WhistlinDixie

I’m Back!

After a very long night and most of this morning and afternoon, I finally have my computer back up and running. There were a few things that I couldn’t recover, but I’ll be downloading them again. There are a few small quirks that I still have to iron out, but it should all be good. I am currently copying the entire contents of my hard drive to my new external hard drive I would use Norton Ghost, but that was one of the few things that I was not able to recover. Also, since I didn’t use the restore DVD, I also don’t have Norton AntiVirus anymore. I am using AVG (free) while I try to obtain an actual copy of Norton.

One Step Closer

I just spent the last couple of hours recovering files. Unfortunately, it was not as easy as just telling it to recover my user profile folder. Instead, I had to tell it to recover all of the files in each folder, and repeat this process for each folder, making sure to keep the folder names and folder structure the same. Another slight complication is that it will not recover files to folders with periods in them. This means that I have to recover them to a folder without periods in its name, and them copy them to the correct folder. This becomes time consuming quickly.

Unfortunately, some of the larger files that I had are being troublesome. When I try to recover them, it says that there is an error and I have to abort that file. The only possible solution that I know of is to recover directly off of the hard drive instead of the image that I made to save time. So, right now I am scanning for partitions, again, on my laptop hard drive It should be complete by the morning, so that I can start to recover files again. With my schedule, I won’t have time to get back to it again until tomorrow evening at the earliest. Maybe I’ll be back online around midday Saturday.

So Close, But Yet, So Far

Well, checked on the progress of the recovery this morning, and it all looked good. I told it to recover all of my user profile to my new external hard drive At first, it estimated 4 hours to finish. It quickly changed to 1 minute and then finished. I was slightly puzzled at how it had copied over 7 GB of data in about a minute and a half. I opened up the folder that it had been recovered to and I saw all of my files. When I dug deeper into My Music folder, I saw that the files were there, but when I hovered the mouse over them, I noticed that each file had a size of 0 bytes. In other words, the file had been created, but contained no data. I was slightly irritated and started running simple scans on all of the detected partitions. Then, the program crashed. This means that I will have to scan the hard drive all over again, about a 10-12 hour process in all. To help it go faster, I am now copying an image of the hard drive to another hard drive that is much faster. By doing this, the preliminary scan goes from taking 5 hours to a little less than an hour. It will take around four and a half hours to create the image (compressed to save space), but things should go much faster after that. Maybe I’ll be up and running again by the weekend. Or at least I’ll start on that road since my term paper will be finished by then.

On The Road to Somewhere

[Excitement!] I got my hands on a copy of Active@ Undelete 5.1. I ran a preliminary scan on my hard drive, and all of the files appeared! I have to run the scan again, but I should have all of my files by the end of the day. Then, I can start reinstalling everything on my laptop. Finally, it may all be coming to an end.

Progress and Miscellany

Yeah, my hard drive adapter came in the mail today. Right now I am working on Tim’s computer trying to get my data back. So far, all I have found is my Firefox profile. Not what I wanted, but it is a start.

You know when a class is bad when your teacher exclaims at the start of class that they are tired of the subject and that it has no real application in the field. I think that everyone in the class almost jumped for joy when Prof. Stanchev told us that today in Discrete Math. Finally, we know that he hates it just as much as we do. I also heard from one of the kids in the class that Dr. Geske, the former head of the Computer Engineering department, has the same thoughts. I say, why not just get rid of the course? It sounds pretty worthless to me.

Well, that sucks, don’t it?

Got my hard drive back from the computer store today. After I finished my physics lab practical, I installed the hard drive that was supposed to have the recovered data on it in Tim’s computer so I could sort through the data and find what I wanted to keep. When I looked at the contents of the drive, I thought that I would have a long and arduous process before me, going through all of the folders, which had names like FLD010. With names like that, who knows what could be in them. I thought that I would start with a search for zip files so I could find my downloads folder. I got no hits for a single file that would have been in that folder. Discouraged, I tried to search for my music, but only found about 400MB of the 1.5GB that I have. At this point, I lost all hope. I tried to search for a few more things, but ultimately came up empty handed.

Now, I get to wait for the 44-to-40 pin IDE adapter to arrive in the mail so I can hook up my laptop hard drive in Garrett’s computer and try some of the software that he has downloaded. It supposedly got shipped today, but I’m not sure if it will get here since I forgot to insert the whole "1700 W Third Ave" part of the address. At least the zip code is only for Kettering. Maybe that will get it delivered here anyway. For now, my hard drive will remain untouched, without any OS installed on it, in hopes of someday getting some software that will recover all of my files.

The Wonders of the Sneaker Net

One of the programs that Garrett downloaded requires me to put my hard drive in his computer. This would normally not be any problem. However, since it is a laptop hard drive, it requires a special adapter to mount it in a desktop. While I was searching around my unit for someone who had one, I wan pointed to Marc Santa in unit 44. While he didn’t have one, he knows a guy at a computer store that is "just around the corner". When he called him, he said to bring my laptop over this afternoon and it should be ready by Wednesday. Since we both have 1:20s and he has an exam at 3:35, we plan on running over at around 4:30. The best part of the deal is that the guy will do it for free. Now how cool is that?

Hope

Marc and I went to the computer store this afternoon. I guess that right around the corner here in Michigan is like the distance from my house to downtown Newark, or about fifteen minutes. Anyway, the guy at the shop is going to recover all the data from my hard drive and copy it to a hard drive that Marc brought with him. The pain is going to be that the program that is being used does not maintain directory structure, so I will have to sort through all of my files to find the ones that I want to keep. Not only that, but I think that the program doesn’t give them their correct filenames either, just the correct extensions, so it could take a very long time to find the files that I want to keep. At least they will survive. I might go ahead and save an image of my hard drive to Garrett’s computer anyway before I format it so I have that to reference against. That is assuming that I can get an adapter first. I should be able to pick it up Wednesday. For now, my laptop is sitting on my desk without a hard drive, a sad shell of what it once was.

The Not-So-Beautiful Letdown

Aaaarrrrgggg!!!! Garrett couldn’t find SpinRite. Right now he is trying some other possibilities. Now I won’t be able to start recovery until at least tomorrow morning.

Why doesn’t my computer love me anymore? I never did anything bad to it. I loved it, protected it from viruses, firewalled it using a real firewall (ZoneAlarm), and did just about everything else in my power to keep it safe. Unfortunately, it nipped me right where it hurt. The one thing that I never did was back up my files (except my resume, which is in three different locations). I guess that I have learned my lesson. Now maybe I can convince my parents to at least help me purchase an external hard drive for backup purposes. Maybe they will cover the whole cost (wink, wink Mom). If I get a co-op for next quarter, it won’t be such a big deal since I will have a real income. Then maybe I can upgrade to a real cell phone instead of the pre-paid "plan" that I have been using for the past couple of years.

Waiting

Garrett should get back from home sometime this evening. I sure hope that he was able to find SpinRite, because I really hate data loss. I almost had it happen to me at about this same time Summer quarter. That time, though, I was staring the death of my hard drive in the face. When you start hearing clicking and thunking from your hard drive, you know that things are not good. At least I had some warning that time so I could back up my most important data before I took my laptop to Best Buy to have it serviced. (They ended up giving me a brand new laptop to replace it.)

The real irony of this weekend it that both John and Tim got together on Saturday afternoon to have a "format party" in Tim’s room. They both copied the data they wanted to keep to Tim’s desktop, then reformatted the hard drives in their laptops and reinstalled Windows. I could be up and running at this moment too, but I never got a chance to back up any data, so if I format and reinstall Windows now, it would be good bye for the data that I hope to recover. To think, if Garrett came back with the software tonight and I started it running at 8pm, I might be able to start copying data at 6pm on Monday. (It is estimated that it takes 22 hours to run this on a 60GB drive.)

Another irony that has come to be from this situation it that I have been much more active here on my blog than I have been in its almost month of existence. The really sad part is that it takes so much more effort to add stuff to it since I have to walk to the other side of the dorm just to get to the computer lab. Then I have to go and copy the source of the web page to my computer and edit it in Notepad, which is not fun since it has no coding capability built in. Then I have to go and upload my new copy to the server and see if it works. I usually end up leaving a quotation mark or angle bracket out somewhere and spend ten minutes trying to find it. Using Dreamweaver, I never forget quotes because it enters them automatically, and it also has a tool that will run a check on the page to make sure that it is good.

Anyway, here’s to data recovery. Cheers!