Painful process of recovery from HD crash

[billanben]

Please sticky this (or edit first) if you feel useful Admins. This ONLY works if the HD can be recovered with the data intact but unusable.

So another HD crash and many corrupt download part files. This was compounded by having loads of files in a state of completion but unable to write to disk due to lack of disk space. Combination therefore of .part files which were being downloaded, and others which were being completed. First thing is to make sure you make a backup AT CRASH TIME of downloads.txt - do NOT restart EM until you have done that. Second point is NOT to have loads (or ideally any) files in a state of non-completion due to lack of disk space !!
OK so you have a backup download.txt - now starts the painful process of either recovering or re-downloading the corrupt ones. Well you could make a copy of the log showing "invalid part.met files" at crash time, then delete ALL corresponding files and re-download them, better to try to let EM recover what it can. Restart EM and note those which are still shown either as invalid or inaccessible. Open the downloads.txt and locate the offending .part file entry, now you can delete the corrupt download in EM, and simply copy the link from the downloads.txt (should auto-prompt you to paste this into EM). What you may find (as I am now) is that you get the ominous bleep from the HD when itencounters a corrupt file - you ust have to make sure you follow this procedure for each file it highlights as corrupt - an ongoing process until EM has processed all corrupt files. So as I said, painful but at least you will not lose anything for good.

Hope this is useful.

One final piece of advice, if at all possible do not download directly onto a cheap USB drive - the drives frequently lose data in the XP cache, and the end result is this and all subsequent data are trashed by the OS as unrecoverable. If you must use a USB drive (as I have to), make sure it is good quality.

Good luck.

[FLL]

Sorry to hear of the crash, before I replaced much of my eMule machine it was crashing every couple of days so I know how much of a pain it can be.

Some of my own recommendations:

- Make sure after any crash while using an external drive you run chkdsk on it, it will keep problems from cascading.

- Turn on the eMule option to preallocate the full file when it starts to download. This means you will never run out of disk space mid-download and lose that data. This also has the advantage that the .part file is always the same length as the target file, so if you don't have downloads.txt you can still match up the .part files to their downloads.

- When the .part.met files get corrupted (most common) get metfileregenerator.exe so you can rebuild them from the data. In some cases this can save weeks of re-downloading.

- I found metfileregenerator a real pain, though, so I switched to a mod (Morph among others) which allows import. Now if I get a bad .part.met due to a crash I just add the download again, let it run long enough to get the hash data from someone, then stop it and import the old partfile. Any parts of the file which were complete and were not corrupted will be imported into the new download. You typically only lose a couple of percent of what you had.

- I use the internal HD for my temp directory, and if I run out of space there I move completed files being shared to an external HD. You can have multiple temp directories if the internal HD isn't sufficient, in some cases that can help a bit.

[mongodisco]

i got my disc back, with most of the files intact. Hope you sort out your problems Billanben

[billanben]

Thanks guys - re downloading all the screwed ones.

[Debaser]

The only hard drives that broke on me were those shite external ones... Maxtor being the worst culprits, they last a few months.

Internal ones, well iv been using them since the stone age, and not a single failure.

Have I just been lucky or have you guys just been really unlucky?

[loverboy]

External enclosures appear to be pretty crap. I reckon it's the cheap boards/cicuitry that ends up frying the hard drive. After all, it's usually the same drive that's in your desktop. But then you don't chuck your desktop around, load it in & out of the car & take it for a drive for several hundred miles!.......

[FLL]

I like the Western Digital MyBook and the Seagate externals... the only problems I've had with externals was with external enclosures to which I added an internal drive bought separately. I think the cooling and overall engineering isn't as good for the enclosures as it is for a major-manufacturer integrated unit. The Seagate ones have the same 5-year warranty as their drives alone.

[mongodisco]

Got two nice Mybooks, one 320 and one 500, in addition i have one S-ata setup in a askasa well-cooled external case (the one that got som medical help)

Found out that it is the s-ata controller on my MB that has went tits up, that means that i will resurrect another 300 GB s-ata disc in short time in another external case..

[billanben]

MAXTOR external drives are OK for storage, problem comes if (like me) you are forced to use them as the temp directory for EM. Probalem is when you have a lot of data being written to the drive, initially, the data is written to a buffer in your OS, if this gets full, the drive cannot retrieve the exected data from the stream and goes tu.

[Debaser]

MAXTOR external drives are OK for storage, problem comes if (like me) you are forced to use them as the temp directory for EM. Probalem is when you have a lot of data being written to the drive, initially, the data is written to a buffer in your OS, if this gets full, the drive cannot retrieve the exected data from the stream and goes tu

I tried 3 Maxtors, and on 2 different computers.
They would be fine for the first few weeks, then suddenly it would take more than 20 attempts to fire them up... they would start the grinding noise, then simply wind down again.

Then when I got my latest computer (Dell) I stupidly purchased another Maxtor external drive... it lasted 3 weeks, then died completely. I returned it like I did the others, they couldn’t fix it, just like the others.

I then decided to get a freecom external, that lasted 2 years. I was advised they were better than Maxtor and they were right to say that.

Anyway, 2 years later (about 2 months ago) it started to make loud grinding noises, then eventually it stopped.... that was the final straw, no more wasting money on externals.

I will have to live with my two internal 300GB drives, which is more than enough cos I hardly need all my movies online at the same time, plus it encourages me to always back-up