“The Abyss” meaning (in this sense) the unexpected, un-prepared for, potentially crushing loss of my primary hard drive with 50GB of music stored on it.
A couple of weeks to go, our main computer got a little confused (as Windows does sometimes), and I had to do a hard shutdown of the computer.
When it booted back up, I noticed that the E: drive where all of our music was stored was only showing 450MB of files, but reporting that it was 50GB used. Not good.
Virus check - negative.
Spyware - same.
Scandisk - can’t complete (reports “open files). Hmm.
I googled for some file restore/undelete utilities, and tried them out, but they couldn’t read the disk. Hmmmmm…
I mucked around a bit more, then asked a friend who suggested Spinrite 6. Initial research was promising, so I proceeded to use Sprinrite to make a boot diskette, and start drive analysis/recovery.
SR started it’s thing, and I went to bed. The next morning, SR was 0% complete, reporting an ETC of over 1000 hours!!! I decided to stick it out a bit more, just in case it was having troubles at the beginning of the drive (I was thinking FAT problems or something similiar).
Two days later, with a revised estimate of 1300 hours, I checked with GRC. The nice guys there agreed that this estimate was a bit off, so I stopped the process and started again a little farther in on the drive. It made better progress (from 1% to 29%), but then stalled out again (and reported tons of Unrecoverable sectors). GRC suggested either commercial data recovery firms, or a “program that had worked for some other clients” - Restorer2000.
Using this tool, I was able to make an “image” file from the E: drive, and ended up with a 97GB image file on my C-drive. At least I got 97GB of data, not sure what was in there.
Happily, Restorer2000 was able to restore most all of my files from the image file, to my brand new 200GB Seagate drive (connected via USB2 in a Vantec NexStar 2 enclosure). Now I can test and rebuild the main music drive, and set myself up for mirroring, which I should have done a looooong time ago…
At least it was recoverable, and even if not, at least it was just music (relatively easy to replace). Personal documents, digital picture files, that stuff doesn’t come back once it’s lost. I know we’ve all heard it before, but if you’re not backing your stuff up (to at least one other place, if not more), you gotta start. Hard drives are cheap - $65 for 200GB after rebate, and I’m sure you can find other deals (here and here to start). You can use SyncBack to set up sunc or backup jobs, and forget about it. Better yet, if you put that extra drive in an external enclosure (costs less than $50), you can take it all with you, very easily.
I have learned my lesson. You can learn from me.
Update: Using FolderSizes, I see that there are some files that are 0 bytes in size, so those are the ones that are lost. Not too many - probably less than 50-60 overall. Not bad, considering that I was thinking of 100% loss; this is more like
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