Hard drives (like all mechanical parts) have a limited lifetime. You need to
monitor their health regularly and be prepared to replace them BEFORE they
crash. Sure, I've had drives last a decade, but others seem to last about 5
years (or less). Lifetime seems to be a function of how hard you push the
drive, how hot you let the box get and (most of all) how important the data
is. If you start getting read errors (many are unreported), you're in for
trouble so don't fool around--just get the data off as soon as possible.
After your ship hits the iceberg, it's not a good time to order new
wallpaper for the main dining room.
One trick I use in an emergency is to put the drive in a conductive plastic
bag (like the one it came in) and put it in the freezer overnight. Next
morning, get your system ready to retrieve the data from it and hook it up
(no, don't plug it into a running system) and try to access it. It might
work long enough to get the data off. You might have to repeat the process
several times. Again, I have mixed success with this technique.

--
____________________________________
William (Bill) Vaughn
Author, Mentor, Consultant
Microsoft MVP
www.betav.com
Please reply only to the newsgroup so that others can benefit.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
__________________________________

"Brian Morin" wrote in message
. ..
My secondary HDD is giving me error messages... "Plural you say... ""Yes!"
says I... This just seemed to happen one day. I went to access my second
HDD- which was formatted and had data on it, that I've been accessing for
more than a year now, without problems- it took forever to respond. I got
an
message saying that the drive was not formatted and needed to be
formatted.
Well since I had a recent back up - more than just luck, more takes a lot
of
discipline, long story - I reformatted.

After I reformatted the drive I could access it, but for only a short
while
before it gave me other error messages. Now I don't quite remember all the
sequent of events but I got error message that said:

- Can not read security data stream...

- Corrupt master disk...

By the way, this is my second drive (20 G), my first one is 30G and is
running Windows XP both drives are NTFS.

Hope I've been clear.

Thanks for any help that comes my way.

Thanks Brian