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I was defragging my hard drives so left the PC on whilst I slept. Then I got up after a while when I realised that my scheduled virus scan would come on in the morning and likely fuck with the defrag, which would still be going.

I paused the defrag then went to the AVG thing to cancel the next scheduled scan (6.00am in the morning) - my computer crapped itself, a BSOD flashed up for a fraction of a second and the PC rebooted.

Then a weird screen which I've never seen before from American Megatrends came up during the start up sequence, before the usual WinXP thing. I can't remember what it said, something about no H.D.D. something or other being detected.

I resetted with the reset button and the same thing came up.

I powered it down, then powered it back on, all was back to normal.

Have I got anything to worry about?

The whole reason I did the defrag is that I've noticed the PC has become somewhat slower to do things lately - e.g. the burst of fan power from my video card, which used to come up after WinXP had loaded, now happens during the WinXP loading sequence (i.e. it takes longer). I dunno. Game performance hasn't been effected as far as I know.

EDIT: or perhaps it has. Left 4 Dead seems to be running a bit slower and is experiencing a very minor odd "stutter" that wasn't there the last time I played it. It may be my imagination, but what the hell could be going on?

The 'no hard drive detected screen' can be an early sign of hard drive failure. Just as a precaution, grab the manufacturer diagnostics for your drive, burn them to a disc, and run the thorough/advanced test when you don't need the computer for an hour or two. It might not turn out to be that, but hard drive failure is something you want to catch early, so I always pay attention to warning signs like that.

The fact that you were running a defrag AND AVG was nosing about means that it was a period of high drive activity, so any bad sectors on the drive would be more likely to come to light during that.

So today I learned what that S.M.A.R.T. thing is that flashes up on the screen when I boot up. It's what tells me that the HDD will fail. I was helping my uncle figure out how to use the Internet, because I'm such a great guy, and the computer just died on us. I thought maybe he had kneed the power button, but he couldn't have. Then a screen flashed up telling me the HDD was about to fail and that I should back everything up. F2 to continue. That let me into Windows again, but I had just reinstalled WinXP on his computer after a virus fucked up the last install. So there wasn't anything on it yet. I used the time I had to look up HDD prices from Memory Express. Shut off the PC, went to get it.

Came back an hour later, and the computer won't start, Windows tells me that the Hard Drive must have shit itself, the S.M.A.R.T. thing tells me the HDD could fail right away, and F2 just gets me back at that screen.

I have to swap a 120GB Samsung for an 80GB Seagate. $55 for the new one, too.

Phantasee wrote: I have to swap a 120GB Samsung for an 80GB Seagate. $55 for the new one, too.

Wow....
55$ for a 80 gig drive? Yeah 320 Gig drives are 50$. Even at the local store I can get 250's for 49.99$ Where in the hell do you buy 80 gig drives for 50+$ dollars?

Not that it matters but it's like you proudly announced you only payed twenty dollars for a medium value meal from McDonalds.

Vympel, it MIGHT be caused by an imminent HDD failure. Stutters could be caused by the problems in swap file access. Which in turn leads to bad sectors.

The best case scenario: nothing happens. Worst case scenario: your HDD goes down without bankrupt. Do a proper diagnostics, but back up your important data beforehand.

It is possible that the drive will die during diagnostics because of the heavy usage. My old 20Gb Fujitsu died on me that way many years ago.

I think you guys were right. I went to bed (before anyone replied ) and when I woke up in the morning (I had the PC on overnight because I was torrenting some stuff) and when I switched the monitor back on, the American Megatrends screen was back again. When I tried to boot up by resetting / turning off and on, nada. Just the MB flash screen and then a blinking cursor. After a while, it says disk read error.

Too late!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

(I'm sending this from my Dad's laptop).

My PC guy is coming over to take a look at it - I imagine I'm up for a new hard drive and will have to slowly reassemble my computer's brains when I come back from overseas - I'll be in California and Nevada from today till the beginning of April.

Will there be any way to salvage the data on the hard drive? I'd rather not start from scratch if I can help it.

There are hard disk data recovery companies out there. One in Toronto has a clean room and everything, and they can take apart the drive and retrieve the data off it even if the electronics are totally fried and the motor is seized.

However, that won't be cheap.

Phantasee wrote:I have to swap a 120GB Samsung for an 80GB Seagate. $55 for the new one, too.

Dude, I have a 100GB drive and an 80GB drive sitting around collecting dust. I was planning on dumping them at the local hazardous waste depot where they recycle old computer parts.

Darth Wong wrote:There are hard disk data recovery companies out there. One in Toronto has a clean room and everything, and they can take apart the drive and retrieve the data off it even if the electronics are totally fried and the motor is seized.

However, that won't be cheap.

Fuck. Oh well. Shit happens. Need to manually delete / reinstall all my games on the other HDD that the "new" OS won't recognise, reinstall all drivers, download new codecs, reassemble all my copiously collected bookmarks, grin and bear the loss of my various documents ... *sigh*

This PC's served me pretty well though. Brain transplant (format, start all over) was overdue. Bloody Windows ....

Darth Wong wrote:

Phantasee wrote:I have to swap a 120GB Samsung for an 80GB Seagate. $55 for the new one, too.

Dude, I have a 100GB drive and an 80GB drive sitting around collecting dust. I was planning on dumping them at the local hazardous waste depot where they recycle old computer parts.

Heh. My PC has two 350gig HDs - seemed AWESOME back in 2006

Now I guess I'll be replacing one. Might as well get a shitload of extra space, the games HDD was down to 20% free space.

Vympel wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:

Phantasee wrote:I have to swap a 120GB Samsung for an 80GB Seagate. $55 for the new one, too.

Dude, I have a 100GB drive and an 80GB drive sitting around collecting dust. I was planning on dumping them at the local hazardous waste depot where they recycle old computer parts.

Heh. My PC has two 350gig HDs - seemed AWESOME back in 2006

Now I guess I'll be replacing one. Might as well get a shitload of extra space, the games HDD was down to 20% free space.

I just picked up a pair of 1.5TB drives. It's nice to have extra room again.

Jeezus H.

The guy just came and picked up the PC - he said he'll see if it's possible to clone the contents, in which case everything should be fine.

I told him to just get a HDD the same size as my last one - after 2.5 years ive only used up half of my 700GB, so I didn't think it necessary to spend more.

Year after next, it'll be new PC time.

Petabyte, maybe?

Vympel wrote:Jeezus H.

The guy just came and picked up the PC - he said he'll see if it's possible to clone the contents, in which case everything should be fine.

I told him to just get a HDD the same size as my last one - after 2.5 years ive only used up half of my 700GB, so I didn't think it necessary to spend more.

Year after next, it'll be new PC time.

Petabyte, maybe?

No your going to be buying your 40 Terabyte drive right around then.

OAN:Drive recovery. Recovery from a HD is expensive as hell. The service we use at work runs between 85$ for the lower level drive fucking(Drive motor dies for example) to expensive as hell(Laptop drive broken open) or roughly speaking 1000$ an occurrence. Which is another plus reason for SSD's as the company we use just started offering SSD recovery at only 250$ a pop even if the drop was broken in two. Except for the physically damaged chips it's just a matter of some PCB work and then a transfer to a new drive.

I'd try with GetDataBack or a similar program before shipping the drive off for professional recovery. Often, such recovery programs can get basically everything off a drive which appears dead in Windows, especially in cases where it progressively just went bad (as opposed to shock damage or something). Considering the prices of professional recovery, I'd try such a program first, even if it does have dangers of some possibility of corrupting the data further.

Vympel wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:

Phantasee wrote:I have to swap a 120GB Samsung for an 80GB Seagate. $55 for the new one, too.

Dude, I have a 100GB drive and an 80GB drive sitting around collecting dust. I was planning on dumping them at the local hazardous waste depot where they recycle old computer parts.

Heh. My PC has two 350gig HDs - seemed AWESOME back in 2006

Now I guess I'll be replacing one. Might as well get a shitload of extra space, the games HDD was down to 20% free space.

Oh, I was pretty pissed about the price, but what can you do when you're limited to IDE? They were charging $75 for the same drive at Best Buy. I got my 320GB HDD in 07 for $80, I remember.

Ah well, it's for my uncle, he's not going to do any space-intensive things anyway, and my cousin doesn't use the computer for much more than homework and chatting with friends.

I got the same computer as my uncle, though, but mine was a display model, so it was running longer than his ever was (mine has probably had much more uptime compared to his in the period since purchase, as well.). I'm nervous about my HDD now.

Random question number five
What is the megs per minute of your average 1080P HD movie? I know the various compression's but recently I did a bit of checking and the rule of thumb seems to be 200 Megabytes per minute for a direct DVD copy. Various compression levels could get that down but it gives us a good baseline. Unless that figure is off and 1080P HD(Audio/video) is only 100 Megabytes a minute, or 50 it seems that we have very quickly hit that "content expands to fill the space it's in" limit already as WD's new 2 Terabyte Green drive which looks perfect for a DVR (It's very quiet, uses little energy and runs much cooler than most drives yet still provides above average performance) or home theater setup. But if I want to start ripping Blueray movies to the drive it seems I can only fit about 160 odd hours worth of video before slamming into the limit. Granted that's nearly a week's worth of video but still it seems my dreams of building a home theater with every video I'll ever own and then some is still three years off.

And that's not even counting the Holo-tapes or whatever format we go with once 1080P begins looking fugly.

Just found out the HDD couldn't be cloned. Everything on C:/ has been lost. I need to play Mass Effect again, I need to replay Fallout 3 (and redownload the expansion), I've lost all of my Mount and Blade stuff, and of course I need to reinstall the games I still have on my other HDD. Oh, and of course the Steam games, need to redownload them, too. Hope I remember my Steam login details. Oh, and Games 4 Windows as well re: Fallout 3.

Fuck.

Oh well, I'm going to enjoy my holiday and think about all that shit when I get back!

Mr Bean wrote:What is the megs per minute of your average 1080P HD movie? I know the various compression's but recently I did a bit of checking and the rule of thumb seems to be 200 Megabytes per minute for a direct DVD copy.

1080p Blu-Ray video content peaks at 40 megabits/second for the video stream. Audio content peaks at 640 kilobits/second (AC3), 1.7 megabits/second (AAC+), 18 megabits/second (TrueHD) or 24 megabits/sec (DTS-MA).

480i DVD peaks at ~9.8 megabits/second for the video stream. Audio content peaks at 448 kilobits/second (AC3) or 1.5 megabits/second (DTS)

But if I want to start ripping Blueray movies to the drive it seems I can only fit about 160 odd hours worth of video before slamming into the limit. Granted that's nearly a week's worth of video but still it seems my dreams of building a home theater with every video I'll ever own and then some is still three years off.

Build a media server.

phongn wrote: 1080p Blu-Ray video content peaks at 40 megabits/second for the video stream. Audio content peaks at 640 kilobits/second (AC3), 1.7 megabits/second (AAC+), 18 megabits/second (TrueHD) or 24 megabits/sec (DTS-MA).

Rule of thumb is max of 64 megs a second? So 15,625 minutes a terabyte or 260 odd hours a Terabyte?

480i DVD peaks at ~9.8 megabits/second for the video stream. Audio content peaks at 448 kilobits/second (AC3) or 1.5 megabits/second (DTS)

phongn wrote: Build a media server.

I'm holding off for larger cheaper drives. It's around .10 cents per gig with the Terabyte drives. I'm looking for that to hit .01 cents per before I go all in. Or right around the time the 8 Terabyte drives hit 100$ each I'll go all in and buy four of them to put together a server with.

Mr Bean wrote:

phongn wrote: 1080p Blu-Ray video content peaks at 40 megabits/second for the video stream. Audio content peaks at 640 kilobits/second (AC3), 1.7 megabits/second (AAC+), 18 megabits/second (TrueHD) or 24 megabits/sec (DTS-MA).

Rule of thumb is max of 64 megs a second? So 15,625 minutes a terabyte or 260 odd hours a Terabyte?

Uh, that's 64 megabits/second, giving ~36 hours/terabyte.

That is the absolute Blu Ray maximum, but in practice, things'll be significantly smaller for a variety of reasons (not the least that you don't need sustained 40 mbit streams and not everything has lossless audio)

phongn wrote: Uh, that's 64 megabits/second, giving ~36 hours/terabyte.

DOH! How exactly did I manage that?
That last figure was what I was looking for. 36 hours a Terabyte is the figure I'm working on.

phongn wrote: That is the absolute Blu Ray maximum, but in practice, things'll be significantly smaller for a variety of reasons (not the least that you don't need sustained 40 mbit streams and not everything has lossless audio)

Which is again why I asked for a ballpark figure. I have a worst case at 36 an hour which you provided me. What's an average? 50 hours a Terabye? 120?

I'm not familiar with audio/video codecs so I'm trying to get a good idea before I start building a server.

Mr Bean wrote:Which is again why I asked for a ballpark figure. I have a worst case at 36 an hour which you provided me. What's an average? 50 hours a Terabye? 120?

I don't know, honestly. I can only give you the most conservative estimate possible. A quick survey of, uh, certain content websites show some movies at around 20 GB/hour with an AC3 soundtrack.

phongn wrote: I don't know, honestly. I can only give you the most conservative estimate possible. A quick survey of, uh, certain content websites show some movies at around 20 GB/hour with an AC3 soundtrack.

Would you be up for a um, comparison between something you already own and the versions available on um "certain" websites?

Well, it's your lucky day.