What is it with me and harddisks?

[Harrison]

The only problem with using such an old HD these days is speed. They are much slower than current HDs. The HD I used to use in this system was a 5 year old IDE drive and it would boot a fresh copy of Windows XP in about 20-30 seconds. With the new Seagate SATA2 HD I'm now using it booted a similar fresh copy of XP in about 10 seconds!

[Teho]

Just wanted to say thank for providing that CD, Harrison. I did end up not needing it though, but I've downloaded it anyway in case of another rainy day so it'll still be useful.

I tried a demo of a program called Active UNDELETE. It scanned the drive and found all the files, let me browse them and everything. But on trying the recover function, was told that the demo didn't allow the recovery of any files larger than 64KB! Well, that's a lot of help!

However after "getting around" that problem, it did end up working fine. It copied every single one of the files to a different drive. So now I've reformatted it and put the files back, and everything is nearly as it was again. So I'm pretty happy with that result as of all the HD crashes I've had, this is the first time I've actually managed to recover one.

[Harrison]

That is good news indeed. I will have to remember the name of that program for future reference.

I don't know if they are the same program, but the Hiren's CD has Active uneraser and active partition recovery.

[Submeg]

So active undelete? sounds good!

[Teho]

Yeah, it definitely works. It isn't actually made for rescuing files from broken drives, but for recovering accidentally deleted ones. Like if you managed to format the wrong drive or something. Worked fine with a corrupt filesystem too, but if you've lost files due to bad sectors on a drive then this program probably can't help you.

[v85rawdeal]

May I just say that this thread is a good advert as to why you should NOT try stopping a spinning hard drive with your thumb!

[Sharingan]

Weird. The harddisk which I reported as being dead and buried a few posts back suddenly sprang back to life again. Been working fine for two days now.

Perhaps there was some other problem with it.

[Buleste]

Perhaps it's a Jesus HDD and it's Easter Thursday when the messiah of hard drives shall rise from the dead and show the way for all HDD believers to the promised land.

[Sharingan]

All hail my harddrive!

[Buleste]

Just wait till the deciples start turning up on the doorsteps. "He's not the messiah. He's a very naughty Hard Drive"