75ZT Community

I have a self built PC, its about 2 years old and basically consists of:

Intel Celeron E 1200 Dual 1.6ghz
Msi Mainboard
Western Digital SATA HDD (x2 160Gb each)
PNY GeForce 8500GT Graphics adapter
Seagate External 320Gb HDD

The problem is, The other night whilst playing World of Warcraft, the game froze and I had to reset PC to get things going again. When I rebooted, all the DOS Text during startup had turned purple and once Windows booted up, it simply froze and teh screen just flickered. So, again I reset PC and went into Bios to set up the "Load Defaults" setting. The Bios screens normally yellow text / Blue background, had turned Yellow and red text with Blue background. Furthermore, some Text was actually missing from the Bios screens.

I managed to get into Safe Mode and remove the Drivers for the Graphic Card when I noticed that 2 of my 3 HDD's where missing from the Hardware list. The painful part was that BOTH these HDD's are my "Back up" drives The first being a Western Digital 1200JD drive and the External drive being the 2nd. Windows could now boot up normally, minus the two aforementioned HDD's. Anytime I put any form of Driver on for the Graphic Card, the system would fail and I would have to go into Safe Mode to remove them.

I can only assume that it is a Graphic Card failure, but I was concerned because also there is a chipset on the Mainboard, which possibly could be the failed device.

Does anyone have any idea at all what it could be? and more importantly does anyone know of a way I can try to recover any Data from the two back up drives as they contain about 40% of every photograph I have taken in the last 10 years as well as other documents etc

I have googled the issues but found nothing relating to windows on this matter.

Graphic Cards are cheap enough to replace, but if its the mainboard, I may as well go for an upgrade to DDR3 instead of the DDR2 which I am currenlty at.

Do the secondary drives spin up and come to ready (chuckle)? They do not need to be connected to a PC to assess this. If so then the drives and data are OK. It is unlikely that both drives failed at the same time and in conjunction with the faults displayed by your PC. Most likely the PC not able to contact them.

Mick wrote:Do the secondary drives spin up and come to ready (chuckle)? They do not need to be connected to a PC to assess this. If so then the drives and data are OK. It is unlikely that both drives failed at the same time and in conjunction with the faults displayed by your PC. Most likely the PC not able to contact them.

Sorry forgot to mention that lol.

The Western Digital drive does spin up, but Windows says "Cannot access drive it is corrupt or unreadable" - I am not sure about the second one, It is a silent drive - You cannot even "Feel" the vibrations of the discs spinning - There is a HDD light that shows avtivity when running and this does show there is system activity when trying to access it (ie the light flickers) However I did put it on the laptop (via its usb) and it states the same "Cannot access drive as it is corrupt or unreadable" message. However there is no heat to it, normally after about 5 mins you could feel heat transfer through the casing, but there is none there now.

EDIT: The External drive is spinning up I just tried it using a hollow tube as an earpiece lol .

The message when accessing is - "Drivename"\\ is not accessible The file or drirectory is corrupted and unreadable"

Are either of those drives RAID drives? If so then the RAID drivers or the RAID part of the chipset on the motherboard may have kaput itself.

At this point I would run a disk repair utility. (Mac Speak) Presuming you can get access.

Hi Spongebob / Mick.

Thx for your responses

Spongebob, my 2 internal Drives are raid, whilst my 3rd is USB. The Internals are 1 x Main Windows and 1 x Backup and the USB was a "If all else fails" backup.

The good news is, I have managed to access the USB drive now using Disk recovery software and have started pulling files etc from there to my Main HDD and CD Rom. The internal HDD was completely obliterated with all files showing as corrupted in the Data recovery program But I have been able to format it

Its a slow process, but I am happy now as I know that all the irreplacable pictures are safe and undamaged, these being my main concern. I am just shocked at how many "corrupt files" there are / were on these drives and have no idea how it happened

Happy to hear it's not all bad news.

Glad to hear all OK again.
Be a idea to scan all backup and program files just in case anything nasty has slipped in.

Have to agree it sounds suspicious if external drives have major corruption as hardware problems shouldn't be able to affect them, I wouldn't have thought (though I am not any kind of expert).

It's good that you keep a backup, so many don't and isn't it a horrible feeling when you think you've lost all your digital photos.

However, for the future (and for anyone else), I'd reccomend only connecting your backup drive to run a backup every so often, and then disconnect and put it somewhere safe. A fire safe is a good idea and you can get one big enough for a portable hard drive fairly cheaply. The reason for not connecting it all the time is a virus / trojan or even windows (leave it) could decide that your data isn't to be kept and can as easily affect an external drive as internal ones.

Personally, I'm paranoid (I wouldn't be if they weren't out to get me) about losing my data, so I have a raid network attached storage which doesn't run windows, and back that up to a portable hard drive that lives in a little fire and waterproof safe.

I recently had a 500Gb external drive go belly up. Full of stuff I really didn't want to loose.

Pulled it apart and installed it as an internal drive, then used a program called GetDataBack.

Managed to pull everything off it to another drive. Reformatted, it's working perfectly now.

Thanks all

I am normally a little more "On the ball" at keeping my stuff secure, sadly I got a little lax lately and almost paid the price for it

I used Easeus Back Data Recovery, which was simple to use and I recovered 99% of my Files from both drives and as Mark_Bansai said, I too have been able to format and reuse my drives The only files I could not recover where MS Office templates I had created, so no big loss really. All the pictures where recovered intact

Again thanks for all your advice from a much wiser me