voyage to mars

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Once again, my office PC goes all Michael Myers on me and slaughters my entire hard drive, containing, in no particular order of preference, all my (unanswered) mail - last backup was mid-October - a number of work-in-progress documents, research material, pictures, my rather sizeable MP3 collection (aaah!), bookmarks, online-purchased software, contact list, important stickies - I could lament bitterly for another two paragraphs, but I think my point has been made. Loss. Major. Ragnar mad. The word? Shit!

I honestly don't know what happened. Everything seemed fine yesterday afternoon, until I tried running a program and I got a fatal error. I decided to reboot (every Windows user's first line of defence), which was when Windows slapped up a blue screen telling me there was an 'unmountable boot volume', which sounded rather ominous. One attempted reboot later, and it was clear that something was horribly, horribly wrong. I contacted our network department who came promptly to my aid, but no amount of clever and educated tricks - including booting into Unix from CD in order to pull critical files off the HD - could help. The hard drive was beyond salvation: every file on it appeared to have the same name ('xpad.pad'), and there was nothing left of the original directory or file structure. When the tech guy, after an hour's work, shrugged apologetically, I knew I was screwed.

My only possible salvation is to install a new Windows drive and a program that can scan and recover as many files as possible from my original 250Gb crammed-to-the-rafters disk. If I'm (very) lucky, I can save my mail and those documents - but in these cases, I never have been. Lucky, that is. This isn't the first time I've lost everything, so I know I ought to be more backup-minded, but it's easy to forget.

Virus? Who knows, but seeing as I run Norton Anti-Virus - plus several adware killers; I'm paranoid - I don't think so. Running 'chkdsk' on it also came up blank: the drive seems fine, physically. Just, you know, fubar.

Oh well, life goes on, and as I begin to rebuild my life piece by piece, I'll surely find that I won't actually miss the things I lost...too much. Time heals, as does a brand new drive, and though quite a few of those MP3s will be sorely missed, and though there are dozens of mails that will forever go unanswered, it matters little in the grand scheme of things.

But still:

Shit. ¶ 16:45

Comments:

That is quite a terrible loss. I'm sorry you have to deal with that, especially when you're so busy and have deadlines coming.

You may want to consider setting up a RAID array for your hard disks. You'd probably have to upgrade your motherboard too, but it could give you the safety of having a backup. I believe a RAID-1 array is the one you'd be most interested in, if you want to look into it.

# posted by Anonymous : 7:08 PM

It almost sounds like the FAT table or boot sector was corrupted. Sometimes they can be restored. There are places that specialize in this, they are usually expensive, but it might be worth it. If the data is valuable enough.

# posted by Anonymous : 8:01 PM

This post has been removed by the author.

# posted by semperwifi : 8:24 PM

Comiserations, Ragnar.

I know a little about how you felt - same thing happened to me this august (came to work one Monday, had Explorer.exe crashed during the weekend. No response from the PC, so I reset it, and wham-bam - bluescreen. However, that seems to have been a hardware failure, there was no reading from the disk whatsoever.). That's one day I was happy that I follow the "Save production-related stuff to the servers" rule at work... All I lost was my personal MP3s, and those can be reconstructed from CDs...

Hope you manage to salvage/reconstruct the most important stuff, and that it won't impact important projects. Best of luck to you!

toremygg of the Divide

# posted by Anonymous : 8:31 PM

if i were you, i'd blame firefox

# posted by Anonymous : 8:36 PM

It's Bill Gates! Get him!

Ragnar, I'm sorry to hear of your loss, tragic. Will you be backing up more often in the future?

RAID 1 cloning reduces the risk of this happening, it has to be used along side your normal backing up precedures though.

# posted by Anonymous : 8:52 PM

I find uploading stuff to a (password protected) web-server is a good way to save yourself from losing day to day work, coupled of course with a CD-RW backup every few months. I also save my work like every 5 mins and to different incremental files at every major change. Bit obsessive maybe but I've been burned one too many times by these machines. I'll be damned if I let them lose me another day of work!

# posted by Ninja Dodo : 10:55 PM

Did you try booting from your windows cd into the recovery console?

Using the commands
chkdsk /r
fixboot
and chkdsk /mbr

This should work, if it isn't a virus or defect hard drive.

P.S. See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q297185

# posted by Anonymous : 1:32 AM

Sorry to hear this, I know how deflating it can feel.

An external USB2.0 harddisk plus Windows Backup (on a daily or weekly schedule) is simple and effective. Using imagers like Ghost/TrueImage make for faster restores from bare metal, but they're trickier to figure out.

# posted by Anonymous : 1:38 AM