George Hester <hesterloli@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Ugh I am at a loss here. I run chkdsk while Windows is runnig
> on it and it completes and says everything is fine. It will not let
> me xcopy /c a file off of it. Not all just one in particular. There
> is nothing on it very important but important enough that I will
> probably never delete the partition unless I can get most off of it.

> Remember everything on it is available just not able to be copied or moved.

You say above that its just one particular file that cant be copied.
What exactly is that file content wise ? You appeared to say
previously that its a video file.

> I will probably retire the disk if I can't do anything with it.

You may be able to fix it by doing something about the temperature and then
getting PowerMax to fix the pending sectors by 'low level formatting' it.

> Maybe I could Ghost it ???

Might be viable but it depends on that file, what it actually is.

> Yes I have a 320 GB drive. Do you think I should
> try to Ghost the drive in question onto that?

Depends on what that file actually is.

> That will probably fail.

You should be able to ghost it by telling Ghost to ignore bad sectors.

> The app you suggested said I should change the Geometry
> of the drive. What do you think about doing that?

No evidence of a geometry problem.

> What happens is after I try to copy this file elsewhere the drive just seems to stop.
> No activity on the indicator lights. But the other partition doesn't exhibit this behavior.

Almost certainly that particular file has the pending sectors in it.

> One other thing about this partition. Some time ago I noticed that
> I was not able to put a file on it that was less than 100MB of the
> available space. In other words if there was 200MB of available
> space any file I put on it had to be smaller than about 75MB. And
> even that might have been too much. A 5MB file would have gone on it.

What exactly happened when that failed ?

> I think in the meantime I will try to put it in a different
> machine. One a little more advanced then P1.

I doubt it will help. Just make sure you keep using an AUTO drive type.


> "VWWall" <vwall@DEADearthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:G0zxh.19319$yx6.12970@newsread2.news.pas.eart hlink.net...
>> George Hester wrote:
>>> Ok got it the report is very big. But what I will do is just post
>>> the parts that have to do with the drive in question:
>>>
>>> --------[ EVEREST Home Edition (c) 2003-2005 Lavalys,
>> [big snip of report]
>>> --------[ Debug - Video
>>>
> BIOS
> ]----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> --------------------
>>>
>>> C000:0000 U.@..7400............S....f.m.IBM VGA Compatible
>>> BIOS. ..f..a...
>>> C000:0040 ....STB PowerGraph 64 Video (TRIO64V+) Enhanced VGA
>>> BIOS. Versio
>>> C000:0080 n 1.5..Copyright 1987-1992 Phoenix Technologies
>>> Ltd.............
>>
>> This looks like a very old BIOS. Is it? What date do you see on
>> boot-up?
>>
>> What size are the disks in question? What size are the partitions?
>> Looks like the WD is 60GB and the Maxtor 320GB.
>>
>> A BIOS that old must be LBA28. I'm wondering if the problem came
>> from overwriting one of the partitions. This can happen if you
>> attempt to
>> use a drive >137GB, (128GiB), on an old LBA28 BIOS, by making smaller
>> partitions.
>>>
>>> What do you think man? Doesn't look like anything????
>>>
>>> Now the application that VWWall provided from up top, TestDisk said
>>> the partition could not be recovered. Then said it may be
>>> recovered if I change the geometry of the drive. I am a little
>>> hesitant to do that for how could the Geometry change from whatever
>>> it was to wrong? It may always have been wrong and worked fine.
>>> It wants to reduce the number of cylinders.
>>
>> I haven't used TestDisk in awhile. I've heard only good reports about
>> it. What kind of data is on the drive in question? You may be
>> forced
>> to re-format after saving as much as you can get off.
>>
>> Generally, when a drive starts to go bad it doesn't get better by
>> itself. If it's a file/partition problem the drive may be OK, but
>> the data's in danger.
>>
>> Let us know if you do have a 320GB drive and the BIOS is an older
>> one. (Before about 2002, when LBA48 became common.)
>> --
>> Virg Wall