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Taking ownership of files ... confused, irritated & discombobulated

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Deozaan:
Trinity Rescue Kit helped me with a similar problem.

barney:
Don't ya just hate when life interferes with what you really want to do :o?

After a hiatus to restock the larder/fridge, I got back onto this. 

Tried several live CDs - Trinity was the first, btw - but nothing could move those files  :huh:.  I finally gave it up as a bad job, tried to reformat the drive.  It would not format  :tellme:!  I no longer have anything that will do a low-level format:  don't know that such would do any good, anyway, with today's HDs.  So I'm just gonna chalk it up to a bad - really bad - drive and eat my losses.  It is now in a suitable repository for disposal  :).

I tried Trinity - I've had middlin' success with it in the past.  Then I tried a Win live CD, on the theory that Windows would better understand what was going on, but the drive wouldn't be directly mounted to the OS - flakey, I know, but at this stage I was grasping any straw available.  Then I tried several Linux distros that would run from CD w/o being installed.

Every one of those efforts gave me the same response, albeit couched differently depending upon the CD format I was using.

So I just decided to bite that particular bullet and, eventually, replace the drive.

Thanks, everyone, for your kind help and suggestions  :Thmbsup:.

cranioscopical:

So I just decided to bite that particular bullet and, eventually, replace the drive.
-barney (October 19, 2011, 02:44 PM)
--- End quote ---
Bad luck but there comes a point when the game's not worth the candle, as you've realized.
Gets on your wick, doesn't it.
Had you talked to anyone at MicroNet?

40hz:
Every one of those efforts gave me the same response, albeit couched differently depending upon the CD format I was using.

So I just decided to bite that particular bullet and, eventually, replace the drive.

-barney (October 19, 2011, 02:44 PM)
--- End quote ---



I've had that happen to me. Your drive may not be shot. Most times it's just the partition table and/or MBR that are FUBARed. It's very likely there's just some digital garbage lurking in a critical area that is preventing a reformat.

Before you trash it, download a copy of Darik's Boot & Nuke. It's a tiny download. Fits on a floppy.

Boot using that, and select the quick option - or just hit enter. (If you just hit enter it will take longer.)

Let it run until it hits at least the 15% complete mark. You don't need to let it run to completion. You just want to be sure the partition table and lowest tracks are completely wiped.

Now load up a copy of gparted from any of those live Linux CDs you've got and create a new partition table. After that you can partition/format the drive however you want using NTFS. If you can do this you're half way home. Think of this as the test phase. I like gparted because it can do this part quicker and more reliably than Windows usually can.

Now when you go to reinstall windows, first do a fix master boot record on it (FIXMBR) and then do a quick format on each partition when you reinstall Windows. This may not be absolutely necessary since it's redoing what we just did with gparted. But we're using Microsoft's utilities this time around just to be 100% sure there's nothing going on Windows doesn't understand. When running Windows you want to stick with their setup tools as much as possible.

In 9 cases out of 10, this fixes the problem.

Luck! :Thmbsup:

barney:
Oops!

Sorry, I was unclear again  :(. 

This was - emphasis on the was - not an OS drive, just a USB external storage drive.  All the diagnostics I have said it had bad sectors, and the bad sector count was growing.  Considering the power problems I've had recently, I'm inclined to believe the drive really was [going] bad.  MTBF is really only an empirical average, and all indications were that this drive wasn't paying attention to averages  ;D.

Haven't tried the Boot & Nuke thing yet, but like you, I'm kinda partial to gparted.  However, when I tried that to see if I could recover the drive - in case I was getting faulty SMART data - it couldn't do anything to ameliorate the situation.

So I dismantled the drive housing - I'm a string-saver when it comes to mounting screws and such  ;) - and will dispose of it, prolly, at Best Buy, as that's the only place locally that handles that kind of thing.

Anyway, the ordeal is past ... I just have to decide whether to get another Fantom  :P.

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