A very strange issue

[LonelyTV]

A very strange issue has come up with ALL of my IDE hard drives. I recently upgraded to a new EVGA/Foxconn board that had one IDE port(?) on board. Unfortunately, ever since I updated the Motherboard I've been experience strange issues with my IDE Hard drives. 90% of the time they show up corrupted on POST. Usually, it takes a reseting of the IDE cable to fix it. That annoyed me so I swapped IDE cables and all was well, except that now most if not all of the HDDs are showing up in Windows and Linux as a blank, unformatted, or unreadable drive. When I look at them in a program like gpartd or System Tools on windows they how up as "RAW and Healthy" or they don't show up at all. I've yet to find any way to fix them, chkdisk won't run because it can't 'find' the drive and so far no other programs like to work.
Most of the drives are Maxtor 120gb drives, and a few are Western digital as well.

Are the drives repairable so not to lose any of the data?

Thanks!

[sceggy]

LonelyTV

You don't say which board (is it the 680i SLI?) Looking at this from a fault elimination perspective, potential problems are:

(a) F**ked motherboard/IDE channel - broken track/silicon - RMA
(b) Damaged BIOS (motherboard) - can you boot from USB flash drive/floppy?
(c) Damaged IDE connector on motherboard - RMA
(d) Damaged IDE cable - get another 80 core
(e) Damaged MBR (on more than one disk)

Since it is happening on more than one disk, I'd be tempted to explore the first FOUR options as the ROOT cause, and then go about fixing the MBR using Winhex to search for lost partitions.

To eliminate the disk problem, I'd suggest loading a known disk (with OS) into a USB caddy and see if the system can see the disk.

Scegs

From your comment I guess you are

[pcimage]

Yep, agree. A USB caddy test will eliminate IDE controller/cable problems.

They are cheap to buy and always handy to have!

[LonelyTV]

LonelyTV

You don't say which board (is it the 680i SLI?) Looking at this from a fault elimination perspective, potential problems are:

(a) F**ked motherboard/IDE channel - broken track/silicon - RMA
(b) Damaged BIOS (motherboard) - can you boot from USB flash drive/floppy?
(c) Damaged IDE connector on motherboard - RMA
(d) Damaged IDE cable - get another 80 core
(e) Damaged MBR (on more than one disk)

Since it is happening on more than one disk, I'd be tempted to explore the first FOUR options as the ROOT cause, and then go about fixing the MBR using Winhex to search for lost partitions.

To eliminate the disk problem, I'd suggest loading a known disk (with OS) into a USB caddy and see if the system can see the disk.

Scegs

From your comment I guess you are

Heh, yeah sorry I didn't specify my board version It's a EVGA 122-M2-NF59-TR AMD 590 SLI. I have successfully booted from both floppy, IDE HDD, IDE CDrom, and SATA Drive (my 'main' drive). I've got a USB enclosure that I could try out if need be. My CDrom has Zero issues being found and working properly on the IDE Channel. I have also swapped out IDE Cables already to see if that was my problem, however with my HDD's already being messed up they still show up as "healthy, RAW".

So you suggest booting into a known OS by way of USB enclosure, would that be the same as booting with a SATA drive?

I apprecate the response thus far... my goal in all of this is to get my data off the drives and onto a new SATA (when I buy it) I really have no need for all of these IDE drives.

[pcimage]

Boot from a SATA drive (with Windows installed on it).

Plug in your IDE drive via the USB. See if it's recognised.

If still raw,try some DR software (e.g. GetDataBack, demo version available from Runtime softwares site)

That will at least tell you if your drives are toasted, or just corrupt partion info (for example).

[sceggy]

As pcimage stated.... get a new SATA drive and a usb caddy. Build a new OS from CD onto the new drive (SATA).

LOAD ALL THE RECOMMENDED DRIVERS FROM THE MOTHERBOARD MANUFACTURERS WEBSITE.
LOAD ALL THE WINDOWS PATCHES FROM MICROSOFT.

Put the "knackered" drives in the USB caddy, one at a time; connect to the machine and use Winhex or something to examine for remnant/filesystem artefacts ($MFT etc); and then recover to the SATA drive.

New IDE cable £5.00
New USB caddy £29.00
New SATA drive £69.00

Data recovered £priceless.

[LonelyTV]

Well, I went and bought a new USB caddy since the other one I had was for a laptop HDD. All the hard drives were recognized instantly in Windows. However, when digging through them in WinHex I found that the partitions were in tact but I could not view the files. I did notice that winhex reports that the File System type is "unknown" and PTEDIT32 (it's worked for me before ages ago) reports that the HDD's partition table is set for NTFS.

So my speculation is that the IDE port/cable has corrupted my partition tables (or MBR?) and I need to find a way to repair them. Running the NTFS Template on Winhex has done nothing for me except show me gibberish I can't recypher.

Thanks a lot for all the help thus far. I do beleive this Motherboard is shot since it's had some other issues since I got it back in May. However, my #1 goal is to get my IDE drives up and running again for the time being.

[pcimage]

Try GetDataBack

[LonelyTV]

Try GetDataBack

I have, it quotes the filetype to be NTFS and when it scans it gets near finished and gives me an unknown error (I'm re-running it now to get the error). However, it continues on and then spits out the file tree which is full of 'system' ($_filename_) files up for recovery. My concern is if there's a way to fix the HDD without copying the files to another HDD as right now money is scarse and I'm unable to purchase a new SATA drive to back everything onto (which would be my #1 choice).

[Steve]

Try NTExplorer also from runtime ..
Check the partition table ,
Boot Sector ( normally 63)
And the master file table .

If any of those are corrupt NtExplorer will tell you .
Then you can repair only the corrupted item

But as Always , be very careful modifying ANY data
on a drive you are trying to recover.

At the very least you should save any sectors that
you are going to modify.

[LonelyTV]

Try NTExplorer also from runtime ..
Check the partition table ,
Boot Sector ( normally 63)
And the master file table .

If any of those are corrupt NtExplorer will tell you .
Then you can repair only the corrupted item

But as Always , be very careful modifying ANY data
on a drive you are trying to recover.

At the very least you should save any sectors that
you are going to modify.

I downloaded Disk Explorer, and it was helpful to some extent. However, I was unable to make much sense out of what I was looking at. I found a lot of "Invalid" items. So instead of trying to type it all up... I decided to just upload some photos of them. Forgive me for their size... i didn't know how large they would be when I uploaded them.

Drive:


Partition:

[Steve]

the pictures aren't showing up on my screen

[LonelyTV]

Ack, it appears I chose a bad photo host.

I've re-uploaded them to a more reliable one.
Drive:


Partition:
[img]http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1219/955409075_67887ce52a_o.jpg/img]

[Steve]

OK .. when you run NtExplorer , open the drive .. ( which it appears you did )
Not the partition..
Then when at partition table Double click the first entry , that
should take you to the boot record .. See if it is valid .. according to
the partition table that is sector 2048 ( which seems strange ) ..
if it shows invalid , go to sector 63 and see if it is a valid boot
sector ..My thoughts are that even though the partition table is
valid , that it is incorrect and should point to sector 63 but let's
check first .. you can post a picture of sector 2048 ( as a boot
record ) and sector 63 ( as a boot record ) then I can point you
further down the line

[LonelyTV]

Thanks Steve!

Unfortunately, while explorering other drives I found the drive I posted pictures on wasn't important(as in, it truely had no data on it that was important), so I reformated it and moved on. However, now I've moved onto another hard drive that is very important. Sadly, I've got four or so more that are doing the same thing (mounting as Healthy but being read as "RAW"), so hopefully this one will help me figure out the rest. NTexplorer, reports that the Partition Tables are valid and the NTFS starts at 63. WinHex reports the filesystem to be NTFS but gives me a $MFT error, "Cannot open "\$MFT" .3221225472 - 10 - $MFTmirr".
I'm going to run "GetDataBack" on this one while I run to dinner. It appears to be in better condition.

Sorry for ditching the other one...

Thanks again!

[Steve]

not a problem .. also you can use the one that has no important
data to experiment on
If ya run into any problems , I'll be around off and on most of the
night