Urgent PC Help!!!

[ThatRoundHeadedKid]

Ok guys, this is really pissing me off. My computer has two hard drives. My primary is a Western Digital SATA 120GB. The other, my slave, is a Western Digital IDE 120GB that's almost 7 years old. I use that for straight up storage. I made it a Windows formatted blank partition, so it didn't even have an OS. But just recently, when I was playing with my OverClocking settings, all my music, videos, porn, yes shut up..., and other things I have stored are just totally corrupt. All my top gear is gone, all my funny videos I had are corrupt, GRRRRR. They can play back, but for example, videos are all crapped up, in music, there's squeaking, peaking, noises and all, and all my photos have endded up like this in one way or the other:


There's a couple things that could have caused it. These past two days, I had some software issues with my CD drive so I brought my clocking frequency down. SInce then, I've never had a problem. Well, it started earlier when I got back to school from home and tried to transfer the new Top Gear from my laptop to my PC. It transferred and worked fine on my primary but when I tried to move it to my slave, it got all corrupt.

about a month ago, my computer took a not so great 3 foot fall off my bed after I was moving it around. But right after that, I had no problems...

Could it have been the over clocking? I already checked, I have no viruses, I ran Norton's one button check up...nothing.

It really fucked everything up when yesterday, I performed a defragmentation and a Norton Speed Disk. After noticing all the corruptness, I ran a Disk check which took an abnormal 30 minutes to almost an hour of my slave drive, and it had bad clusters etc...I did it again to day, it took an hour to complete...same bad clusters yada...

Is there any way I can get my stuff back to normal? How can it just corrupt itself like that? The data couldn't have just disappeared, it should be somewhere on that drive....I WANT ALL MY STUFF BACKKKKKK

[Neutrino]

well first lets check the status of your drives. enable smart in BIOS and get speedfan or whatever else smart reader you might fancy and have a look at the physical state of the drives.

If they are still good, recover the data from them using a good recovery sofware like spinrite 6 from grc.com then reformat the HDs.

now there are probably two things that fubared your data. Either physical damage due to the drop or data corruption caused by overcloking.

Overcloking can be quite messy if you overlook some details. For example most CPUs have locked multipliers so the only uption is to up the FSB (unless you use a divider). When you up the FSB you also overclock the memory, memory controller and here comes the fun part: the IDE bus unless its locked. Overcloking friendly boards like my DFI lan party ut have it locked for this exact reason. Now all 3 things i've mentioned can cause data corruption which is why you always run memtest over and over after each overclock to test the mem and its controller folowed by stress testing the cpu using prime.

If you get errors in either memtest or prime then your components are working past their specs and are full of errors which in turn will corrupt any HD data that goes through them.

And again even if your mem/cpu/chipset combo survive the OC always make sre your IDE bus is locked otherwise if it gets also overcloked its very likelly you will corrupt HD data.

[Oz]

Neutrino is spot on the money.

My suggestion for DR would be to get yourself a copy of Mini PE (a bootable CD iso) and boot into it. It has a dizzying array of utils for attempting to fix your problems.

But there's absolutely no guarantee's, and in all likely hood your data is gone.

Do you have a backup of it? If not, why not? Especially if you are going to severely fuck around with your machine. Back off the overclocking buddy.

[ThatRoundHeadedKid]

Just a follow up on what happened. I cleared my CMOS the other day which solved the problem of data corruption when moved. Just thought you guys would like to know. Unfortunately I could not recover my stuff. But thanks for your insite again!