Sort-of-Dead WHS/SageTV HDD - advice on how to recover the files

[brianblank]

My WHS/SageTV machine has been acting up for a couple of weeks (stuttering recordings and playback, HD200s not able to access recordings, etc.) I have been trying to sniff out the problem. On Xmas day I think I found the problem, one of the 2 drives I use to store SageTV recordings disappeared from the system and nothing I tried brought it back:

• Both the Short and Extended Tests on the Western Digital Diagnostics say the drive is OK.
• CHKDSK says the drive is OK
• CHKNTFS says the drive is "Cannot query state of drive F:"
• Disk Management shows the drive as healthy
• When trying to access the drive from Windows Explorer I get this error "F:/ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted or unreadable."
• I noticed this BIOS error during one reboot "S.M.A.R.T. Capable but Command Failed"

I downloaded Recuva to see if I could recover the data. And lo and behold all of the video files are there and appear to be recoverable. My question is this, is there a way to fix the "index" file or whatever is broken/corrupted on the drive instead of going through the slow process of recovering and copying the 800GB worth of files?

Another question for once I get all these files back onto my WHS. When I built my WHS/SageTV machine I was under the impression that the SageTV recording directories couldn't be part of the WHS pool. Is that still the case? If it is, what other options do I have to create some redundancy for the Sage recordings?

Thanks and Happy Holidays,
Brian

[IVB]

Not truly your question, but when one of my prior HDs was dying under XP, the advice I got which worked was to put it into the freezer, then hook it up to a machine and quickly copy all files off. Sounds like you can already do that with Recuva though, so I guess this is only helpful if the disk degrades even further.

[GKusnick]

If the drive hardware itself is failing, you're not going to be able to fix it with a simple reformat or re-index. If you value those files, you want to get them off there onto another drive as soon as you can.

That said, it's possible the drive itself is OK and what you're seeing is a cabling problem. So it's probably worth an experiment to swap out the SATA cable and switch the drive to a different power dongle to see if that improves stability. Even if it does, though, you'd still be smart to copy off any files you can't live without to someplace safe.

The freezer trick helps if the drive's usable uptime is limited. Chill it, copy files until it warms up and craps out, then pop it back in the freezer for another round.

[brianblank]

IVB - I'll try the freezer trick tonight to see if I can access the drive directly.

GKusnick - I've tried multiple SATA and power cables to the drive, everything points to a bad/dying drive.

[IVB]

800GB is pretty massive, i know my HD was failing within 30ish mins, so you may want to pre-plan what files to copy off first. I had to do several cycles of freezing to get part of what I needed off, after which the HD failed totally.

[brianblank]

Everything has been recovered and moved to a new drive. Unfortunantly, I am leaving tomorrow for the NYE weekend, so the conversion of my WHS pool to 64k clusters and copying of the recovered files will have to wait a few more days.

Happy New Years,
Brian