Well I have got to wonder. These things just keep dying on me for whatever reason. Woke up this Tuesday, and after making coffee went to check the news on the PC as per usual. And it was dead. On, but not responding. Probably crashed during the night then I thought, and hit the reset button. Five seconds later I'm staring at the words "Disk read error" in disbelief. Not
again!
"Fortunately" this is a pure system drive, there's not much else on it. So rom-collections, music etc is all on the two other harddisks I got. Still there's some info on the system-drive I'd rather not lose, so cue a couple of evenings of messing about with various recovery methods, without any luck. When finally deciding to do a format and reinstall Windows anyway, it turned out I couldn't even do that. When trying to format it, the progress bar just stayed at 0%. The disk was obviously completely dead. So went out and bought a new harddisk, a 320GB Western Digital. Not needing much space on it since I intend to continue using it the system, it was the smallest I could find. And I had to look in four different places to find someone who had any at all. Seems shops don't stock internal drives anymore for some reason.
Well I got that in and partitioned, and got Windows installed on it. And once up and running I make another interesting discovery; one of the other two drives isn't showing in the file manager. Looking in the device manager shows that it is there, but it has
also crashed! What the hell!? Two drives at once?
I haven't begun trying to recover that one yet, so don't know how bad it is with that one. It isn't even that old, it's the one I bought new
last time a HD died on me. Most of the content on it isn't very important fortunately. It holds all of my music, 99% of which exist on an external drive as well. Only the original Amiga music files aren't on there. It also holds my downloaded movies and TV-shows, but fortunately I backed up most of that recently when I was running out of space on the disk. So there wasn't a lot in that folder, only a couple of shows I hadn't watched yet.
The most important bit is that it also holds the torrent folder. Most of the downloaded material isn't important, but there's the stuff I was seeding myself. The worst being one I uploaded to Bitgamer only last week. Only one guy was able to grab the whole thing, and he isn't seeding it back. There are other people with partial downloads who'll never get all of it unless I can recover the files from that HD. But according to previous experiences with crashed HDs, I don't have much hope for it. Does anyone know of any decent HD recovery software? Does that boot CD in the sticky have any for example?
Why
do these HDs keep dying on me? It's not like it's the system, it's been happening with all three PCs I've owned. This is the fourth time that it's happened to me, and two drives at once this time? Someone down there has it in for me, I swear!
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What Steve is referring to with the names is my maybe somewhat peculiar HD naming convention. The three drives are called Alzheimer, Parkinson and Downs. Alzheimer was the system drive, and Parkinson is the other one that's crashed.
It reflects what I thought of PCs back when I finally made the switch from Amigas. First PC I got had only one drive as they normally do, and I almost immediately named it Alzheimer. I've kept naming them similarily over the years allthough my feelings towards PCs has warmed somewhat.
I've actually been wanting to reformat the system drive a while anyway, as I wanted to partition it in two and install Linux on the other. I was going to name
that partition Einstein.
Originally Posted by Sharingan:
If this has been happening to you in three different PCs, each with different PSUs, I would guess it may be a problem with voltage spikes. Do you have a surge protector?
No I don't. It shouldn't strictly be necessary here, our power grids hold a fairly high standard. High spikes like that shouldn't be occuring. It may be worth looking into still, so thanks for the suggestion.
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