failed hard drive

[ssbn743]

I recently had a hard drive partially fail, and was hoping tha someone in here has a better knowledge of Windows crap than me. I have a system with 3 hard drives, Windows XP installed on drive #1. The OS was really acting up, taken 5 minutes to load IE, I had recently caught a bunch of nasty viruses and assumed that was the problem. Tried to re-install windows w/o formating which failed several times. I'm thinking it's the hard rive, since I have since run several benchmarks that all but proved that is true. I installed Windows on Drive #2 and brought the system back up. Now I can still access the files on drive #1, but I don't know for how long.

All of my E-mail was in Outlook Express on drive #1.

Does anyone know where/which file that E-mail database is stored in?

Like I said I can access the drive and the outlook express folder, and tired to copy and paste the contents of the outlook express folder on drive #1 to OE on drive #2, guess what doesn't work....typical Microsoft. If anyone could help that would be awesome.

Josh

 

[~mr mixx~]

This could be one of two things, 1 You got one nasty virus on hd #1, or the hd itself is going (depending how old it is.) Although you can still access the hd as a slave drive, i would not rely on the data you can retrieve from it..


If You insist on getting data back from it, then i would suggest scanning the entire hd #1 as a slave drive using hd #2's anti-virus software. Just make sure that Your anti-virus is a full version one, with all virus definitions updated. If it does have a virus on it, it should catch it and quarentine it. I fit does'nt catch anything...it may be that either Your installation of Windows XP was done in a dos 32 format instead of a NTFS format wich is far more stable than dos 32.

So if You are sure that the Operating System of Windows XP on hd #1 or #2 is correct, then it just may be that Your hd is failing. I would just use hd #2 as Your master harddrive, and use hd #1 as a slave drive, til it fails.

When a harddrive starts to fail you will notice it will make funny sounds or clicking noises, meaning the read/write arm is going...hope that helps.

 

[Raffaz]

Im assuming mr mixx is meaning FAT32 and not DOS32, first time ive heard of that file system

Goto the HDD manufacturers website and download and run their diagnostic tools on the drive, then you will know if its failing or not.

Also you say the installation has been failing, can you give more details of that?