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Aiieeee! Massive HD data loss
This morning I was informed by my brother that the computer required several
attempts to boot up, each time just showing a message with something similar
to "ntldr not found" or something like that. I was suspicious because I had
recently toyed around with a WinXP installation on my other HD, and had
deleted but not formatted the drive so the XP boot sector still existed. I
disconnected main HD and sure enough got the message. I then reconnected the
main and tried to boot back up and noticed the onboard UDMA/66 controller
identified my main HD as a WD)(*XC)(F*)DSF (gibberish, you get the idea). I
shut down and fiddled around with the IDE and power cables again and it did
it a few more times. I decided perhaps it was just a bad connection with
that cable or something and the HD so I switched the main and secondary
drives cables (they both have a full channel on the UDMA/66 controller to
themselves, CDROM and Zip are on 440BX IDE ports. This seemed to solve the
problem, and I decided the problem was fixed. Woe is me... woe is me. :-)
Earlier this evening I went to check my email and noticed that rather
strangely OE had lost all my newsgroups. I checked my email, and was happy
to see that I was accepted into Warcraft 3 beta, but was rather unhappy to
see that all my email was gone. Since I store my email on my secondary HD
for "safety" reasons, opened my computer and was surprised to see the HD
named "Secondary$". I got suspicious that somehow I had contracted a virus
so I had NAV2K2 run a full check of the C: drive and found nothing. I opened
D: and noticed some file names were corrupted. I ran scandisk, and it seemed
to lock up. While rebooting I noticed that the BIOS identified the HD as a
MAXTO#()$*)(#*$)# (more gibberish). It hit me that the cable must have been
bad, and went to my old spare parts bin and dug up a UDMA/66 cable and
swapped the suspect cable out. I rebooted, the HD detected properly, and I
ran scandisk from the command line before booting Win98. It said there was 3
gigs of lost data that it wanted to move into one chunk of data, and before
I realized what it intended to do I had hit YES. I reset the system and then
booted back into Win98, installed Norton Systemworks and managed to recover
a few things, but pretty much lost everything including all my email
archives from Oct 01 to now. DOH :-)
attempts to boot up, each time just showing a message with something similar
to "ntldr not found" or something like that. I was suspicious because I had
recently toyed around with a WinXP installation on my other HD, and had
deleted but not formatted the drive so the XP boot sector still existed. I
disconnected main HD and sure enough got the message. I then reconnected the
main and tried to boot back up and noticed the onboard UDMA/66 controller
identified my main HD as a WD)(*XC)(F*)DSF (gibberish, you get the idea). I
shut down and fiddled around with the IDE and power cables again and it did
it a few more times. I decided perhaps it was just a bad connection with
that cable or something and the HD so I switched the main and secondary
drives cables (they both have a full channel on the UDMA/66 controller to
themselves, CDROM and Zip are on 440BX IDE ports. This seemed to solve the
problem, and I decided the problem was fixed. Woe is me... woe is me. :-)
Earlier this evening I went to check my email and noticed that rather
strangely OE had lost all my newsgroups. I checked my email, and was happy
to see that I was accepted into Warcraft 3 beta, but was rather unhappy to
see that all my email was gone. Since I store my email on my secondary HD
for "safety" reasons, opened my computer and was surprised to see the HD
named "Secondary$". I got suspicious that somehow I had contracted a virus
so I had NAV2K2 run a full check of the C: drive and found nothing. I opened
D: and noticed some file names were corrupted. I ran scandisk, and it seemed
to lock up. While rebooting I noticed that the BIOS identified the HD as a
MAXTO#()$*)(#*$)# (more gibberish). It hit me that the cable must have been
bad, and went to my old spare parts bin and dug up a UDMA/66 cable and
swapped the suspect cable out. I rebooted, the HD detected properly, and I
ran scandisk from the command line before booting Win98. It said there was 3
gigs of lost data that it wanted to move into one chunk of data, and before
I realized what it intended to do I had hit YES. I reset the system and then
booted back into Win98, installed Norton Systemworks and managed to recover
a few things, but pretty much lost everything including all my email
archives from Oct 01 to now. DOH :-)
Thankfully I did keep backups of all the really irreplaceable stuff like my net purchased copy of NAV2k2 and other stuff like that on Zip disks, it wasn't a total loss. 
click! click! click!
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