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RIP Pete’s Pics
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It’s not as bad as it could be, but here’s a scary story for Hallowe’en.
I booted up on Saturday and I got the Win XP message to say that my HDD
needed scanning. It was only my F: drive so I wasn’t too worried. To cut a
long story short I have been unable to rescue anything because a handful of
early sectors are unreadable. This seems to have demolished the NTFS master table.
If it was a FAT32 drive I’d be pretty confident of getting nearly everything back.It was a pretty new 160GB SATA drive onto which my daily backup was written and
also my RAW files straight off the camera. When I process a photo I move it to somewhere
permanent, but there were approximately 2000 photos. Most were dross and would have
ended up in the bin… but I wish I’d had a choice.I’ve already ordered 3 new drives – it’s RAID 5 for me from now on.
Bummer-
Have you given up,
or is there any hope?Don’t know anything about this sorta thing-
j
No, I haven’t given up because the stuff is there. My main concern
is that windoze – being such a clever bit of software – might have
decided to “repair” the hard drive and hence jiggered it entirely.I’ve taken it out of the machine and wrapped it in cotton wool for now. When I
get a few hours to footer, I’ll link it up to a computer (probably a LINUX one)
and see what I can do.If the stuff on there was vital, I’d have had it in more than one place, but it’s still
very disappointing.What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Pete,
same thing happened to me in 2005. I still dont know why it did it. Had everything on a secone hard drive, had all my weddings on CD’s as well but just as taken off the camera. The ones on the HD were all worked on, completed and ready for printing when I needed them. Windows did the same thing or a simular job as you have now. I lost a few studio jobs at the time also that I had no back-up done but at least they were repeatable. I did have the drive recovered by a company in London – cost ?1200 stg approx but many images were unusable and just jumbled up.Your right ! multiple hard drives is the best policy. I’m doung it since then.
Gerry
It’s interesting to hear how much it cost to recover stuff. I’ve successfully done it
for clients a few times and charged only a fraction of that amount.It’s particularly galling that I can’t do it (yet) on my own drive. I blame the NTFS file system
because it is very dependent on the master file table (the official name might be a bit different).
It’s basically a database of what’s on the drive, so losing very few sectors due to disc failure
can leave the whole drive corrupt.As I say, I won’t give up till the drive can’t spin up. If it gets to that state (where it won’t spin
or where the read head won’t move over the disc surface) then it’s a job for a factory and ?1200
would probably be cheap.RAID 5 – as you say – is probably the best solution. Offsite storage of backups is essential
if you have data that is vital.Pete
Sorry to hear that Pete,
I’m sure you will have a good stab at it.
Did you lose any of “the rock that’s shaped like a duck”?
Andy
Andy
If all I have left is 800 pixel copies of the Rock Like a Duck, then I’ll be happy.
Ish.
Pete
My sympathies Pete. I don’t know anything about this sort
of thing either, but I don’t like the sound of any of it. Hope you
can get it sorted. There might be more of value there than you
realise…Rob.
Pete, my mother in law had her hard drive die last year, as far as I remember it cost over ?1k to rescue it (this was in Paris), which included the cost of the new disk the guys copied the data onto. I think she got pretty much everything back afterwards. Recovery just seems to be expensive full stop, and is best avoided by a good backup regime (John searches feverishly for that new external drive he got a few weeks back for the purpose which is still in its box…. ahem)
I’m surprised NTFS doesn’t have multiple copies of its table scattered around the disk for this reason… actually I’m not really, it was created by Microsoft after all
John
Sorry to hear about your hard disk Pete.
The best tool I’ve heard of and keep hearing about for this type of problem is SpinRite (http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm). I’ve never actually used it myself and it’s not free, but at $89 it’s a far cheaper first option then sending the drive off for a repair.
Paul.
Thanks all. I use SpinRite and it often does good things. It got stuck on sector 3
with this disc and was still in the same place after an hour.I may just link it to a separate computer and let SpinRite have a day or two at it
just to see what happens.Yippee!
I linked the drive up to my Vista PC and got “Drive corrupt – would you like to format?” or something
like that. Pretty much what I got on XP.I linked it up to my Linux box, booted up, mounted the new drive. Bob’s yer uncle no complaints,
no probs just “Here are your photos Pete auld mucker, what do you want to do now?”. Start Samba
transfer back to my PC ready to go on my RAID 5 when it arrives.I wish I was comfortable enough with Linux to use it 24/7/365/rest of my life. Gor blimey, I’d love to
bin this damn Windoze nonsense.That’s fantastic Pete! I opened this thread to offer my condolences after quickly reading over it yesterday, but I guess that’s not necessary anymore.
Amazing that Windows doesn’t have the intelligence or decency of design to deal with this problem.
What flavour Linux Pete? Is Ubuntu any good? Glad ya got yer pics back :D
Ubuntu is great. I’ve used Red Hat, Mandrake and SUSE in the past but I’ve never stuck
with one as long as Ubuntu. One thing is that it updates itself all the time (via broadband –
the files are quite chunky) so you know you’ve got the latest kernel and stuff. The other
thing is that the support community is huge and there’s almost nothing you can’t do with
Ubuntu as a result.The main thing that keeps me on Windoze is the pricey programs that I have to use for work:
Dreamweaver, other Adobe stuff etc. If I was able to find a DW replacement I’d probably
switch over fully.
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