Don't you dare mention HDDs

[Nick]

I hate technology with a passion I normally reserve for the stupid call centers that have a computer ring you up... and then you say 'Hello' to a blank line as it hangs up on you cos no-one's free to take the call.

Why?

Because today one of my drives failed.

Well, no, it didn't fail, but somehow the file table became corrupted, meaning i was left with a piece of junk spinning away 19 to the dozen when I tried to do anything.

I should've known something was up when MCE refused to record anything last night and then went into swap file spasms... they were so bad the obly way I could shut down was to physically switch off my PSU.

Checking the drive in question last night showed it to nearly be full, which was some going seeing as the only I store on it is my music, the MCE recorded TV, My Documents etc etc. I don't actually have ANY software stored or installed on this drive, it's purely for storage.... 200 GB of just storage!

So how the hell did I manage to fill a 200GB drive in under three months?

Well a quick look in the Recorded TV folder revealed the other half's penchant for Desperate Housewives, Top Gear and anything at all about What you eat, Diet Doctors and Child of our time... But this still wasn't taking up all of my drive, nor was the 5-6 Gb of documents, home movies and music... so something was up.

I switched MCE to record onto another drive so I could enjoy some peace and quiet and then got on with making up to her for not finding the time to even buy a Valentines card...

And then this morning my PC fell over big stylee... LOADS of HDD activity and it was running at a speed that Charles Babbage himself would've laughed at... and then, my D drive just ...went away. Gone. Disappeared.

So once I'd cleaned up after that bowel loosening moment, I dropped into BIOS and it was there and shiny and happily reporting but in Safe mode it had somehow lost 58Gb and was, according the Windows, officially screwed.

But, fear not! Slapping in my trusty CD of disk recovery utilities and answering some dumb as hell questions such as 'Do you wish to recover the data on this drive?'... Moment to diverge... WHAT sort of question is that???...'Do you wish to recover the data on this drive?' I mean, I've just booted up a sodding recovery program, what the hell else does it think I want it to do? Make the tea?

No, no, mate...of course not, I don't want that data. IN fact, I'd rather you just ripped it all off, burnt it and scattered it's ashes off Everest!!!... stupid, stupid, stupid.

So.. I get my data back onto my RAID array and set about wiping the D drive. Lo and behold, I get my 58 GB back AND every hard disk test I can find says it's all hunky dory and nowt is wrong.

Oh sure, nothing's wrong... except the THREE hours it took to recover the datd and repair the drive and the further 2 hours it took to replace the data on that drive AND the frustration you get when windows decides that if you move a folder called My Documents from ANYWHERE to anywhere, it wont let you as you obviously have no clue what you're doing...

GAH!

Thank the lord for sensible bits of software that let you do this sort of thing... and now, as I write this, MCE is jumping up and down like a jack russel telling me that the missus is now recording yet another episode of Desparate Housewives...

So I think I know why I didn't get her a Valentines card or pressie... my subconcious was holding me off as IT knew I'd be a needing another new HDD soon... I wonder if 400GB drives are reasonable money now?

[arthurleung]

Go XP/2K3 x64, the GPT disks appear to give you more protection against MBR/MFT corruption, although taking quite some space (couldn't remember if its 200m or 2g)

[Lee H]

I had a similar issue on Christmas Day in fact.

2 of the 300Gb drives in the Raid 5 array I have "supposedly" died, thus most of the recordings I had from freeview were lost - including all the doctor who episodes from BBC3

This is the funny part, their now in another system working fine after a good format and in a non-raid setup

[YorkieBen]

Nick, can I ask what the recovery programs on the CD are?

[Nick]

Sure, they're all freeware or shareware, with the exception of Norton (which I only had as a bundle when I bought my first copy of Norton Anti Virus and Firewall).

You can still grab a lot of them from www.freebyte.com/filediskutils/

A copuple of the others I tried were from way old cover mounts that I've copied onto one disk during a highly uncharacteristic period of being organized... damn glad I did though!

[directhex]

go buy yourself an LTO3 tape drive, to protect against future data loss \o/

[Nick]

going one better than that.

I installed a HEX editor and I'm printing all the code out...

Then it's just a case of typing it all back in if I lose it... I just KNEW those weeks spent typing in programs from the back of My Sinclair would pay off one day!

[directhex]

going one better than that.

I installed a HEX editor and I'm printing all the code out...

Then it's just a case of typing it all back in if I lose it... I just KNEW those weeks spent typing in programs from the back of My Sinclair would pay off one day!

for the proper experience you need to ensure there's at least one typo every 2 pages.

[Lee H]

for the proper experience you need to ensure there's at least one typo every 2 pages.

and at least 4 instances where an 0 is printed so badly it looks like an O and vice-versa

[autopilot]

Sounds like a ball! You guys have so much fun

[XA04]

Similar thing happened to my 80gb harddrive, I think it's slowly dieing. Managed to back some stuff up and have ordered a new 120gb HDD.