Backup Disaster!!

[Chris Fearon]

Today was not a good day. It started out fine, but then
disaster. I am using XP Professional with a 30 gig
master hard drive and have a 30 gig secondary hard drive
(FAT 32) where I have been saving additional files. The
secondary drive used to be a primary drive under Windows
98. Everything had been working fine. I then read an
article in PC World that talked about back-ups and using
the back-up program that comes with XP. I thought maybe
I should reformat the secondary drive as NTFS to minimize
turbulence between drive formats. So I copied all the
files on D: over to a folder on C:. That was easy. Then
I used XP to format D: with the NTFS. That was easy
too. Then I cut and pasted all the files that were
originally on D: and moved to C: back to D: That was
easy as well. All the files were recognized on D: (3
gigs of data on the 30 gig drive). Then I decided to do
a full back-up of C: to D: I had only 10 gigs of data
on C: to back up, so there was plenty of room on D:. I
started the process and then disaster struck. A yellow
warning triangle showed up in the icon try saying
something to the effect that a file was corrupted and
that data was lost. I figured it was the back-up file,
so no big deal. Then the back-up menu locked up and I
had to push the reset button as Ctrl-Alt-Del did
nothing. On boot up, the computer BIOS/CMOS no longer
recognized a secondary drive. That's bad!! Of course
once XP loaded, no D: drive was seen there either.
That's bad too!! I tried to use Maxtor Powermax 4.06
utility in the A: drive (even changed the boot sequence
in the BIOS set-up to first seek A: then HD-0) and the
boot process just blew by the Powermax diagnostic without
loading. So now am big time stuck and out of ideas. Can
anyone help with this one.

[Malke]

Bad Day 2 wrote:

> My pc lost its cd roms, both my liteon burner and brand new DVD drive.
> Tried to fix it and its been rapidly careening downhill since......
> winblows claims the drivers are corrupted. Just try and change them.
> Nope wont happen. Put the win cd in set tp boot from CD np. Boots asks
> if I want to do auto repair, YAY go for it. Dam retard comp.... makes
> some weak arsed attemot and restarts and now I'm locked in a death
> loop..... It is missing something off the disk but of course it turns
> it off...... I went as far as using a network boot disk and accesed
> the comp from on on my lan, no dice. WFP must be pulling some crap and
> will not accept the file from my win 2003 machine. POS wasted all day
> and most of the night..... 4am now and looks like a reinstall is all
> thats going to fix it GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR This Blows.
> Im dealing with a 120gig disk almost full, no spare to use as a
> starter either....... repair console wont do the trick either....
> its times like these I really have some serious aggression towards
> MS.... almost ****ed enough now to go chase those irratating
> penguins..... I should attach a picture of a dead elephant with a
> little bird perched on it laughing its ass off......

OK, the first thing to do is to take a deep cleansing breath. Because we
don't know exactly what you did to "fix" the first problem or any of
your system specs or if you have virus protection, etc. it is
impossible to backtrace the error. Now, let's move forward. Blaming any
one else for your failure to backup isn't useful, either. *Any*
computer system can fail, especially if the user makes an error. *All*
data needs to be backed up. I'm not going to go into the Linux vs.
Windows issues, but I will say that you won't have an easier time under
Linux.

Now - Physically slave the drive in another XP machine and copy off your
data. If doing this crashes the XP box, you can also slave it in a
Win98 box, boot with a distro like Knoppix, and copy off the data. Now
put the drive back in the original box. Run a drive diagnostic to be
sure it's good. Check all cabling. If you know the drive is good, boot
with the XP cd, format the drive, clean install Windows, reinstall
drivers, programs, etc. and restore your data from the backup you made
on the other machine. On the new installation, be careful not to
install older software - such as older cd-rw burning software - that
will not be compatible with XP.

HTH,

Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"