This Morning, as usual, i fire up my Workstation, my favorite Machine, the Dual-Athlon Monster, and guess what?
All of a sudden, it started to reboot, just out of the blue, kept on re-starting, over and over again...

Pop in the WinXP-CD, you might think.
Yes, that is what i did.
Recovery-Console, you might say.
Did that one, too.

Nothing worked!
My Documents, my Websites, my Pictures, oh my!!!
42 Gigs of Stuff gone? (I had 2 120 gig hard drives on it.)

Relax, I tell myself... I have done this a million times before.
"Repair Windows" flashes into my tired Brain (after all, it is 7:00 AM in the Morning.
Booted into the CD, repair, recover, Emergency Repair, nothing worked.
“Drive C is unrecognized or damaged", it says. (116000 MB free) ???
I restrain myself from walking back into the House ( my lab is in the Garage) and beat up my Wife or at least the Cats...no, can't do that.
Ah, I think, the Winternals CD in my Car ( never leave Home without it) will help me...
Sure enough, boot into the Winternals recovery CD, and ...nothing.
Corrupted Partition or damaged Drive, it tells me.

So i pull the Drives out, install a fresh 120 gig Drive, load Windows.
Load Drivers.
Damn ATI Card.
Damn G-Force Card.
Damn Raid Controller.
Damn Audigy Card.
Load all Updates, close to 100 Megs. ( without Service pack 1, I got that on my Server)
Load Office.
Load FrontPage.
load ...where’s my Battlefield 1942 CD???

Rewind 4 Days

Perhaps it has something to do with it, i just installed my brand new Board in this Machine, now using a Gigabyte instead a Tyan, sold that with the CPU's. The Thing ran like a Charm, Games looked awesome, but something must have happened.

I took the 2 Drives, obviously damaged,( can't believe it)and connected them to one of my Motherboards, slaved them to an existing System, Windows did a repair ( will post the Screenshot later)and woila', everything is there.

Now I just have to move all the Stuff from the Drives to the freshly installed Machine.
Meanwhile, Windows and Office is nagging me about the stupid activation.
I have some Backups from last week, heck I got a Server with almost a Terabyte Space on it, even got some Ghost-Images from way back in April 2003, but decided to go all fresh install.
Thank god, I backed everything up on my Server as well as on a removable Hard drive.
( USB 2.0, 250 gig)

What are we learning from that?

BACKUP EVERYTHING NOW!!! because it can happen to you.

Sorry about the long Story, but I just had to vent.
It will still take me a couple of Days to get the Machine back the Way I had it before.
I would not know, what I’d do without Backup.

Good Weekend to ya’ all!

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....after i connected the "damaged Drives" to a Testbench Motherboard:
Any ideas?

Attachment: dscn5363.jpg
This has been downloaded 109 time(s).

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Well that sucks really bad.

one drive yes, two drives no. In no particular order, motherboard disk controller, bad cable, directory cache, one of your CPU's is not mod'ed as well as you had hoped. equally

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Backing up is so so so important. I think almost all of us can come up with a PC horror story that wouldn't have been so bad had we backed up.

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Glad you backed up well. I keep a 120Gb hard drive solely for backups and every so often make a ghost on CDR just to be certain ... lol

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quote:

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Originally posted by Boulware5
Backing up is so so so important. I think almost all of us can come up with a PC horror story that wouldn't have been so bad had we backed up.

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Turns out both Drives are just fine.( only 2 months old.)Windows or Norton can't find any problems with them... also did a complete Virus-scan...nothing.
I still don't know, what exactly went wrong.

quote:

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In no particular order, motherboard disk controller, bad cable, directory cache, one of your CPU's is not mod'ed as well as you had hoped

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The dual MP's ( Former XP's) were checked for about 6 hours at maximum load, performed just fine.

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Hum, That story sounds similar to mine, luckly it was just an 80. Computer did the whole rebooting over and over. When I found out what was wrong with it my harddrive had gone from ntfs to raw. I was still able to recover about 90% of my stuff so it didn't really bother me, and just reinstalled. Ahh No biggy, I think mine was caused by a power outage (crappy breaker is always blowing). I actuall was pretty sure my 80 had shit out on me (it does have bad secots and my heads crash more often then not). But it didn't, I don't think it will ever give me an excuse to replace it. Ah well, 'tis life, always tormented by things we can't control.

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Sorry to hear. I lost 80 gigs at work in June due to a hdd failure. Same BoS.

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Can anyone refer me to a good book or a website or anything to learn hard drive repair and data recovery, i have some cash to invest and in my country and some near by countries theres no service for that.

Help im desperate to do these data recovery company.


thanks guys.


Luisjo

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