Sometime Friday night, not sure when exactly, my largest hard drive decided to forget that it had a file system on it.
I can’t say that this has ever happened to me.
It was fine for a VERY long time, and in fact earlier that evening I was downloading stuff to that drive.
But alas, somewhere down the road, it decided that it was no longer going to be NTFS, and decided to be RAW instead.

This shocked me somewhat.
I felt that I was being good to the drive, using it lots, letting it sleep in on weekends or when I was playing City of Heroes.
But apparently, that wasn’t enough.

Of course, I had no backups of what was on that drive.
I did not panic however. The way I figured it, it was only the first couple of bits that were off, and everything else should be fine.
So, for the next couple of days, I evaluated some Recovery software. One was good, one was not, but they both cost money, and I would rather go the cheaper route(as to why, I’ll never know, but more about this later).

So I tried rebooting. Maybe it was just too warm. No.
I shut it off for the night.
Nope.
Jim and I tried Linux, to see if we could mount the drive as NTFS(read only) and copy the files.
Nopers.

I was stuck.
I mean, for the most part, the stuff on that drive was all stuff I could get from anywhere. Really, sure, the MP3s would be a pain to replace, but not impossible.
The Anime, I could download that again.
But the pictures that I had on that drive.
Those I wanted.
Those I would pay money to recover.

So I did. Not too much, $50US, and I still think it was worth it.

So the long, boring process of restoring started.
I hate backups, I always have. They just aren’t useful.

So I bought another drive and just restored everything to that.

I suck.

But I didn’t put it on Visa ^_^

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Filed under: Blog - @ June 20, 2004 11:26 pm