Missing Music Drive - HELP

isro

Please direct me if this is not the appropriate forum.

System:
HP a1120n
Pentium 4, OS: Windows XP Home Edition
Memory: 512 MB
Hard Drive: 200 GB SATA (partitioned into 7 drives, space available: 145 GB)

The PROBLEM:
One of the above drive is used for my music files and related music programs. I updated my iPod last night, used iTunes to listen to and update some files and visit iTune store. I also added some mp3 files to my Real player. Everything was working great without any problems.

Normally it takes approx. 40-45 secs for my system to be up and running. Since this morning it's taking 3:30 - 4:00 minutes. I attempted to restore the system and that's when I learned that my music drive with all the content is GONE.

I can recreate the drive because I have most of the programs saved elsewhere in a Download drive. The music (2,500 mp3 files) I can hopefully recreate from an iPod util applet and from saved files; hoping also to be able to copy the files from the iPod.

I tried to play music files from the C drive using the Widows Media player but am not able to because the file wmp.dll has a verision of 10.0.03937 where 10.0.0.3990 was expected. Don't know if this is related to the other problem.

I scanned the computer using ZoneAlarm, Ad-aware and SpyWare and it came up clean except for MRUs. Ran PC-Doctor and came up with the following:
Hard Drive - SMART Short Self Test- FAIL Error Code: HD521-2W
Realtek RTLB8139/810X Family Fast Ethernet NIC - Packet Scheduler Miniport - FAIL Error Code NC315-1W

HP SOLUTION:
5 hours with oversea support with no real answers. Attempted several Restores, restarted with last knows good config, disabled all startup entries, power drain to no avail. Their suggestions was for me to contact Norton regarding Partition Magic I used.

Sorry for the length of the post but I'm hoping that I have provided enough information for someone to assist with this issue. I really appreciate any assistance you can provide.

isro

profdlp

Is the partition still showing up in Windows Explorer? If it's not, try using TestDisk to see if you can recover it.

Let me know how it goes.

isro

profdlp wrote:

Is the partition still showing up in Windows Explorer? If it's not, try using TestDisk to see if you can recover it.

Let me know how it goes.

Prof,
Can't tell you how happy I was to receive you email. Unfortunately, I have gone progressively from bad to worse. Last night I lost connectivity to the internet - not due to provider. This morning I could not get beyond the first few seconds of the Windows XP logo when I started the computer. I tried safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, last known good config and manually and in each case it attempted to start over and over.

Help support attempt to run recovery but received unmountable ? volume error. I'm now awaiting to receive copies of recovery CD in the mail from HP.

My neighbor, bless his heart, let me borrowed an extra laptop he had; otherwise, I would have gone out of my mind being w/o computer for 5 days.

Again, many thanks for your assistance. You have a good one!

Armo

sounds like you need to try a hard drive integrity checker. my favorite is Maxtor's PowerMAX which you run from either a floppy disk, or you can burn the ISO toa CD and boot from there. sounds like your hard drive has gone ka-putz =\

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068/?channelpath=%2Fen_us%2FSupport%2FSoftware%20Downloads%2FAll%20Downloads&downloadID=22


if you can gain access to another computer that suports SATA, you MIGHT! be able to get your data back by slaving the drive ( hooking it up into another PC but noot booting off of the malfunctioning drive ) to get to your data.

profdlp

I'm with Armo on checking the hard drive. When problems like this seem to get progressively worse, it's often due to a failing drive. If that's not it, you'll at least have eliminated one possibility.

Good luck.