Hello all:
Friday evening, I came home and saw some error messages on the screen. I didn't pay a lot of attention, as this sort of thing does happen occasionally, usually memory induced, I thought.
So, i close the windows, go about my business. Later on, I go to eat dinner, and when I return, I see that Norton tried to run his evening scan, (why is it a he, rather than a her?) but he had a problem, said some of Norton files were missing.
Well, I still wasn't that alarmed, as I have had Norton get trashed before, and have to reinstall it. So, I said, it's time to reboot.
Boy, was I wrong. When I rebooted, my system stopped at a text line after the initial boot screens, and said, no disc drive found. I said, shit, what?
So, I reboot again, look in cmos, and yes, my drive was still there. Still, i can't get past it. So, I begin to panic. I check to make sure memory is installed, connections seated, still nothing. So, I get out a win 98 boot disc and w2k install disc and start running tests. None of the above allowed me to see my C drive.
At this point, I realize the magnatude of problem, and damn near begin to cry. My C drive, that's not backed up, is gone, gone, gone!
Panicing, i run to Best Buy to get a new drive, and they were closed already. So, that night, kicking myself all the while for not backing up when I had the space, all i could do was wait. Saturday morning, I went and picked up 2 new Western Digital Drives to restore my system and begin the painful process of rebuilding.
First, I formatted both drives individually as the primary drive. After doing that, i proceeded to install Windows on the first drive. After getting up and running, I connected my one good drive with data, and copied everything from that drive to the new C drive. I then installed the second new drive and did a backup of that data. *yeah, now I backup!
By Sunday night, I run another test, and evaluate the bad drive in w2k disc facility. Well, what do you know, Winblows thinks it's a healthy drive! Well, I still can't read it though, as it says there is no valid directory or partitions.
After that on Monday, I started thinking recovery and after talking to one person, and reading on another site (www.ontrack.com), I begin to think there's a 50 50 chance at least, that much of my data is still on the drive, even though I couldn't get to it.
So, last night, I downloaded the trial software from On Track, and sure enough, I found over 43000 files!!! Yeah! So, now, I am ready to turn my attention to recovery, and purchase this package. Turns out, I ran the RAW data recovery test last night. I should have ran the standard. So, I will start that test at lunch.
Morals of the story?
1. Never trust a Maxtor drive, even if less than 1 year old.
2. Never run by the seat of your britches. Assum the worst, it could happen to you!
3. when replacing drives, look at the new Western Digital 8 meg cache units.
I was amazed by the increase in seek times by my new drives. Gone are the cursor delays when clicking on something so simple as a start menu. In short, it's made my dual drive system like a real dual now! Those Maxtors were holding my system back big time!
I'm anxious to get my data back, and close my system up once again. Only this time, running Ghost software backups from C to E, with no data stored on 1 drive only.
The trial software did encounter a partition error, but no directories. That is a big problem...
lex
Cable Guy DVD Collection
Friday evening, I came home and saw some error messages on the screen. I didn't pay a lot of attention, as this sort of thing does happen occasionally, usually memory induced, I thought.
So, i close the windows, go about my business. Later on, I go to eat dinner, and when I return, I see that Norton tried to run his evening scan, (why is it a he, rather than a her?) but he had a problem, said some of Norton files were missing.
Well, I still wasn't that alarmed, as I have had Norton get trashed before, and have to reinstall it. So, I said, it's time to reboot.
Boy, was I wrong. When I rebooted, my system stopped at a text line after the initial boot screens, and said, no disc drive found. I said, shit, what?
So, I reboot again, look in cmos, and yes, my drive was still there. Still, i can't get past it. So, I begin to panic. I check to make sure memory is installed, connections seated, still nothing. So, I get out a win 98 boot disc and w2k install disc and start running tests. None of the above allowed me to see my C drive.
At this point, I realize the magnatude of problem, and damn near begin to cry. My C drive, that's not backed up, is gone, gone, gone!
Panicing, i run to Best Buy to get a new drive, and they were closed already. So, that night, kicking myself all the while for not backing up when I had the space, all i could do was wait. Saturday morning, I went and picked up 2 new Western Digital Drives to restore my system and begin the painful process of rebuilding.
First, I formatted both drives individually as the primary drive. After doing that, i proceeded to install Windows on the first drive. After getting up and running, I connected my one good drive with data, and copied everything from that drive to the new C drive. I then installed the second new drive and did a backup of that data. *yeah, now I backup!
By Sunday night, I run another test, and evaluate the bad drive in w2k disc facility. Well, what do you know, Winblows thinks it's a healthy drive! Well, I still can't read it though, as it says there is no valid directory or partitions.
After that on Monday, I started thinking recovery and after talking to one person, and reading on another site (www.ontrack.com), I begin to think there's a 50 50 chance at least, that much of my data is still on the drive, even though I couldn't get to it.
So, last night, I downloaded the trial software from On Track, and sure enough, I found over 43000 files!!! Yeah! So, now, I am ready to turn my attention to recovery, and purchase this package. Turns out, I ran the RAW data recovery test last night. I should have ran the standard. So, I will start that test at lunch.
Morals of the story?
1. Never trust a Maxtor drive, even if less than 1 year old.
2. Never run by the seat of your britches. Assum the worst, it could happen to you!
3. when replacing drives, look at the new Western Digital 8 meg cache units.
I was amazed by the increase in seek times by my new drives. Gone are the cursor delays when clicking on something so simple as a start menu. In short, it's made my dual drive system like a real dual now! Those Maxtors were holding my system back big time!
I'm anxious to get my data back, and close my system up once again. Only this time, running Ghost software backups from C to E, with no data stored on 1 drive only.
The trial software did encounter a partition error, but no directories. That is a big problem...
lex
Cable Guy DVD Collection
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