The hard drive is empty

Bob in St. Louis · « **on:** 14 Jul 2009, 02:04 pm »

Right in the middle of a Stevie Ray Vaughan song, the speakers go silent.

I flip over to the SqeezeCenter tab and notice it's playing several seconds of a song, then randomly finds another song in the playlist and tried to play it for several seconds, then finds another, and another.....
But nothing is coming from the speakers.
Just then a message pops up that says:

--------------------------------------
Windows - Delayed Write Failed
Windows was unable to save all the date for the file F:\$Mft. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elseware.
--------------------------------------

(My USB external hard drive is drive F:)

If I go to the drive, all of the folders are there, but there are no songs in them. But it still says there's 699GB of data contained in F: drive.
WTF?
Please don't tell me.............

Any ideas?

Bob - Tuneless in St. Louis

zybar · « **Reply #1 on:** 14 Jul 2009, 02:12 pm »

Hope you have a backup Bob.

George

richidoo · « **Reply #2 on:** 14 Jul 2009, 02:17 pm »

Reboot the computer from dead stop (shutdown) after disconnecting the external USB storage.
Then plug F: back in and let it reconnect.

Can you run checkdisk on an external drive??? Never tried that.

Bob in St. Louis · « **Reply #3 on:** 14 Jul 2009, 02:27 pm »

George, yes I've got a backup. The external USB enclosure is dual drive RAID. So theoretically, it is it's own backup.

Rich, I did a reboot of the PC and got a message:

------------------
Found new hardware
Unknown device
------------------

But I did not do a dead/hard shutdown, and I did not unplug the drive.
I'll try that in a minute.

Also, drive F: no longer exists in the Explore list. So I guess I can run scandisc/checkdisc on a drive that doesn't exist anymore.

My first thought is the RAID enclosure itself failed, not the drives within it.

more soon.........

Bob

EDIT: There is a pretty little orange light on the front of the enclosure I've never seen before.

Bob in St. Louis · « **Reply #4 on:** 14 Jul 2009, 02:48 pm »

Unplugged it, shut the PC down, restart, plug back in.....
No more pretty orange failure light, but Explore still doesn't 'see' a drive F:
Also, no more pop up message about seeing an external device when I turned it on. It's like it doesn't even exist as far as the PC is concerned.

Bob

srb · « **Reply #5 on:** 14 Jul 2009, 04:32 pm »

Bob,

If your RAID 1 drive box has an internal hardware controller, there may be a key sequence to press during bootup that could perform diagnostics. You would have to check your manual.

There is a lot less to go wrong with RAID 1 mirroring than with higher level RAID striping levels, so there is a very good chance that one or both drives have viable data.

I would probably pick up a SATA USB/E-SATA dock, so that I could pop out the drives and put them in the dock and see if you can access them. My guess is that the data is intact, but the RAID device has a problem.

Steve

Jon L · « **Reply #6 on:** 14 Jul 2009, 06:18 pm »

This is why I will NEVER use USB external drives. Many, many people, including myself, have had USB enclosures fail, mostly due to USB controller chip failures.

Depending on when and how this has happened, your HD may be OK or could have been corrupted, especially the partition directory.

Obtain some other adapter/enclosure to test out your hard drives and keep your fingers crossed. Even if this doesn't work, if only the paritition has been corrupted, you may still be able to fix the HD by using a good partition repair software.

BTW. I will ONLY use e-SATA HD enclosures myself.

richidoo · « **Reply #7 on:** 14 Jul 2009, 06:25 pm »

I agree it's the host. I've used these before with good results:
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509
But there are a lot of new ones out now. iOmega has a lot.

But you might want to get the same device as before to recover the data from RAID with same RAID controller and OS, in case there is some weird file table or something. They all use Linux, but sometimes different variants.

Sorry for your trouble.

JEaton · « **Reply #8 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 01:55 am »

Like the others have said, it sounds like a failure of the RAID controller or maybe the USB controller in the enclosure.

If you're lucky then the data on the drives is still good, but you'll need a similar host system to read the drives. I'm guessing the enclosure was running Linux of some flavor. Maybe if you move the drives to another RAID enclosure of the same make/model or maybe a generic Linux PC. If you have a good backup, though, you might cut your losses and just reformat the drives in your PC or a non-RAID external enclosure and then restore your files from the backup.

This scenario is just one of the many reasons why using RAID for music library storage is generally a bad idea that's more dangerous (and more work) for most people than just running non-RAIDed drives and keeping very good backups.

Bob in St. Louis · « **Reply #9 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 02:14 am »

Hmmm.....Sounds like RAID isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Or maybe have two separate "generic" USB drives and use RAID installed as software in the PC as opposed to "internal" RAID in a dual drive enclosure?

I've sent a nice friendly email to the manufacturer that sold me the enclosure and the two 1.5TB drives.
We'll see.....

Thanks guys.

Bob

chip · « **Reply #10 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 02:22 am »

I was using some USB drives for extra backup for some data - Extra Disaster Recovery and boy was that a mistake. I hate them...the work and then they don't. They will work and a week later it will say the HD is there but needs to be formatted - YUCK.

Len_Dreyer · « **Reply #11 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 02:48 am »

Hopefully, in the long run, you don't need this info, but just in case it might be useful. For backups, I use the Thermaltake BlacX (toaster style) hard drive docking station. It makes it very easy to swap out drives. In conjunction with this I use a program called "Goodsync" that is set up to copy all changes since the last copy to the backup drive. What I like about this setup is that I don't have to have the second drive on all the time thereby hopefully extended the life of the backup drive and the backups take a relatively short amount of time after the initial one.

bpape · « **Reply #12 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 02:49 am »

Don't shoot the messenger. If you count on USB 100%, that's a problem. If you have a drive that's not USB and then a USB for occasional backup, that'll work fine.

Bryan

srb · « **Reply #13 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 03:00 am »

Quote from: Bob in St. Louis on 15 Jul 2009, 02:14 am

Hmmm.....Sounds like RAID isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I think you may be right, as far as the present "home" type of RAID solutions go. I use RAID in a business setting, and the Dell RAID controllers that control the PowerVault SCSI arrays cost more than a complete high-end home PC.

I have had a few drives fail over the years, and the hot-swappable replacement drive gets popped in, and the new drive is rebuilt without skipping a beat.

The forums are also full of horror stories and drive corruption from integrated RAID controllers on consumer motherboards.

Not sure what I'll do at home here, probably just continue with my scheduled backups to an e-SATA external drive.

Steve

tdangelo · « **Reply #14 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 03:24 am »

could be the disk became deactivated and needs to be reactivated. You can check it using these instructions:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/dm_reactivate_disk.mspx?mfr=true

Bob in St. Louis · « **Reply #15 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 05:11 pm »

Alright guys, thanks for the good information. I've tried the disk manager, different USB ports, and everything else mentioned here and it's still inop. The manufacturer has replied to my first email so I'm getting somewhere.

Listening to low bitrate internet tunes through the SqueezeBox isn't cutting it for me.

Bob

srb · « **Reply #16 on:** 15 Jul 2009, 07:13 pm »

Quote from: Bob in St. Louis on 15 Jul 2009, 05:11 pm

Listening to low bitrate internet tunes through the SqueezeBox isn't cutting it for me.

I know, Bob. Just when you thought 128Kb/s iTunes was bad ........ hello Internet Radio @ 96Kb/s, 64Kb/s, 32Kb/s !

Hope you get it sorted out, please keep us posted.

Steve

Bob in St. Louis · « **Reply #17 on:** 16 Jul 2009, 06:01 pm »

HAHA... yea, I know what you mean.

I was fortunate enough to find a 128Kb/s blues station from Boston (correct pronunciation: "Baastin") that's tolerable. Good tunes, mediocre quality, but it's giving me my 'fix' for the time being.

The DC power cable to the USB enclosure looks like an s-video plug. The company said that even though the power indicator illuminates, the cooling fan runs, and the drives can be heard spinning, it's still possible the power supply is faulty.

So they're shipping a replacement out today.
If it's not that, the entire unit goes back. Even the drives with the tunes.

Bob

nathanm · « **Reply #18 on:** 16 Jul 2009, 07:19 pm »

Is it a Lacie by chance Bob? What a coincidence, they are shipping me a new power supply for my recently-failed RAID drive today too and they are backordered?hmmm.

Bob in St. Louis · « **Reply #19 on:** 16 Jul 2009, 07:33 pm »

No it's a Mediasonic HUR1-SU2.
Might be made by the same company though.

.............

Ok, that's wasn't funny.

Bob