Is there a disk in the DVR player?

Do you have an external hard drive connected to your PC?

Aputernut: I do but it's unpluged

PKponder ... no

I took a screen shot of the "D" drive... note that it says it corrupted. Question is how did this happen and now what do I do about it ... thanks all.

That's nice screenshot but it would have been more informative if you had posted a screenshot from Disk Management, as I wrote above. Without that we can't tell if it's a partition - which I suspect it is - or a physical drive.

You can use a free tool like CrystalDiskInfo to check the S.M.A.R.T. info for the drive, which can tell you some useful information, like how many hours it's been spinning. It's information that's stored on the drive itself and can be accessed by the appropriate piece of software. But a fair bit of the other information is hard to decipher. Nevertheless it's useful.

See :
How to See if Your Hard Drive is Dying with S.M.A.R.T.

Also, is this is a laptop or desktop or ?

And what is the brand ?

ok see if this helps I think the larger drive is the one I operate from ( desktop) and the other not sure about ... let me know please thanks for everyone's help here .

Ok, it's a separate drive - a Western Digital 160GB drive. Based on the "Power on Hours" - 33,000 - I'd say it's getting to end of life or it's already there. That's the equivalent of running for almost 4yrs continuously.
I'd replace it.

Most drives are good for around 3-4 yrs, after which you run risks. I've had some drives run for much longer, but it's risky, especially without backup.

Did you have important data on it ? There are some recovery tools that might be able to recover some data if you're interested.

A curious item in the Crystal Disk status report is the Power On count. It's hard to imagine what your use practice is, for that number to be so high - over 10,000. Electronic devices (especially drives) often die at power-on time, it's better to try to minimize these.

The usefulness of SMART data is debated - there's a lack of standardization between manufacturers and no publicly available information about what values should be expected with various models.

But never mind these, reality is that once a drive exhibits any type of erratic or uncharacteristic behavior, the best choice is to abandon ship. Drives are cheap. Hopefully you have other backups for what's on it. Get a replacement, set it up with the data you wish, and return to carefree days.

Yes, I agree. I was hesitant to lead him down that road for the reasons you've stated.
I'd be skeptical of even the power on hours.
And most of the information is very hard to interpret - I have to look it up every time - and so a lot of it is misleading to the average user.

If you're having problems with a Western Digital product...removable drive...go to the site below. Download the WD drive utilities. Once the program is downloaded...open it, connect your WD drive to your USB port and you can test to see if the drive is shot by taking it for a quick run with this utility. I've just gone through this exercise myself and found my WD Passport drive had gone boots up so I went off to Staples and bought a new one. I find this is not an unusual occurrence with these type of drives. I think this is my third one in about the last five years. Between time...I quickly backed up to a stick flash drive that I had hanging around.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=223&sid=171&lang=en

Anne

By the way, since you're probably going to have to buy another drive, there was some pretty good long term testing done by Backblaze, a company that uses hundreds of different drives for cloud storage :
What Hard Drive Should I Buy? - backblaze.com

It turns out the Seagate drives I've always relied upon didn't turn out so well.

thanks all ... what if I just say format this drive ...what then .. any harm .. if I can't access it now and the system is running what could be on that drive that I would use ????

I'm on Win 7.1. I don't know much about Vista except to say that 7.1 has some blending from the Vista model. If you decide to format that drive...be sure you know where it "lodges". I've just gone through a maze of aggravation trying to locate an older drive that had nothing on it that's no longer on my obvious list of drives. I finally found it tucked into my pictures folder and deleted it. Just it's existence prevented my backups from completing correctly. Now that it's gone...my backup runs and closes nicely. I don't know if formatting that D: drive will cause the same problem...but be forewarned. If you do a backup and it won't complete because it can't find the D: drive...you'll have to go find it to delete it. Better yet...if you're not going to use it...delete it now.

Anne

Uh, on Windows you can't put a drive in a folder - not sure what's going there. In Linux you could mount a file system like that, but not in Windows.

Anyway, from your screenshots it looks like the drive is failing, and some of the sectors where the boot record and partition tables are located might be damaged as well.
You could use that WD utility to double check.

So you could attempt to partition and format it, but even if that was successful, it'd be highly unreliable. Before you do that though, decide if you want to attempt to recover any files, as reformatting it and so on could make that impossible.

I'm not really sure about the last part of your question, the way it's worded. Anything could be on that drive : data files, photos, videos, programs, anything - basically whatever the user/owner put on it.

If you want to stop getting the error message though, just shut down the computer and remove the drive.

Wouldn't hurt to open the case and unplug/replug all of its cable ends before tossing away its contents. Maybe you'll get lucky and its just a corroded connection contact. Clean the dust out while you're in there.

OK ... I see what you all have said... what if I just do what it wants me to do ... FORMAT the "D" drive will it hurt anything in my other drive etc. BTW I am not comfortable reaching in and unplugging etc ..LOL my luck I would do more harm then good. thanks for everyone bearing with me here.

Uh, on Windows you can't put a drive in a folder - not sure what's going
there. In Linux you could mount a file system like that, but not in
Windows.

That maybe what the book says...but I found the errant G: drive nicely tucked at the bottom of the "My Pictures" folder under "Libraries". How it got there is as much a mystery to me as it must be to you but insinuating that it's an impossibility is a tad harsh. Perhaps your "Pro" title has gone to your head. I've lived long enough to say that there's always the possibility of the impossible...no matter what the venue.

If you format that drive, big-al, everything will be erased that's on it. If there's data/pictures/etc on it...back it up before you do anything. Then...if you want to format it to get rid of the annoying message...go ahead. If the drive is failing as we all seem to suspect...why do through all of that. Remove anything you have saved on it by backing it up to another healthy drive...and ditch the D: drive. If it were my problem...that's what I would do.

Thanks all.. my son is away for a week I'll wait until he is home etc ... will let you all know ...many thanks.

@anne_ct

"That maybe what the book says...but I found the errant G: drive nicely
tucked at the bottom of the "My Pictures" folder under "Libraries"."

I don't want to get too sidetracked here, but the Libraries are essentially folders full of shortcuts. They are not the actual files, folders, or drives, but references to their real locations only.
You could put another computer on the network inside say, Libraries/Pictures, but that computer is not actually in Pictures. As well, if you delete it there, it does not delete the actual file, folder, drive, or computer that's being referenced.

To test, see if you can drag a D: drive, or your CD drive into your actual Pictures directory. You can't - indeed it's impossible.
But you can drop it as a shortcut into anything that's in Libraries, although it doesn't explicitly say that it's just a shortcut.

See : Windows 7 Libraries: Frequently Asked Questions

big_al_41

If you follow through with the message prompt you're getting, it will only format the drive that you're being prompted for and nothing else. My guess is that it will probably fail anyway. But as we have suggested, it's kind of a losing battle.

I understand your hesitancy to open the hood and start messing around.
But just so you know, all you have to do is make sure you're selecting the right drive, which would be the 160GB one, and then there is one power cable and one data cable for it. As long as the computer is off, you can pull those cables from the back of the drive without too much worry.

But maybe just wait until your son gets back, and then you can blame him if there are any problems. Just kidding of course ;-)