Saturday, December 05, 2009

More to come…but for now…drive recovery first

As usual I’ve been sidetracked yet again by hard-drive discombubulations.

Needless to say, the pile of linkage in my “to blog” closet is threatening to blow out my JSON file. I’m making frequent backups of that as well.

I went to boot the Shuttle-SFF XP system (my primary desktop system but rarely booted due to the comforts of laptop use in the living room with the girls) and after about two minutes, it locked up with the hard-drive light solid-on.  Diagnostics and troubleshooting led me to various theories, but in the end, wisdom and time led me to the conclusion it would be best to data-recover, wipe, and rebuild.

So this morning I kicked off the recovery response.  I pulled the drive, placed in on my USB drive interface and set to work trying to recover files from it to my Western Digital portable USB drive, through the Win7 system.  Only this didn’t work quite as planned.

SMART information and other drive checks reported the drive was physically OK. CHKDSK found some errors but said they fixed them.  However I had four volumes on it, all NTFS, but now one is showing RAW.  Sometimes attaching the physical drive would lock up my Windows 7 system or cause my specialized file-copy power utilities to lock up or not even launch.

Eventually I was able to recover “most” of the important data and files with much patience.

I’m leaning to some bad file/disk structure corruption, but I’m not certain.

I’m next about to blow out the drive in diskpart and repartition it with two NTFS volumes, then install Win 7 RC x32 on it. Lets see how that works….

I should be back on the air for some normal blogging tomorrow.

Hang tight.  And yes.  Recent reports of snow on the Gulf Coast of Texas are accurate.  However despite the local hype, it nothing to compare with regular snowfalls up north.

Claus V.

No comments: