Help! Hard Drive is failing

[theanimala]

I have two internal HD's, and one external. I manually copy important documents across all three drives, but in this case I was letting iTunes manage my music, and all of the files are on my D drive (a 160GB Maxtor drive). Well, a few months ago I had it where there were a number of files that were not showing up in one specific folder. Alphabetically it would be fine until letter "O", or whatever letter is was. It would not show anything after that. I believe at the time I did a chkdsk with repair, and all was fine.

Of course, I assumed all was fine with the drive after that. I recently got a network HD and I wanted to share files across multiple computers. While trying to copy my itunes music folder I kept getting a "cyclic redudancy check", which I believe I was also getting the last time I had this problem. Guess what, I can know only see folders up to the letter "M", nothing else after that.

I have tried to use Chkdsk, and during stage one (File verification) I do get many "File Record segment XXXXX is unreadable. During stage 2 (Verifying indexes), it hands at 49 percent. CPU hits 100% utilization and it just hangs.

I know I should have copied this folder to other locations, but is there any way I can save the data from this drive before tossing it?

Thank you all for the help.

 

[0roo0roo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite

 

[theanimala]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite

OrooOroo, thanks for the info. This problem looks pretty cool so I did download it. I started running it last night, and now 10 hours and 59 minutes into it I am at 2% complete. Time remaining, 142 hours and 3 minutes. Does that not seem to be a bit on the slow side? So far, 2 unrecoverable secords, the test have been fine. Of course, I've only gone through a few at this speed. Is this the best I can hope for?