Hi all,
Well, the dreaded happened, one of my drives has carked it. A 160GB Samsung which has been running just fine, SMART indicators all within normal operating ranges. One morning windows didn't boot up properly, it just hung on "Windows is starting up" I forced a reboot and when I logged in my 160GB drive which I use for game/music/movie storage is there but it is unformatted and marked as RAW. When I try to open it Windows informs me it is corrupt and unreadable.
One thing to note, this drive was formatted as a dynamic disk, no good reason why, I was just a noob when I set it up and didn't know what I was doing. I haven't ever got around to reformatting it into basic.
Anyway, my data is all gone, a quick scan with Easy Recovery leads me to believe I can probably get most of it back. What I really want to ask here is
how on earth this happened?!? I believe the hardware is still more or less ok, if SMART is anything to go by, but a quick perusal of the event log is where things start to get ugly.
The event log shows me approximately 1000 dmio "information", "warning", and "error" messages. Should I have seen these sooner? Maybe, but they only go back 14 days and I don't obsessively check the log every week. As an aside it is
very irritating that critical drive failure information like this is hidden from the user, I would have liked to be alerted by the OS personally.
Anyway, my question is what are dmio warnings/information/errors? I will copy a couple of the relevant messages in here and I would really like some help trying to understand what these mean. As far as I can tell they are "bad" but what are they about? Do they indicate file system, software, or hardware failure? Could it be a faulty cable or controller? Could it be the motherboard? Or is it most likely just the end of the road for this drive?
Note that although the message changes from harddisk1 to harddisk2 I'm 99% sure they are the same disk, I swapped it to another SATA controller at one point.First Error (Two Weeks Ago):Source: dmio
Category: none
Event ID: 30
Type: information
Description:
dmio: Harddisk2 write error at block 312581807: status 0xc0000010
These errors spam a considerable amount of the log over the next 8-9 days with the same block and status numbers until we get this one:Source: dmio
Category: none
Event ID: 30
Type: Information
Description:
dmio: Harddisk1 write error at block 6160447: status 0xc0000185
Simultaneously with this error these other two occurred:
Source: dmio
Category: disk
Event ID: 57
Type: warning
Description:
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.
Source: dmio
Category: none
Event ID: 37
Type: warning
Description:
dmio: Disk Harddisk1 block 6160447 (mountpoint H:): Uncorrectable write error
These errors continue for the the remaining days, dmio warnings mixed with dmio infomation messages, until the drive fails. They are a mixture of write errors and read errors and occur at several different blocks, new ones come up occasionally.I really do wish Windows had told me this was happening instead of silently filling the event log, oh well. Anyway, can any of you wizards help me diagnose this situation?
System:Windows XP SP2
CPU: AMD 3400+
GPU: Nvidia 6800GS
RAM: 1GB Generic
Motherboard: Albatron K8X800 Pro II V2.0
Chipset: VIA K8T800/8237
I am a gamer and so keep all my drivers constantly up to date.
EDIT: Could this problem be related to dynamic disks as
this might imply? I also found
this but I do not really understand it, also the message is a little different.
