3TB Drive troubles, eeek!!!

[glasswave]

Hello,

My 3TB drive seems to be having some very odd problems. I first noticed when I could not get some large .mkv files that I have played many times to play in vlc. I tried them in several media players, then on another cptr. In the process of testing, I come to find that .mkv files play songs from my mp3 collection instead of the video that they are supposed to play.

I ran a disk check and it zoomed right through the slowed and said that some problems were fixed and files were moved to a found folder. I cannot find any "found" folder. The log details from the check disk cannot be copied or saved, *&%#%^! The check disk had hundreds of lines saying "correcting error in index $I30 for file 56088" or some such and hundreds of lines that say "recovering orphan file TWOWEE~1.h26 into directory fille 317726" or some such.

Most of this data is backed up in some sense or other, but it would take dozens of hours to get it all back. Most all the very critical stuff is backed up, but even that will take hour and hours of searching re-assembling my current data structure. This is main data drive!

Any ideas what this can be wrong, or where to go from here???

FYI -- It is a Seagate Barracuda (6Gbit/s, 7200 rpm, 64mb cache) in a Rosewill external case with fan, eSata and usb3

[fzabkar]

I'm guessing that your Rosewill enclosure may not be able to handle 3TB drives correctly. I suspect that you may have partitioned and formatted the drive outside the enclosure, and have now exceeded the 2TiB capacity point. If so, then it could be that your file system has wrapped at the 2TiB mark, causing new data to overwrite the old.

I would stop writing to the drive, and don't "fix" anything with CHKDSK. If possible, clone your drive, sector by sector, and then work on the clone. Otherwise I would examine the drive in readonly mode using a disc editor, eg DMDE freeware. At the very least, we would need to confirm whether DMDE can see the full capacity of the drive, or whether it is limited to 800GB.

[glasswave]

I'm guessing that your Rosewill enclosure may not be able to handle 3TB drives correctly. I suspect that you may have partitioned and formatted the drive outside the enclosure, and have now exceeded the 2TiB capacity point. If so, then it could be that your file system has wrapped at the 2TiB mark, causing new data to overwrite the old.

I would stop writing to the drive, and don't "fix" anything with CHKDSK. If possible, clone your drive, sector by sector, and then work on the clone. Otherwise I would examine the drive in readonly mode using a disc editor, eg DMDE freeware. At the very least, we would need to confirm whether DMDE can see the full capacity of the drive, or whether it is limited to 800GB.

Thank you for the reply.

The drive has been inside the Rosewill enclosure since it was new. It took some work to get it partitioned correctly, which I eventually did by using a Seagate utility to make the GUID partition. The drive has always had nearly 2.72TB of space formatted. It is now nearly full only w/14GB free.

I'll see if I can look at it with the DMDE sw. Is there a portable version?

[fzabkar]

Well, it seems that my guess was wrong. I can't offer an explanation for your data corruption except to say that disconnecting the USB cable while data still exist in the write cache is a common cause of file system damage.

It might still be an idea to see how DMDE reports the range of sectors for your drive. I don't understand what you mean by a "portable" version, though.

[HaQue]

portable version means run the software from an extracted folder - no installation required.

It can be "shipped" this way or someone could make a portable version. Its getting quite popular, especially in the warez scene as a software can be cracked and distributed and nothing much can mess with it such as shared libraries.

I don't condone that part of it, but small freeware tools are handy to have as a portable version.

and yes - it is portable.