HD failure... FIXED! Wo0t!

[rcfreas]

So I was putting some finishing touches on an image late last night. The system started a virus scan (Panda AV) so I left the computer on and went to bed. Woke up to find that the computer "froze". Rebooted the system. Went to view the image in FastStone image viewer. System locked up. Rebooted again. System took a while to come back up minus my entier IMAGES drive. All my digital shots, Paintball action shots, designs and scans, my artwork, collected images, shots from Yosemite, gone. I'm sure the data is still there, but the HD isn't being recognized. Hopefully when I get home from work it'll be just a bad dream and the HD will come back up...
I'm so thoughly bummed.

Ron

[Edited on 12/31/2009 by rcfreas]

[bdbolin]

That sounds pretty bad... hopefully you can get it to work! You do have a backup right.....???

[dcloud]

Ron, I am so sorry to hear this. I had something similar happen to me last summer. It wasn't my HD, but I lost a lot of my artwork that was on DVDs and CDs. It made me start looking seriously for an alternate storage method - something outside the PC, that is.

I ended up buying a very nice 500GB external HD made by acomdata. Now all my work gets stored/saved regularly on this external HD so I don't have to save on DVDs or CDs anymore. Also, if anything ever happens to the hard drives in my PC then everything will still be safe (and saved) on the external HD.

You might want to check into getting yourself one. Even at $100 (which is what I spent on mine) this is small potatoes compared to loosing your files.

[Edited on 12/31/2009 by dcloud]

[dave_100_uk2002]

Sorry to hear this Ron, Hopefully you can sort something out.

Like Doug, I too have invested in an external HD just for the fear of losing all my stuff. I would definately recommend doing this in the future.

Fingers crossed for you.
All the best.

[bdbolin]

I recommend looking at drobo drives...

[rcfreas]

chkdsk /F to the rescue!

Sweating bullets there for a while. My last backup was over 2 years ago... Will be doing a backup tonight.

The Maxtor 200gig drive is about 4 years old, installed it about a year after getting the HP as a seperate internal HD for photo editing, art and such. I bought a WD 250gig USB external for "safe" storage. Couldn't stand seeing all that space go empty and have been using it for a massive music storage unit. ...and it's almost full. I rip my lps and put them to cd. Yeah, sometimes it's cheaper to buy the releases off the shelf, but I get to pick and choose what tracks and order they are in.

What gets me is, the Mac G3 (the biege box kind) at work has the original 4gig harddrive in it from 1994. It has had only one problem in all those years... go figure.

Ron

[dave_100_uk2002]

Brilliant news! Wohooo!

[mixedupmacandpc]

Hard drives are one of the last vestiges of hard core old school mechanical engineering left in my soho, besides my watch that sits idle in the desk drawer. I'll miss them when everything goes solid state. I once worked at a harddrive factory in Colorado, when Americans still made things... but even then, we mostly made machines that made things. It's ironic that one of the most disposable commodities on the planet now holds what has become the most precious to us all, our data. Interesting times these transitions...

[dcloud]

chkdsk /F is kind of scary, since running it can cause files to disappear. It does what it needs to do to fix the logical file system. Any attempt to "fix" things could result in data loss. It's risky.

At least now with Windows XP it is no longer necessary to run Chkdsk F from the DOS command line. You can still do it this way if you'd like (open the DOS command line and type "chkdsk /f"), but Chkdsk is now integrated into Windows itself.

[Edited on 1/2/2010 by dcloud]

[mixedupmacandpc]

Originally posted by dcloud
chkdsk /F is kind of scary, since running it can cause files to disappear. It does what it needs to do to fix the logical file system. Any attempt to "fix" things could result in data loss. It's risky.

At least now with Windows XP it is no longer necessary to run Chkdsk F from the DOS command line. You can still do it this way if you'd like (open the DOS command line and type "chkdsk /f"), but Chkdsk is now integrated into Windows itself.

[Edited on 1/2/2010 by dcloud]

yes, and on a mac, DiskWarrior is ur friend...these points won't change, even if the hardware does