cyclic redundancy check (and now failure)

[cigsthecat]

Last night I had a torrent that was supposed to finish while I was asleep.

When I woke up today it had a red smiley that said "Error: Disk read error - read fails, Data error (cyclic redundancy check)" when I moused over.

Now, I know that this can be seriously bad news...is it possible that this is a problem with the torrent and not my hard drive though? I haven't seen/had any other problems with downloads or files.

[Dyne]

Run chkdsk on your drive pronto.

[cigsthecat]

OK, here's what I got:



Is it safe to run the F parameter without backing up? At this point I would need to buy a new drive to be able to back up my data.

[Dyne]

You may want to backup. I ran one with /f on an external a couple months ago and lost 180gig of music. The drive works fine now.

[cigsthecat]

So this thing failed on me before I had a chance to buy a new drive and back things up. I was in the middle of playing a game and a blue screen flashed and it shut off.

Now when I turn it on it hangs at the XP loading screen and never makes it into windows.

I've got a new drive on the way, do you think I will be able to recover my data? What's the best way to try and do that?

My plan is to install windows on the new drive and use that to attempt to back up the failed drive. That one is still well under warranty so I can get it replaced, but I have some important stuff on there I need to try and recover.

[cka]

maybe, I think (and you should probably google this) putting the drive in the freezer for awhile should make it stable enough for you to ghost your existing data onto your new drive

[cigsthecat]

I've read about that, but there must be a few things I should try before going that route.

[kedawa]

peanut butter