Half my Tivo files are missing on External Hard Drive- Corrupt? Dying? Saveable?

[lynnalexandra]

Bambi - again thanks so much.

Of course, your very helpful replies leads me to a couple of more really simple questions (I feel I should know this - but I don't want to mess this up over simple procedures I may not know).   :embarrassed:

What is the order of operations with shutting down this cavalry drive.  I don't think I have anything running on it now.  Do I turn it off first - then click safely remove hardware before removing?  I'm guessing that it gets powered down first.  (It has it's own ac adapter - it's not powered by usb.)

When I connect it to my work laptop, which do I turn on first?  laptop, cavalry drive?  and what about after spinrite runs?  do I turn off the cavalry drive first - then safely remove hardware, then remove the drive?  Do I first reboot laptop to it's regular operating system so that I get the option to safely remove hardware.  What's the proper way to shut down and remove this drive from the laptop.

And then - in reconnecting it to my desktop, do I connect it to the desktop and then power it on?
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While I've got spinrite downloaded on the desktop, should I at some point run spinrite on my new WD drive before putting it in use? Can I do this from the desktop, or do I have to boot from removable media (disk I create)?

Thank you so much.
Lynn.

[LilBambi]

Proper order is always to 'safely remove' before unplugging or turning off an external drive.  UNLESS, you turn the computer off first. When a computer is turned off, you can unplug any external drive.

The order on the laptop is not important when turning the computer on. Removables like your Cavalry can be plugged in and turn on anytime along the way.

It is only removing that you have to concern yourself about; and then always 'safely remove' before unplugging or turning off an external drive.  UNLESS, you turn the computer off first. When a computer is turned off, you can unplug any external drive.

Please read all that Steve Gibson has on SpinRite at his site, particularly the FAQ and all online documentation, I linked to earlier.

I have only used SpinRite from a CD on any drive, and I personally have only used it on internal drives. To the best of my knowledge, SpinRite only runs from a removable media running FreeDOS and SpinRite so the drive is fully available. Again, refer to the documentation on that.

[lynnalexandra]

That's very helpful.

So can I actually leave the cavalry drive on?
I can safely remove from my desktop - leave it plugged into the outlet where it is - then connect it to the laptop's usb port?

I'll refer to the spinrite FAQ's for any spinrite questions.

Thanks again.
Lynn.

[LilBambi]

I usually turn if off after 'safely remove' and then turn it back on after plugging the USB connector into the other computer. I think it's safer that way. Not all USB ports are created equal. ;)

[lynnalexandra]

Just an update.  I downloaded spinrite and burned an iso to a cd.  (It took a while until I realized that I had to do it that way.  Spinrite 6 doesn't have documentation yet - except to follow onscreen menus.)    I used my work laptop to boot into spinrite and had it do a recovery scan of the cavalry hard drive.

Unfortunately, it crashed within a minute.  It actually gave a message that

Division Overflow Error!

A critical error occurred at:  B04E from which SpinRite CANNOT recover.  The system has been halted:

Please record the locatio shown above, and the inforation given below, and report it to us so we can find and fix this problem...

I did report all the details and sent it to spinrite support.  I'll keep you posted.  I don't know if they will come up wtih anything or not.  I figured I wasn't going to get further on this tonight, so while I had a bootable cd with spinrite, I have set it up to run a level 4 (deep maintenance) scan on my laptop's hard drive.  I might as well use this software and work on that laptop while I have it home.  I will say that it's process looks very different than the scan on the cavalry drive.  I can see squares and O's appearing in the graphical display - suggesting sections that are being worked on.  In the few minutes I've typed this it's completed 4%.  So I am still happy to have this software and get familiar with it.  It may or may not recover lost files on the external drive.

This was still clearly the path I needed to go down.  I appreciate all your time and efforts in teaching me and leading me here.  I've learned a lot.  It may or may not save the files on this drive, but I figure any time I've learned more about computers, that's a good thing.  (In fact, my mother just told me tonight that what she'd like for her upcoming birthday is for me to do an hour or so of maintenance on her computer.  It's only from generous people like Bambi and others at this forum that I know enough to perform basic help and maintenance on my mother's computer.)

Thank you - and I"ll report back.

Lynn.

[LilBambi]

I look forward to your updates.  :mitch:

[lynnalexandra]

Last I posted here, my first attempt to use spinrite to save my external cavalry hard drive failed.  Spinrite support suggested I might need to try one of two things:

- connect the drive to the mother board to run spinrite
-  FreeDOS may be having a problem on your system, so make a cd or bootable usb flash drive -  need to create a MS-DOS  cd - and use that first to start the laptop - and then run spinrite.

The first suggestion seemed the most likely to work.  So I took out an old Dell dimension - and got my hands on a spare monitor - and planned to take the cavalry drive out of the enclosure and connect it to the mother board.  After I got the old computer and monitor, I got way too busy - and had to put his aside.

Then last week, my computer grad was back in town after graduating. He was working on my daughter's mac computer (I don't know any Mac). While he was here, I thought he could connect my drive to the motherboard with ease (whereas I'd be sweating it and looking back and forth at the instrucitons).  Once we opened up the computer, turns out it only had IDE connectors - and the cavalry drive needed sata.

We tried the ms-dos cd. The link form spinrite in April was no good.  WE got another copy and burned to CD.  Could not get spinrite to find the hard drive at all with this method.  He suggested connecting to my main computer's motherboard (he said I'd still be able to use the computer).  Well - it turns out that as soon as this cavalry drive was connected to my main pc, and we turned the pc on, it started running checkdisk (which - at the beginning of this thread's troubleshooting, we were unable to get my computer to run dskchk on the external drive).  At that point, we had to just let it run.  After about 5 hours, it finished and had fixed the drive.  All the lost data was there.  We put the drive back in the hard drive enclosure and I can see everything and am copying those files to my NAS).

So my files are fine - and I never ran spinrite on the drive.

I still thought spinrite would be useful since I have so many drives (external, NAS and various desktops and laptops).  I wanted to run spinrite to check the new 4TB external hard drive I bought.  Once again, spinrite cannot access or recognize the hard drive.

At this point it was time to go out of town.  At some point, I will get back in touch with spinrite to see if they can help me try to test external drives.  The links they gave me to make an MS-DOS cd were not good - so perhaps we did not get a suitable version.  I would like to have spinrite to check my external drives and run the maintenance they suggest running every 2-3 months.  However, if I cannot get spinrite to run maintenance on an external drive (without taking them out and attaching them to the motherboard), this is not a viable program for me.  I have 4 or 5 external hard drives and a NAS with 5 drives.  I'd love to run regular maintenance - but I am certainly not taking them all out of their enclosures every few months and running spinrite from my my main pc's motherboard.

Spinrite support was resourceful.  And Lil Bambi said she knew somebody who did get spinrite to run on an external drive.  If I can eventually figure out how to get spinrite to do just maintenance checks on the external drives, then great.  If not, it's not going to be of that much use to me - except to check internal drives and attach a bad drive that may need saving in dire circumstances.

When I know more about whether I can get Spinrite to do maintenance on my external drives, I'll report back.

Meanwhile, it's been quite a journey, I've learned a lot along the way beyond just saving the data (like saving to desktop, using paint, checking carefully to copy and paste an entire log - and so much more), I do still have my data - but I didn't use spinrite to save it. 

If anybody is checking this thread who lost data on an external drive, it might be worth connecting to the motherboard to run chkdsk.

Thanks.
Lynn.

[lynnalexandra]

Hi,

I am back - with the newest iteration of issues with this drive.

First the good news:  once chkdsk got the drive up and running, I did transfer all important date and video files to my NAS (and important data that isn't videos was backed up elsewhere as well).  The only thing remaining of some value, but not essential, were episodes of Breaking Bad.  We have the last season on our Tivo and the others are available on Netflix - for now. 

Family's been watching Breaking Bad and loving it.  I thought,  you know what - we might want to go back to this in the future and watch it - and it may no longer be available on Netflix.  So I started transferring the Breaking Bad episodes I had on this cavalry drive to my NAS.  When I initiated this "moving of files to a Breaking Bad folder on the NAS", all my files on the cavalry drive showed up.  The file moving was going well and transferred 18 shows.   Then the transferring stopped and a red light had appeared on the drive - and the computer says it cannot find this device.  I looked under devices and it does not appear in the list of disk drives.

However, when I look under Device Manager, USB Controllers, I see a line that lists USB storage device with a yellow triangle. 

So maybe this just means the USB port is bad?  the cable? the housing for the cavalry drive?  or the drive itself?

At this point, I do not intend to use this drive for storage any more.  If I can transfer the remaining Breaking Bad episodes, I'd like to, but this is not critical.  Other than this, I am prepared to junk this drive.  Before getting rid of it, there is sensitive data on it (like tax return data) that I would like to try to erase/destroy before getting rid of the drive.  (Wiping a drive clean is actually something I need to do for a couple of ancient laptops as well that I could donate if I felt I could securely wipe the drives first.  There's somebody local that does good non-profit work and installs linux on these donated laptops).

1)  is there something I can try to access the drive one last time - possibly to transfer Breaking Bad, and definitely to erase sensitive data
2)  what would the steps be?  Again, I need a real basics of order of operation- do I turn it off, safe remove?, just switch usb cable and/or port?
3)  any simple, dependable way to wipe the drive?
4)  if I can't get it up and running enough to wipe it, should I just shatter it with a hammer?

Thank you.
Lynn.

PS:  this drive has been on and connected to my computer since it was resurrected in June - but has not been used to store anything new on it.

[Corrine]

However, when I look under Device Manager, USB Controllers, I see a line that lists USB storage device with a yellow triangle.

So maybe this just means the USB port is bad?  the cable? the housing for the cavalry drive?  or the drive itself?

1.  Double-click the device showing the yellow exclamation.  Select the text under Device Status and copy/paste it in your next reply.

2.  For that device, please open up the Properties window > Details tab > then select the following options from the dropdown in turn and copy and paste all of the details below it.

Hardware Ids
Driver Node Strong Name

3.  Go to http://www.cavalrystorage.com/nas.aspx and provide the specific name of your Calvary device.  If it is not one of the two listed, please look at the listing under the discontinued drives link and provide the category and series identification.

[LilBambi]

Very good idea Corrine.

It is sounding like this drive is thermal; you start copying a bunch of large files and it overheats and stops reading. Could be a chip on the hard drive motherboard or drive itself.

Will wait to hear what Corrine thinks of the results.you give her.

[lynnalexandra]

Dear Corrine and LilBambi,

I should probably make this a separate post, but have been having trouble receiving some emails.  I didn't know I'd gotten responses (and was also away for one week).  Somehow, I got a spam email that looked like it was from lanzdown (but from Sean?). Gmail put it in spam and since then I have not received Corrine or LilBambi's response.  I'm on a quick work break now but will look at this later and reply. 

Thank you.
Lynn.

[Corrine]

Hi, Lynn. 

The default setting for SMF forum software notifications is that you will only receive notice of the first unread reply unless you change "Notifications" in your forum profile, 

The subscription notices from the forum have always used the alias "sean at landzdown.com".  Just mark them in your Gmail as "not spam". 

[lynnalexandra]

Hi Corinne,

I double-clicked the usb mass storage device that had the yellow exclamation point.  It said:

"Windows cannot use this hardware device because it has been prepared for "safe removal", but it has not been removed from the computer. (Code 47)

To fix this problem, unplug this device from your computer and then plug it in again."

And then the light was dawning on me (or perhaps it's not) - but I remember clicking safely remove hardware after loading some pictures from my camera and wanting to safely remove the camera.  I was not sure which usb port was the camera one - and I think I clicked more than one.  This may have been the problem.  So I think I could try just unplugging the external hard drive and replugging it.  But since there's no urgency, I'll wait for feedback here.

When I go to details and hardware id, I'm not able to copy and paste.  Can't get the cursor there.  So this will take a while to literally copy it all because every time I type a few characters, that screen minimizes.  But here goes:

Hardware ID:
USB\Vid_1058&Pid_1021&Rev_2021
USB\Vid_1058&Pid_1021

There is no option in the drop down menu that resembles Driver Node Strong Name (nothing even close enough for me to think that that was what you had in mind).  Anything else it might be called?

The Cavalry Drive is in it's own separate external housing.  It is not part of a NAS.  I have a Synology NAS - but that's separate from this drive that's caused me trouble.  This drive model is:
Cavalry 2TB drive - CAXM3702T0 (not sure if that' s zero or an "O")
it's a USB2 type?
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I made the changes in settings to get all notifications.  I don't recall landzdown emails showing up as "sean at landzdown.com" but I will now check spam folders and mark as not spam.

Thank you.
Lynn.

[Corrine]

Yes, you need to unplug the external drive and then reconnect it. 

For reference, see the FAQ's from the CAXM Series - Cavalry page:  http://www.cavalrystorage.com/faq.aspx#troubleshooting.01

[lynnalexandra]

Hi Corrine,

Yep - that did it.  Unplugged the drive - the red light went off, the blue light came on - plugged it back in and all is working fine.  That was a very helpful link on external hard drives.  I've bookmarked it for future reference.  I had no idea that USB3 was 10 times faster than USB2.  Very useful information.

There's no urgency on this now, but I would still like to know if there is a safe way to delete sensitive material on a hard drive (like my income tax info) - in case I do have to eventually junk this drive - or donate a couple of old laptops.  I assume it's not safe enough to just delete those files and that I have to wipe the entire drive?  That's okay if I'm tossing it or donating it to this guy who installs linux and does charitable things with them.  The idea of re-installing an operating system intimidates the heck out of me (should that need ever come up in the future).  I think there's no really safe way to delete sensitive material without wiping out the OS as well.

Thank you.
Lynn.