Name: Anonymous 2012-05-19 19:33
A day ago, I had accidentally left my computer on overnight while recording a game session. When I woke up yesterday, some 9 hours later, I realized the computer had probably frozen while recording at some point--although the monitors were all blank so I couldn't see when the error occurred. I quickly restarted my computer only to find it feeling a bit sluggish when I go to the folder containing the video that was recorded overnight. The video came out to a bit more than 4 GB but was corrupted so I instinctively deleted the file.
Later in the day, I went to listen to music (stored in a separate folder), but found the tracks would occasionally stutter and/or freeze, sometimes momentarily but mostly ~5 - 15sec breaks, as if buffering on YouTube. I figured it was not a computer freeze as I was playing a game (running off another hard drive) just fine without any hiccups but didn't think much of it.
Fast forward to today, and I find a completely separate folder to my music and that video recording folder inaccessible due to the "The file of directory is corrupted and unreadable". Now I'm dead afraid that my hard drive is dying so I go to back up and move some of my files to the other drive and some to a new external hard drive. I then find I cannot select a large folder to transfer (I have to move small batches at a time), some folders just don't copy at all, and that the transfer speed never goes beyond 200 kB/s. Now I'm stupidly worried that I cannot back up my files in time or at all so I go to look up data recovery services hoping they don't charge a fortune (I'm a college student).
The companies all mention that I should stop using the hard drive immediately to stop further damage. However, this drive has all my necessities from work files, school work, personal data, to files I NEED to access every day. Then there's also the private files I don't want people seeing. The backup didn't seem too fruitful as I couldn't get beyond 3 GB transferred in the past few hours and I don't want to risk damaging my hard drive any more. However, sending a hard drive for a company to work on right now will inevitably set me back financially as well as hold my work up.
What should I do?
Later in the day, I went to listen to music (stored in a separate folder), but found the tracks would occasionally stutter and/or freeze, sometimes momentarily but mostly ~5 - 15sec breaks, as if buffering on YouTube. I figured it was not a computer freeze as I was playing a game (running off another hard drive) just fine without any hiccups but didn't think much of it.
Fast forward to today, and I find a completely separate folder to my music and that video recording folder inaccessible due to the "The file of directory is corrupted and unreadable". Now I'm dead afraid that my hard drive is dying so I go to back up and move some of my files to the other drive and some to a new external hard drive. I then find I cannot select a large folder to transfer (I have to move small batches at a time), some folders just don't copy at all, and that the transfer speed never goes beyond 200 kB/s. Now I'm stupidly worried that I cannot back up my files in time or at all so I go to look up data recovery services hoping they don't charge a fortune (I'm a college student).
The companies all mention that I should stop using the hard drive immediately to stop further damage. However, this drive has all my necessities from work files, school work, personal data, to files I NEED to access every day. Then there's also the private files I don't want people seeing. The backup didn't seem too fruitful as I couldn't get beyond 3 GB transferred in the past few hours and I don't want to risk damaging my hard drive any more. However, sending a hard drive for a company to work on right now will inevitably set me back financially as well as hold my work up.
What should I do?