Are Broken Hard Drives Contagious?
Over the last few days I've groaned sympathetically with Frank as he's described his failing hard drive woes.
But I should have known.
It almost happened to me. *sigh*
As I said a couple of days ago, I got me a new hard drive with oodles of space. It's a nice big un. And my system has been needing a reinstall for a long long time. So I installed the drive, XP saw it, I formatted it, then started moving all my data over to it.
Once that was all done I spent a while downloading the latest versions of all the apps that I use, as well as associated crap like ad removal tools for ICQ, and the latest versions of all the drivers that my system needs.
Having verified several times that I was all good to go (especially that I had all the data backed up), tonight I reinstalled XP.
Maybe I should have thought longer about it when the DOS-based part of the XP installer said that the second drive was unpartitioned. But I didn't. I'm a bit under the weather at the moment, with the cough and gunky chest and blocked nose part of a flu ripping through me. I split my old hard drive into to two 20 gig partitions, formatted the first partition, and installed into there.
Once the install was done, I opened explorer and saw C and D drives - my two 20 gig partitions.
No E.
I went into the drive manager and it saw the drive there - as a big mass of empty unpartitioned space.
Oh shit.
After a hell of a lot of messing around with different recovery tools, I think I've worked out what happened. As I said, my machine has sadly been needing a reinstall for a while.
I think when I added the new drive, it for some reason decided that it was some sort of a RAID drive. RAID 0 in fact. So with the reinstall and everything working the way it should be, it sees the drive as it should be, and not as a RAID device. And now it thinks there's nothing there.
After a few very long nail biting hours of research, I can highly recommend a program called File Scavenger, made by a company called QueTek. This funky little program (while the interface is a bit dated and clunky) has recovered every single thing that I'd put on my new drive.
*wipes sweat off forehead*
It definately brown trousers time for a while there. I'm very releived at this moment :)