While I was away in Melbourne working at Microsoft (read my earlier posts), I purchased a 3.5″ removable hard disk enclosure, in the hope that eventually I would buy a hard disk for it and use it. About a month later, I noticed Scorptec had a sale on their Seagate 160GB drives, for the relatively-low price of A$85. I couldn’t resist, I bought one, slapped it into this enclosure, formatted with a Windows port of mkdosfs (because W2K/XP won’t let you format large drives as FAT32) and off I went. I had quite a nice disk full of stuff. I mainly used it for downloads, running apps, transferring stuff, and storing Virtual PC images. Fun fun fun.

However yesterday, something went terribly wrong. I plugged it into my Windows 2000 Server box and suddenly, it thought it wasn’t formatted. Argh! My 40gb of stuff! Including a backup of docs from a computer I just formatted, which I hadn’t copied back. Not good at all.

So what’s the first reaction? Rip the hdd out of the case, and chuck it in to my W2K box. I had suspected that the enclosure was dodgy. After having it running for about 6 hours, if you touched the USB connector on something metallic, an alarmingly-large spark would appear.

Instantly I grabbed an emergency boot disk and ran some things on it. Both the gParted LiveCD and Knoppix wouldn’t pick up any partitions on the drive. TestDisk managed to repair part of the FAT so it could at least be recognised by partitioning software, and be mounted in DOS, but it still couldn’t find any files on the disk.

What now? After asking around some of my computer enthusiast friends, they directed me to a program called GetDataBack for FAT. Skeptical, I ran it, and to my surprise it’s actually picking up dead data from the disk! Wh00t! So now I’ve just gotta get all my stuff back, then format, check the disk to make sure there isn’t anything wrong with it, and I should be good to go again. However, I think I’ll have to toss that enclosure, it’s too dangerous

In other news, I just formatted the laptop with Windows Vista Pre-RC1 build 5536, which Microsoft made publically available to people who had a Beta 2 key. (The link is dead now, but there’s still those sites that are .. erh … torrential ) It runs a lot better than Beta 2. Seriously, if you’re running Beta 2, get 5536. Your machine will feel faster, there will be more sidebar gadgets, and a few other nice differences. User Account Protection doesn’t piss you off everytime you move your mouse anymore Plus, it activates fine with a Beta 2 key, as long as you haven’t overstepped your 10-machine limit.

‘Tis all for now,

–Ben

BTW: For both people who noticed, a post disappeared from here. It’s an admittedly-stupid rant about Adobe stuff that I wrote late one night while in a bad mood. Bahh.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Computing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.