Had a drive die
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No idea where to put this, but here's the deal. I've an oldish machine and recently it sort of hiccuped, burped, farted, shat and pissed itself. All at once. It's amazing that the thing still works. I had to do a restore, but it fried not only my newish Logitech Ball mouse and caused my main gmail account to disappear (nope, no recovery seems possible), it fried my new 2 TB drive. No machine will recognize its presence now. And I realize that this all sounds unlikely, but there ya go. I've seen computer weirdness in my time, but this is brand new. At any rate, I had a LOT of torrent's almost all of them seeding on that now dead drive and I'm trying to figure out what to do about all these dead torrents. Any help would be appreciated. Oh, BTW, I have LOTS of other external drives that were not affected and yes, they were attached at the time. So was another mouse (I have multiple old machines that I play with) and it still works. The only thing I've figured out to to is to copy the now dead torrents from qBittorrent and try to recreate them on my newest external. In all, it is a mess. Not exactly expecting help, but it would be nice if someone had a clue about this weirdness.
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That's about all you can do. Redownload the torrents. Backup your data in the future.
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The really stupid thing about this, is backing up stuff was what I bought the damn drive for.
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If you even lost your gmail account it might be a virus or maybe even hacker. Usually you don't use gmail account if your computer fries because it's stored on net. If by any chance you still have working computer, and you know what you were seeding, get those torrents and keep seeding, if you by any chance have files on old drive as well. If you don't and can get them again, then get them and seed. That's what I would do. If your old comp doesn't work anymore and you think of buying one more or have another one, then use that one.
If you're the only seeder for your files and the one who uploaded them and you uploaded them here then give links here you never know maybe someone has those files as well and can seed them for you and you can write in comment of torrent what happened and to wait for you. Or if you think you won' be able to ever seed them, then delete them. I don't see any more options. -
As to the gmail account, that just mystifies me. I go through all the right motions to recover the damn thing when at the end google tells me the account doesn't exist. It is just weird. Mind, I have so many other accounts from the time of google groups that I've lost count. so there's that.
Otherwise, I've found a nifty way to restart/replace my missing downloads. I don't quite need to do a full redownloads, I just need to redirect qBittorrent to a new spot which can easily be done with a right click. Who knew
This will still take a long time, but it will be easier than I thought. Am going to have to get rid of my pics backup probably, but then I am looking to get another backup drive very soon. -
Oh, and as to a virus or a hacker, I tend to doubt this. The very first thing I did when I got my machine back was run an Avast scan and a Malwarebytes Antimalware scan and I have the pro version of the latter. Nothing. Hackers aren't going to mess with my machine just to fucking mess with it. That's so 1990's. I truly think that the machine just hiccuped in a spectacular fashion. I kinda saw it do something very weird for a split second at one point and at any rate, the machine is getting quite old. It is just that I've never seen a machine do anything this bizarre before and I've been taking apart and putting together the damn things since Windows 3.1 Just wondered if anyone had run across this type of oddity.
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Everything but the gmail account to me sounds like your computer may have been hit with some sort of a power surge that was enough to damage some components, but not fry the entire system. If the drive in question was heavily in use, I would be inclined to think that would be why that particular drive was affected.
Did you know about the computer management console that may be able to recover the drive?
To do this, click Start, then right click "Computer", then click "Manage"… When you go to the hard drives option, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see that your drive is sitting there acknowledged by the motherboard, but registering that it hasn't yet been "activated"... If this is the case, I forget what the option is to activate it (right clicking it, and selecting the activate option I think). Once this is done, the drive should be assigned a drive letter again, but will likely give you an error when you try to access it, saying that the drive isn't formatted... If this is the case, do not panic.
Assuming that the drive in question is assigned to
you would want to open an elevated command prompt first. To do this, click start, then type "cmd" (without the quotes), then either press LEFT CTRL + LEFT SHIFT + ENTER, or just the LEFT CTRL + LEFT SHIFT, and click it. Once open, run the following command:chkdsk -r -f
(or is it chkdsk /r /f D:)?It's been a few years since I've touched a Windows operating system, so I don't recall the exact procedure off the top of my head, but that should recover the drive, as long as it is still recognized by the BIOS, which it should be....
Also, as long as the drive still spins up without any hiccups when it's powered on, it should be acknowledged by the BIOS, even if Windows won't acknowledge that the drive has been "activated"... Just a heads up.
Hope this helps.
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To MrMazda: Thank you for your eminently reasonable advice. I actually had some hope there for a bit
But 'twas not to be. I kinda figured not simply because I have multiple machines. One runs windows 10 (a nice little XPS 13) and another is an older HP that I've got running 32-bit Mint. The drive didn't show up on any of them. (All my machines are gifts) This one is the one I like the most. It is a Dell Dimension E521 that probably started life out as an XP machine. I got it when it was running Vista and then, er (cough) somehow got it to run 7 Ultimate (cough, cough). It's done well, but I think it is probably slowly dieing. Still, your advice was worth pursuing, if nothing else, for me to explore a part of Windows that I had not considered. I LOATHE Windows! But you know, the main reason I haven't quite made the switch to Linux yet is that I can hack Windows to give me a right-click menu of copy/move TO FOLDER. I NEED this option!! It is how I organize my porn I would buy a new desktop (and I WAY prefer desktops; I can't fucking STAND track pads. They hate me. So do smart phones.) but I really, really need new glasses and I have a molar that is dieing also and, well, first things first. At any rate, thank you very, very much for your consideration. It was useful as an education if not as an actual fix. With any luck, you might have pointed out help to someone else :cheers: -
Ya know, in a weird way, reactivating my poor abandoned downloads is kinda fun. Then again, I really like updating everything on my computer, which can take up to hours, so….Oooh look! Buckleroos 2 is back! gotta go! :cheers:
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Before throwing away the HDD you would want to check whether it's working or not via a S.M.A.R.T. diagnosys.
http://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how-to-see-if-your-hard-drive-is-dying/
You will see a fancy status report saying: "OK" / "FAILING" / "FAILED" :crazy2:
If the drive is ok just format it to use it again
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If the drive was clicking (not the ordinary seeking noise, I am talking about a loud unusual click) or made a "clank" type sound then the computer died, the heads are probably gone. This is usually the way they go. Anyway, if that is the case you can fix it by buying an identical drive and replacing the heads. Once it's repaired you'll need to transfer it instantly to a new disk. Look on YouTube for examples of the procedure.
