever be played in this vehicle was “The Way It Is”, as it happened to be on a CD I was about to fling in the box. I did indeed create a video of this momentous event.

You must have noticed something by now. Despite the fact I’ve taken lots of pictures, none of them are currently on the site. I know you’re all desperate to find out why….

No? Tough.

It was a night like any other. I had a blinding headache, caused mainly by a lack of sleep. I loaded the card in my laptop, and began renaming photos of the day. This makes it easier to look through and also easier when I put them on flickr or whatever. I got through renaming about 10 or 11 of them, when an error came up.. “Acton cannot be peformed because of a device I/O error”. Oh joy. I’ve been here before. At this point, the card reader disappeared from Windows. Greeeat.

I had no option but to restart. Upon my restart, I got the good old Chkdsk, wanting to check the memory card. “Meh”, I thought, as it quickly ran through… I left it to do its worst.

One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You
may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended
that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.
Unrecoverable error in folder \DCIM\101ACERC.
Convert folder to file (Y/N)? Yes
Convert lost chains to files (Y/N)? Yes
295108608 bytes in 92 recovered files.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

I didn’t select Yes. It did it for me. Of course, I didn’t know this until I got into Windows, and went to rename the files again. In place of my lovely directory full of photos, I ended up with one file, 32K in size. And no photos. None of the 92 files it mentioned actually existed. What an absolute pisser. I was seething.

I wanted a lasting memory of the car. I had great photos, which had now been completely lost. No backups, nothing. I didn’t even get to *see* the image of Daddykins syphoning diesel from the old car. Even the video sequence I’d recorded was up in binary-style smoke. I was spitting blood. What could I do? The files are there somewhere, locked away on the card, but how could I recover them? I instantly thought about Sourceforge, and Freshmeat, both purveyors of good, free software.

It was one of those times I really decided that I could no longer be arsed with free software. I wanted something I could load up, and get the job done for me painlessly, without having to deal with horrible installers and Pigeon English. Aaaaaand this where I’m up to right now. Sooo… I might as well timestamp the recovery procedure…

08:51
It is the morning after the night before, and I have the corrupted card in my main PC for the first time. I’ve downloaded and paid for (~£23) some software which appears to be successfully finding the images. Whether it recovers them is another entirely different matter. If it doesn’t, there’ll be hell to pay. If it does, I might write them a nice email claiming that I’m happy with their software, but not happy with the extortionate price.

I know it might come as a shock to some of you that I’m actually paying money for software, and I’m quite aware that there’ll probably be hundreds of free utilities that would do the same job. That’s great, but I don’t care.

Currently, it’s going as far back as being able to recover some of my Berlin photos. These weren’t lost, but deleted on purpose so I could reuse the card again… still 18 minutes before it’ll give me a final view of what it’ll be able to recover.

08:57
It’s up to 470 photos recovered. It’ also found all of the ones from when me, Dan Phil and Tetlow went to High Force. 9 minutes, left, and it’s up to 541 photos found. It’s funny how much is left on the card. To start off, though, I’ll only recover the most recent ones. After that, I might securely erase the card. There’s no point keeping that data on there.

09:03
Only a few minutes left. Time for a pish.

09:06
Whose stupid idea was it to timestamp every single thing I do? Oh, wait, mine. Think I’ll scratch my bollocks.

09:06:37
Bollock scratching ceases.. Less than two minutes on the file scan… it thinks one of the files is 28,475,216Kb This is going to be FUN.

09:12
A heart stopping moment happened seconds ago. It froze entirely, right at the end of the scan. Nasty. Thankfully though, it livened up, and I can select images.

09:17
Whew. It’s all over. The recovery worked. I needn’t have worried about the large file, it automatically detects images over 10Mb and doesn’t preview them. I’m now doing a rescan to see if I can recover any of those movie files that I created. It’s be nice to have those back too. 36 minutes for that scan to go.

09:36
Well, I got the videos back too. They say that prevention is better than cure, and yes, I agree that realising that the card reader in my laptop is complete shit is better than spending £23 on recovering the data it corrupted, but now that I know the software works, it’ll probably prove its worth its weight in gold. Probably.

Time to get the lot stuck on flickr, I suppose…

Technorati Tags: broken, chkdsk, corrupted, fixed, jpeg, lost, memory card, Photos, recovered, scandisk, Software