At my work we have a separate computer reserved just for video editing. I'm usually the only one who uses it, and thus it runs fine. Over the past few months people who don't usually use it have been using it a lot.

About a half hour before I left on Friday someone pointed out to me that one of our external hard drives (Lacie Quadra) was failing to mount and was making a beeping sound.

I while trying to trouble shoot that I found out that the 229 GB local hard drive was down to about 10 GB of free space. I asked the appropriate questions of "What the fuck did you assholes do?" and found out that people had been savings gigabytes and gigabytes worth of video files on their desktops despite having two TB external drives to work with. Between then and now I've managed to get the local HD back to about 100 gigs of free space.

Can anyone offer advice as to:
*What the external hard drive is doing
*Whether or not its salvageable
*Ways to figure out what is eating up so much memory on the local drive and how to deal with it (beyond the normal disk cleanup stuff that I run once a week anyways) I'm running Windows XP for reference
*How to communicate to adults that a computer isn't a Nintendo and you have to actually take care of it

I could always turn the matter over to our university IT department but it'd be the same as putting it in a time capsule and waiting till the year 3000.

Almost absolutely impossible

Sometimes, I make the analogy to a car to people (eventually they all breakdown sooner or later, but with regular maintenance, you can help keep the computer running longer), which works from time to time, but that's pretty rare.

Your uni IT dept sucks =]

The external drive itself is making the beeping sound? WTF is that?

Right-click on My Computer and go to Manage. Go to Disk Management on the left. Does the drive show up there?

This open source program is great for directory stats and should help you find where all that data is: http://windirstat.info/

I don't know Lacie externals but you should call their tech support line if you can't find anyone with similar issues through googling. As for the local machine, bring up task manager to see what's taking up large chunks of memory and then shut them down and modify startup programs and services in run/"msconfig"

Lacie externals suck. they only have a 1 year warranty so you are fucked.

Beeping sound means 1 of 2 things
1) your drive arms are failing to read and having to re-cycle. This can sometimes be fixed with a few hard cycles, freezing them, or doing something to get the arms to work again.
2) your power source is insufficient so that the arms/drive keeps trying to power up and can't due to not enough power. This usually happens when you are dealing with drives that don't have a power cable, just USB.

As for getting people to not be shitty, slobby assholes, I have never been able to keep others to a planned file structure. not carina with photos even after I spent 4 months sorting her pictures/files myself, not WUNH djs after putting up a sign that unfiled/misfiled files will be deleted and deleting them a couple times myself.

people are fucking slobs and shitty and then will cry to you when their shitty shit shits the bed. fuck them.

this is my new mantra.

Try unplugging it and then plugging it back in

run a chkdsk about it, that sometimes can clear up HDD problems if theres a bad sector and isnt booting properly or freezing but is not as relevant if you are just trying to see whats taking up space..i guess maybe just delete their programs and videos they have been installing on the drive..

MAC OS folks. it has fsck not chkdsk, no?

sounds like he's using Win XP

oh, I just assumed this was macos.. shame on me.

I kind of regret getting Lacie externals.

I think I'm going to go back to WD soon and just keep those Lacies as occasional backup drives.

I tried running chkdsk. When I get to the command prompt it starts from Y:\ the network drive. I can't get it to change to the C:\ drive and gives me a Windows CAnnot Check A Disk that is attached to a network, error.

As far as the HD. I've tried a different power cable, and different connecting cables and so far nothing has worked. The Lacie troubleshooting page pretty much stops there.

Lacie are mostly used by mac people. I would say that it's dead and if it is over a year, they won't replace it free.

ps: try putting it in the freezer for a few hours.

If it was my drive I'd toss it in the freezer. This being Red Tape U. I'm gonna just fire off an email and let it be someone else's headache.

mike, can you safe mode dat shit then run dat chkdsk on drive C:...I believe there is an option where you can specify the drive that chkdsk starts on..

good looks. i'll try that.

try this command for the C drive...

CHKDSK/F/R C