Data Corruption & Hard Disk Troubleshooting

Introduction

Incorrect document contents, missing information, gobbledegook, application crashes or hangs when opening documents, inconsistent results when copying files, inordinately slow file operations, a sudden and unexplained full hard disk, missing files or folders, lost or changed permissions on files, unable to logon, hearing loud, rasping, scraping and clicking coming from your PC, and many other weird goings on can be symptomatic of corruption or drive failure.

Professional data recovery specialists charge anywhere from $US250 to $US2,000 or more to try to recover lost data from disks and CDs, yet there is no guarantee you will get anything back. This article provides some resources that you can try in order to recover your lost or corrupt data, either on hard disk, CD or DVD, without spending any money.

Unless you are experienced at troubleshooting corruption issues, you should read through all of these articles before deciding on a course of action.

If you need information on how to make backups to deal with future lost files or corruption, read the article on this site about Backup and Data Recovery.

If the data on your hard disk is in trouble, DO NOT even attempt to boot the machine from its operating system. Simply booting the OS causes data to be written to disk, which can overwrite deleted files. If your disk is corrupt, writing data to the disk can make corruption much worse than it already might be.

If you are currently trying to recover from a disk problem and are at risk of losing data, you should read this article in full before deciding on any particular course of action.

Page Index

Very Poor Disk Performance
Free & Open Source Recovery Software
Disk Manufacturer's Utilities
Alternative Solutions
Microsoft Disaster Recovery Tools
Knowledgebase Articles (Hard Disk Problems)

Very Poor Disk Performance

The kadaitcha.cx XP Performance Tweaks and the Vista Performance Tweaks pages say that PC performance is mostly a matter of perception. If you perceive that you have experienced an immediate and dramatic decline in hard disk or optical disc device performance then you may be dealing with a serious corruption problem caused by a hardware fault. If hard disk or optical disc performance has always seemed slow then it could be corruption, or it could be that you have an early version of XP that does not enable Ultra DMA mode on hard disks and high-speed optical devices. You can apply this check and the associated modification for either reason.

Both XP and Vista have options for "PIO Only" and "DMA if available" on IDE channels, which can be accessed through Device Manager in the System control panel applet in XP.

If slow disk performance is caused by corruption due to a hardware fault then this test and modification will always revert your hard disk or high-speed optical device to PIO mode, no matter how many times you set it to "DMA if available". PIO is woefully slow and the OS will always force your disks or optical devices into the much slower PIO mode if there are six or more cyclic redundancy check (CRC) errors on the device.

If you find that your IDE channels are set in PIO mode and you change them to "DMA if available", then, if the setting change causes the device to stay in DMA mode, you probably have an early edition of XP that does not automatically set DMA mode; this generally happens on older equipment that has an Intel chipset.

Perform this test and, if necessary, apply the changes to both the Primary IDE Channel and the secondary channel.

Start the System control panel, then start Device Manager (by selecting the Hardware tab in XP).

Right-click on the selected IDE channel:

Choose Properties then choose the Advanced Settings tab:

If Transfer Mode is set to "PIO Only", set it to "DMA if available".

Click OK and repeat for the secondary channel, then reboot.

If the device is not faulty, DMA mode will stay selected (shown under Current Transfer Mode) during normal use and you will experience an incredible performance boost due to the disks running at their maximum throughput. If the device is generating CRC errors then the OS will force the transfer mode back to PIO mode, which means you have a faulty hard disk, or if the device is optical, you may have either a faulty device or a faulty optical disc.

Free & Open Source Recovery Software

	PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 4.x is a data recovery program that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged. Recovers files with the original time and date stamp. Supports the saving of recovered files on network drives. Recovers files, even when a header entry is no longer available. If the page comes up in German or some other language, select an appropriate language from the dropdown box underneath the red "Chip" logo in the top right corner of the web page.

	PC INSPECTOR™ smart recovery The new data recovery program from CONVAR for Flash Card™, Smart Media™, SONY Memory Stick™, IBM™ Micro Drive, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital Card or any other data carrier for digital cameras. Supports the following picture formats: .jpg, .amr, .tif, .bmp, .gif, Canon .crw , Fuji .raf , RICOH .raw, Olympus .orf (E-XX), Olympus .orf (C5050), Nokia 3gp, Kodak .dcr, Minolta .mrw, Nikon .nef (D1H/D1X), Nikon .nef (D2H/D2X), Nikon .nef (E5000/E5700), Sigma - Foveon .x3f, mp4, QuickTime .mov (Konica Minolta). Video files in .avi, QuickTime .mov format and audio files in .wav, .dss format can also be recovered. If the page comes up in German or some other language, select an appropriate language from the dropdown box underneath the red "Chip" logo in the top right corner of the web page.
	Disk Investigator "Disk Investigator helps you to discover all that is hidden on your computer hard disk. It can also help you to recover lost data. Display the true drive contents by bypassing the operating system and directly reading the raw drive sectors. View and search raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors. Verify the effectiveness of file and disk wiping programs. Undelete previously deleted files."
	Restoration "Restoration is an easy to use and straight forward tool to undelete files that were removed from the recycle bin or directly deleted from within Windows, and we were also able to recover photos from a Flash card that had been formatted. Upon start, you can scan for all files that may be recovered and also limit the results by entering a search term or extension. In addition, it also provides the option to wipe the found files beyond simple recovery. The program is small and standalone, it does not require installation and can also run from a Floppy disk. Restoration works with FAT and NTFS as well as digital cameras cards."
	TestDisk "TestDisk is OpenSource software and is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL). TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery utility! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally erasing your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy."

Disk Manufacturer's Utilities

	Maxtor There are quite a number of utilities and drivers on the Maxtor site; unfortunately the links are very long and not easily managed so you will have to hunt down the appropriate utilities yourself. PowerMax Designed to perform diagnostic read/write verifications on Maxtor and Quantum hard drives. SCSIMax Diagnostic utility for all Maxtor/Quantum® SCSI hard disk drives supporting Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T).

	Seagate How to use DiscWizard for Windows How to use DiscWizard Starter Edition SeaTools SeaTools for Windows has replaced SeaTools Online and PowerMax. SeaTools for Windows is a comprehensive, easy-to-use diagnostic tool that helps you quickly determine the condition of the disc drive in your external hard drive, desktop or notebook computer. It includes several tests that will examine the physical media on your Seagate or Maxtor disc drive and any other non-Seagate disc drive. SeaTools for Windows tests USB, 1394, ATA (PATA/IDE), SATA and SCSI drives. It installs onto your system. SeaTools for Windows is completely data safe. Caution: If you are trying to diagnose a disk with data on it that you wish to retain then do not install SeaTools for Windows. Download and use SeaTools for DOS instead.
	Western Digital Download the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Tools on floppy or CD. These tools are used primarily for determining the physical condition of your hard drive. If you are having computer problems which you suspect are hard drive related, you can test your drive with this tool. This diagnostic utility is designed for hard drives larger than 8.4 GB with the model number starting with WDxxx.
	Samsung The Samsung website is awful to look at and use. The text is tiny and faint. You will have to ruin your own eyes to look for support tools because kadaitcha.cx won't go near the place anymore. Even the site search facility is awful; a search for "disk diagnostics" turned up hundreds of press releases and no tools, after which kadaitcha.cx's eyes could take no more of the rotten Samsung site.
	Hitachi Drive Fitness Test Supports SCSI and IDE drives, including Serial-ATA drives. OGT Diagnostic Tool A failure analysis tool for Ultrastar 10K300, Ultrastar 15K73, and DK32XX products. Feature Tool A DOS-bootable tool for changing various ATA features. The Feature Tool allows you to control some of the features of Deskstar and Travelstar high performance ATA hard disk drives and supports 48-bit addressing, so it will work with the new large capacity drives.

	Fujitsu Diagnostic Tool For IDE/ATA Hard Drives Diagnostic Tool For SCSI Hard Drives UDMA Utility For MPD, MPE, and MPF Series Hard Drives UDMA Utility For MPG Fujitsu HDD Flash Utility For MPG3xxxAT Models Change Definition Utility Erase Utility

Alternative Solutions

There are solutions other than those presented on this page, however they are mostly out of scope for kadaitcha.cx. In summary:

You should be able to access both NTFS and FAT32 partitions with almost any Linux 'live-cd'
If you have access to another PC, you can take the disk drive out of your machine, make it a slave drive and plug it into the other PC. Be aware that the OS may very well try to write to the hard disk.
If your BIOS supports selection of individual disks as the boot device and if you have another disk, you can install another copy of XP.
If you have one disk with two or more partitions and the disk appears to be going through the boot sequence ok, you can try to install another copy of XP on a different partition.

Microsoft Disaster Recovery Tools

	Troubleshooting Disks and File Systems Hard disk and file system errors can result from a variety of problems, such as hardware failures, power outages, poor system maintenance, viruses, and human error. When troubleshooting problems related to disks and file systems, refer to this chapter for information about troubleshooting tools, volume and disk error conditions, viruses, and stop messages. You can also use this chapter to obtain detailed descriptions of the master boot record (MBR), the GUID partition table (GPT), and the boot sectors: New in Troubleshooting Disks and File Systems Maintenance and Troubleshooting Tools Disk and Volume Status Descriptions Viruses That Affect the MBR and Boot Sectors Repairing Damaged MBRs and Boot Sectors in x86-Based Computers Stop Messages for Disks and File Systems Other Disk Problems Disk Sectors Critical to Startup
	DiskProbe Scroll down to get to the correct sub-section. DiskProbe is a sector editor tool for Windows XP Professional that allows users who are members of the Administrators group to directly edit, save, and copy data on a physical hard disk. With careful use of DiskProbe, you can replace the master boot record (MBR), repair damaged partition table information, and repair or replace damaged boot sectors or other file system data. You can also use DiskProbe to save MBRs and boot sectors as backup binary files in case the original sectors become damaged by viruses, human error, hardware problems, power outages, or similar events.
	Windows XP Professional Resource Kit - Tools for Troubleshooting The relevant sections of the article are: Disaster Recovery Tools Disk and Maintenance Tools System File Tools

Knowledgebase Articles for Hard Disk Problems

	When you open Administrative tools, Computer Management, Disk Management in Windows XP, there is an Healthy unknown Partition type Present, that can not be deleted or formatted.
	After you upgrade to Windows XP from Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation or Windows 2000 Professional by using legacy software fault tolerance, previous striped volumes or volume sets may be listed in the Disk Management tool as "Failed". These "Failed" disks have drive letters, but you cannot access them.
	When you start your computer, you may receive an error message that is similar to the following: Hard disk drive failure
	Describes how to partition and format your hard disk when you install or upgrade to Windows XP.
	After you install Microsoft Windows XP, hard disk performance may be slower than you expect.
	Explains that a hard disk configured as a subordinate only leads to a system halt.
	--> The performance of certain hard-disk write operations may be slower than expected if the hard disk implements write caching and your computer uses Windows XP.
	If your computer has an ATA Packet Interface (ATAPI) hard disk that is larger than 137 gigabytes (GB), you may experience any of the following symptoms: Your computer may restart instead of resuming from hibernation You may experience hard disk corruption when Windows XP writes a memory dump file as a result of an unrecoverable Windows error (or Stop error) You may experience hard disk corruption when your computer enters either standby or hibernation
	When you try to upgrade to Windows XP, or when you try to install a hard disk on your Windows XP computer, the hard disk may not appear in Windows Explorer or in My Computer, even if the hard disk does appear in Device Manager and in Disk Management console. You cannot use Disk Management console to assign a letter to the hard disk.
	This article discusses Plug and Play (PNP) enumeration in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. The article contains information about how Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP assign drive letters to hard disk drives when you run Windows Setup.
	You can use the following command to convert your hard disk from the FAT 32 file system to the NTFS file system: convert drive: /fs:ntfs When you use the command, after the computer completes the conversion and you restart Windows XP, you may receive an error message similar to the following error message: Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: System32\Drivers\Ntfs.sys
	This article describes how to move the paging file and print spooler to another hard disk. For example, after you install a new hard disk that is faster than the hard disk that currently stores your paging and print spooler files.
	This article describes the behaviour of an installation to a partition which is unformatted and is not the first partition on the hard disk.
	Describes how hard disk volume monitoring may stop on a computer that is running Windows XP. Provides a hotfix to resolve this problem.
	When your Windows XP-based computer has been idle for an amount of time that is sufficient to make your hard disk turn off, your hard disk may not turn off.
	If an IEEE 1394 hard disk is connected to your computer, the hard disk may not be redetected correctly after you shut down your computer.
	If you have a Zip drive installed, Windows XP Setup may incorrectly detect the Zip drive as a hard disk and assign a drive letter to the Zip drive.
	Describes Microsoft Windows XP SP1 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) support for ATAPI disk drives to increase the capacity of your hard disk.
	Describes how to check your hard disk drive for errors in Windows XP.
	If you remove a secondary hard disk drive from a laptop computer in certain circumstances, the computer seems to stop responding.
	Discusses an issue where a hard disk drive that is installed in your computer may appear as a removable drive when you run the Wireless Network Setup Wizard. The wizard may copy network setup files to the hard disk drive.
	When you run Setup, Setup may appear to stop responding (hang), and you may receive the following message: Please wait while Setup copies files to your hard disk.
	By default, System Restore is enabled on all hard-disk partitions upon the completion of Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Setup. However, after installation of the operating system, System Restore is automatically suspended when there is less than 200 megabytes (MB) of free hard-disk space on the system drive. The service automatically resumes its monitoring activities at the next system idle time, as soon as 200 MB of hard-disk space is available.
	Describes a behaviour on a Windows-based computer where the Disk Management snap-in reports that 100 percent of a hard-disk partition is available, but you cannot access the hard-disk partition by using the Disk Management snap-in.
	Describes a workaround for an issue in Windows XP where problems with the network, hard disk drive, or storage drivers cause an unexpected program crash.
	--> The performance of certain hard-disk write operations may be slower than expected if the hard disk implements write caching.
	When you connect a Universal Serial Bus (USB) hard disk drive to your computer, the hard disk’s icon and label are not displayed correctly.
	The flush cache command is not issued to a large hard disk that has a 48-bit logical block address (LBA) enabled. As a result, the hard disk may become corrupted when you enter either the Shutdown state or the Hibernate state.
	Computers that have removable disk device controllers, such as CardBus or Memory Stick, may take a long time to resume from standby if there is a disk in the controller.
	Describes an issue where the drive letter that is assigned to the primary hard disk partition is not C if you perform a CD-ROM-based clean installation of Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP.
	Windows XP may not recognize all of your available disk space. For example, you may have a hard disk with a capacity of more than 30 gigabytes (GB), but according to the Disk Management utility or Windows Explorer, you have only 2 GB of disk space capacity. As a result, even though you have ample hard disk space, you may receive the following error message: Low Disk Space. You are running out of disk space on [drive letter].
	Describes a problem where divided entries remain after you delete all the disk partitions on an IDE hard disk that was formerly part of a RAID stripe set.
	During Setup, if you create a partition, the option to format the hard disk with a file allocation table (FAT) format is not available.
	When you are installing Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 on a new computer or on a computer that has the latest SCSI or IDE controller technology, you may have to use an OEM device driver to support, for example, a new mass storage controller, to continue with the installation. The symptoms that you have to install an OEM device driver include the following: The computer may keep restarting and never start the GUI installation after the text mode Setup is finished The Setup program may stop, and you may receive an error message if the Setup program does not correctly detect the controller If you are booting from the installation floppy disks or CD-ROM disc, you receive the following error message Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your system If you are upgrading by using the Winnt32.exe file, or if you are performing a new installation by using the Winnt.exe file, you receive the following Stop error: Stop 0x0000007B Inaccessible_boot_device
	Describes an issue that occurs when you disconnect and then immediately reconnect an IEEE 1394 hard disk on a Windows XP SP2-based computer. Workaround is included.
	Describes an issue where you receive an error message when you try to install Windows Server 2003, a x64-based version of Windows Server 2003, or Windows XP on a hard disk that was previously formatted as a GPT hard disk.
	When you start Microsoft Windows XP Setup after you start your computer from a floppy disk, you may receive the following error message: Windows XP requires a hard drive volume with at least 318 megabytes (333926400 byes) of free disk space.
	When you add or remove ATAPI devices (such as an IDE hard disk or an IDE CD-ROM drive), multiple hard bus resets may occur on the channel on which the device change occurs.
	This article describes Ultra DMA (Direct Memory Access). Ultra DMA (also known as Ultra DMA/33 or ATA/33) is an extension of the ATA hard disk interface that theoretically allows burst data transfer rates of 33.3 megabytes (MB) per second.
	When you use the Disk Defragmenter tool to defragment your hard disk, you may receive the following message: Drive's Contents Have Changed: Restarting... This issue can occur if a program (such as an antivirus program or a screen saver) is running...
	Explains how to resolve the issue if a "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt" error message appears. You can either run Windows XP Setup again, cancel Windows XP Setup, or install Windows XP on a clean hard disk.
	Describes issues that can cause your Windows XP-based computer not to start and how to resolve these issues.
	Describes how to assign, to change, or to remove drive letters on a drive, partition, or volume by using the Disk Management snap-in in Microsoft Windows XP. This snap-in is for managing hard disks and the volumes or partitions that they contain.
	After you suspending and resume your computer several times, hard disk performance may be reduced. If you use Device Manager to view the properties of the IDE channel to which the drive is connected, the Advanced Settings tab may show that the current transfer mode for the drive is "PIO Mode".
	The NTFS file system supports many volume- and file-level features that may cause free disk space to be either misreported or reported as lost. You may notice this behaviour if an NTFS volume suddenly becomes very full...
	Explains how you receive a Stop error when you start the backup computer after you move the system disk to a backup computer. To resolve this issue, use the same hardware in the backup computer.
	When you try to shut down, restart, or start your computer, the Chkdsk.exe or the Autochk.exe program may start automatically and start to scan your hard disks. This issue occurs without any user interaction.
	This article describes how to copy user data from your Windows XP profile to a new profile. When you copy user data into a new profile, the new profile becomes a near duplicate of the old profile, and contains the same preferences, appearance, and documents as the old profile. If your old profile is corrupted in some way, you can move the files and settings from the corrupt profile to a new profile.
	You may not be able to open files that you copied to an external Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1394 Serial Bus Protocol 2 (SBP2) hard disk.
	You use Windows Vista or Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) 2.0 to create partitions on a hard disk. After you do this, you try to install Microsoft Windows XP on the hard disk without using Windows XP to repartition the disk. In this case, you cannot install Windows XP successfully. Windows XP Setup successfully completes the text-mode part of Setup. However, after the text-mode part of Setup is complete, the computer cannot be restarted successfully to enter the graphical user interface (GUI)-mode part of Setup. Additionally, the computer may stop responding. You may receive an error message that resembles one of the following: A disk read error occurred Unable to load operating system Error loading operating system When you deploy a Windows XP Professional sysprep image to a system, the system may continuously restart after you start the system for the first time. If you press F8 and then disable the "automatic restart" option, you may receive the following Stop error: Stop: 0x000000ED (0X81F85678, 0xC000014F,0x00000000,0x00000000) Unmountable_boot_volume Additionally, if you view the disk in Windows PE 2.0, the disk may appear as "raw."
	After you remove an IEEE 1394 hard disk from your Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1)-based computer when the computer is in an S3 sleep state (standby), the computer may take more time than expected (up to 1 minute) to resume from the sleep state.
	After you use the Safely Remove Hardware function to remove the secondary IDE channel on a Hitachi FLORA 220TX NP4 portable computer, the computer does not respond. On your computer, the "secondary IDE channel" that you removed is an external hard disk drive (HDD) that is installed in place of the CD-ROM drive.
	When you: create a new volume on a local disk. plug in a removable disk with existing volumes. plug in a removable drive (for example, a USB floppy drive or PCMCIA flash card). add a physical hard disk or CD-ROM drive to your computer. use Offline Files and specify items to be synchronized when you log on. You may experience any of the following symptoms: An existing mapped network drive is no longer available in Windows Explorer. The new drive is not available in Windows Explorer. The new drive appears in Windows Explorer, but when you open it the contents of the existing drive are displayed. The existing drive appears in Windows Explorer, but when you open it the contents of the new drive are displayed. After your computer starts, the network drive may be replaced by the new drive. After you disconnect the new drive, the mapped network drive letter has the same logical drive letter that it had before you added the new drive. You may receive the following error message when you start your computer: The local device name is already in use.
	When you try to configure a secondary hard disk on your computer to be a subordinate (also known as slave) drive, you may receive the following error message: There was a problem installing your hardware, Code 28 one of the Filter Drivers installed for this device is invalid.
	After you restart a Windows XP-based computer that uses a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) hard disk drive, some data on an NTFS file system partition may become corrupted. This problem may occur during shutdown if the computer is using a utility that calls the FSCTL_MOVE_FILE API. For example, the FSCTL_MOVE_FILE API is frequently used by third-party disk defragmenter programs.
	When you use a Windows-based program, the program crashes, and you receive the following error message: Program_name has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost. Please tell Microsoft about this problem. We have created an error report that you can send to help us improve Program_name. We will treat this report as confidential and anonymous. To see what data this error report contains, click here.
	When you try to start your computer, you may receive the following error message: Invalid system disk
	When you try to use the Windows Disk Management (Diskmgmt.msc) console to upgrade your laptop or portable computer from a basic disk to a dynamic disk, you cannot do so. If you move an existing Dynamic disk from another system to a laptop, the disk will appear as foreign in Disk management. However, the option to import it will be dimmed. Note: This article talks about Windows Vista but it is a Windows XP article.
	When you attempt to start Windows XP, you may receive one of the following error messages: Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information. Or Windows NT could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: Winnt_root\System32\Ntoskrnl.exe Please re-install a copy of the above file. Or Winnt_root\System32\Hal.dll missing or corrupt: Please re-install a copy of the above file. Additionally, you may experience one or more of the following behaviours: If you start the computer to the Recovery Console, a command prompt may appear with no option to log on to the Windows installation. If you try to access the Windows folder, you may receive the following error message: Access denied. If you try to perform a Repair operation from the Windows XP CD-ROM, the Windows installation is not detected and you cannot repair Windows.
	This article describes how to obtain the Dskcache.exe tool. Dskcache.exe is a command-line tool that you can use to configure the Power Protected write cache option that is available in the hotfix that is described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: --> (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/332023/EN-US/) Slow Disk Performance with Write Caching Enabled
	This knowledgebase will help you to resolve "The atapi.sys is already in use try to close it" error message during Windows XP service Pack 2 instillation. The error message indicate on missing [sic] RAID adapter drivers or incompatible RAID drivers in the system.