Hard Drive making Explorer crash

I have a 250GB drive that makes Explorer repeatedly crash when it is plugged
into the machine. Windows is completely unusable.

The drive does not seem to be making any weird noises at the moment, but it
was when I unplugged it, when I came home one night. It could have been a
head crash?

Is there something I can boot into to make a raw backup of everything on it,
and recover from that?

Cheers

ss.

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:34:07 -0000, "Synapse Syndrome"
wrote:

I have a 250GB drive that makes Explorer repeatedly crash when it is plugged
into the machine. Windows is completely unusable.

The drive does not seem to be making any weird noises at the moment, but it
was when I unplugged it, when I came home one night. It could have been a
head crash?

Is there something I can boot into to make a raw backup of everything on it,
and recover from that?

A Linux livecd of any sort seems like a good place to start. It'll at
least tell you if it's up enough to find a viable partition map.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"We're not into science fiction because it's good literature,
we're into it because it's weird" - Bruce Sterling

Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

I have a 250GB drive that makes Explorer repeatedly crash when it is
plugged into the machine. Windows is completely unusable.

The drive does not seem to be making any weird noises at the moment,
but it was when I unplugged it, when I came home one night. It could
have been a head crash?

Is there something I can boot into to make a raw backup of everything
on it, and recover from that?

A Linux livecd of any sort seems like a good place to start. It'll at
least tell you if it's up enough to find a viable partition map.



Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Have you got any pointers on that
app to use and how to go about it? Cheers.

ss.

In article , Synapse Syndrome
says...



Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Have you got any pointers on that
app to use and how to go about it? Cheers.

When you've booted off the Live CD, if it is like Ubuntu, it should
automount it and have an icon on the desktop. gparted is the tool to
partition it.



--
Conor

I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't
looking good either. - Scott Adams

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:54:14 -0000, "Synapse Syndrome"
wrote:

Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

I have a 250GB drive that makes Explorer repeatedly crash when it is
plugged into the machine. Windows is completely unusable.

The drive does not seem to be making any weird noises at the moment,
but it was when I unplugged it, when I came home one night. It could
have been a head crash?

Is there something I can boot into to make a raw backup of everything
on it, and recover from that?

A Linux livecd of any sort seems like a good place to start. It'll at
least tell you if it's up enough to find a viable partition map.

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Have you got any pointers on that
app to use and how to go about it? Cheers.

You're not a Linux/unix user already? Um. I do all my linuxing at the
command line, so I've no idea which are good for just booting and
checking simply. I'll leave it to the others to suggest distros that
are aimed at recovery, but any of them should automatically search for
and show your drives on the desktop which is a first step.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex."
-- Marvin the Martian

Conor wrote:


Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Have you got any pointers on
that app to use and how to go about it? Cheers.

When you've booted off the Live CD, if it is like Ubuntu, it should
automount it and have an icon on the desktop. gparted is the tool to
partition it.



Cheers. It's just that with this explorer crashing, I was not expecting it
to be that easy.

ss.

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:22:48 -0000, "Synapse Syndrome"
wrote:

Conor wrote:


Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Have you got any pointers on
that app to use and how to go about it? Cheers.

When you've booted off the Live CD, if it is like Ubuntu, it should
automount it and have an icon on the desktop. gparted is the tool to
partition it.



Cheers. It's just that with this explorer crashing, I was not expecting it
to be that easy.

Windows isn't very good at dealing with broken filesystems - generally
going off into a flat spin rather than outright crashing. And there's
no way to stop it trying to mount broken disks either, unless you'd
tagged it not to mount *before* it broke, which is unlikely.

The Linux filesystem plugins are a lot more sturdy, probably because
they expect to have to deal with surprise changes from Redmond on
occasion so they don't mind if there's something they don't really
understand.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"January 1, 2000 might well be the first day in over six years that
is _not_ in September 1993..." - M Grant in afp

But unfortunately, he was later found to be wrong.

Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

I have a 250GB drive that makes Explorer repeatedly crash when it is
plugged into the machine. Windows is completely unusable.

The drive does not seem to be making any weird noises at the moment,
but it was when I unplugged it, when I came home one night. It could
have been a head crash?

Is there something I can boot into to make a raw backup of everything
on it, and recover from that?

A Linux livecd of any sort seems like a good place to start. It'll at
least tell you if it's up enough to find a viable partition map.

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Have you got any pointers on
that app to use and how to go about it? Cheers.

You're not a Linux/unix user already? Um.

I've played around with Red Hat, SUSE, PCLinuxOS, and some easy to use one
that I have forgotten the name of, Ubuntu and I am currently using
Openfiler! I've used Knoppix as well for file recovery. My apps are all
only available on Windows and MacOS, so...

I do all my linuxing at the
command line, so I've no idea which are good for just booting and
checking simply.

I wiped my whole disk by command line while following somebody's
instructions on IRC. He wasn't even being malicious, apparently. I was
just expecting to have to use some sort of specialist recovery program to
extract the file in this case though.

I'll leave it to the others to suggest distros that
are aimed at recovery, but any of them should automatically search for
and show your drives on the desktop which is a first step.

I'm downloading the latest Knoppix release right now.

ss.

Synapse Syndrome wrote:
I have a 250GB drive that makes Explorer repeatedly crash when it is plugged
into the machine. Windows is completely unusable.

The drive does not seem to be making any weird noises at the moment, but it
was when I unplugged it, when I came home one night. It could have been a
head crash?

Is there something I can boot into to make a raw backup of everything on it,
and recover from that?

Everybody winders user should have one of these.
http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm

In article
ssile.org, Jaimie
Vandenbergh says...
On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:22:48 -0000, "Synapse Syndrome"
wrote:

Conor wrote:


Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. Have you got any pointers on
that app to use and how to go about it? Cheers.

When you've booted off the Live CD, if it is like Ubuntu, it should
automount it and have an icon on the desktop. gparted is the tool to
partition it.



Cheers. It's just that with this explorer crashing, I was not expecting it
to be that easy.

Windows isn't very good at dealing with broken filesystems - generally
going off into a flat spin rather than outright crashing. And there's
no way to stop it trying to mount broken disks either, unless you'd
tagged it not to mount *before* it broke, which is unlikely.

The Linux filesystem plugins are a lot more sturdy, probably because
they expect to have to deal with surprise changes from Redmond on
occasion so they don't mind if there's something they don't really
understand.

To add to the above, I've found that sometimes software errors can be
so bad as to make a drive unusable but using the manufacturers drive
tools to scrub it and repartition it can recover the drive to a usable
state.


--
Conor

I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't
looking good either. - Scott Adams