Amiga.org
Operating System Specific Discussions => Other Operating Systems => Topic started by: Matt_H on December 24, 2009, 08:41:19 PM
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I need to stop second-guessing myself.
Had an old FAT32 drive that I'd been meaning to back up for years. Finally got around to popping it into my external enclosure today, and decided not to hook it up to my Deneb. Instead, I hooked it up to an XP machine which promptly decided to corrupt the single most important directory on the drive. Brilliant.
So remember kids, if your Amiga can do something, it can do it better than Windows.
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DOH! Sorry to hear about your bad fortune, but I agree 100% about the Windoze bit ;)
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I need to stop second-guessing myself.
Had an old FAT32 drive that I'd been meaning to back up for years. Finally got around to popping it into my external enclosure today, and decided not to hook it up to my Deneb. Instead, I hooked it up to an XP machine which promptly decided to corrupt the single most important directory on the drive. Brilliant.
So remember kids, if your Amiga can do something, it can do it better than Windows.
If you had hooked it up to your Amiga and it screwed up, would you have blamed it on FAT32 or the Amiga? Seriously, I am sorry for your loss; I hate it when I lose data like that, and it's happened more than a few times in several file systems -- FFS, SFS, UFS, FAT12/16/32, NTFS, CBM DOS...
Anyway, to be even more serious, make sure your drive isn't going bad. Yeah, it's been sitting around, but not being used doesn't mean a drive can't go or be bad. I've seen plenty of them in my time -- about a dozen in the past two weeks alone. You lost data already, but you could use more if you continue to use a bad drive.
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Use a file recovery program you should get most of your files back.
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Hope you can recover it somehow Matt. I know the feeling, though I have been lucky lately and have become much better about backing up my important data regularly. Having an external USB 1TB hdd that I can move from one computer to another to make backups of each system has made it so much easier for me to keep up with a more-or-less regular schedule.
Now if some day I plug it into my Vista Ultimate computer and it screws up all of the partitions on the 1TB drive and I lose all of my backup data, I would be very upset too. (keeping fingers crossed)
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You're actually quite lucky with a dumb file system like fat32, sound like you just dinged the directory list, any good file recovery program, run in MS Windows of course, should be able to recover those files.
@AmigaDave
What's the point of partition a small drive like 1TB? Wouldn't it be happier as just one large drive?
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You're actually quite lucky with a dumb file system like fat32, sound like you just dinged the directory list, any good file recovery program, run in MS Windows of course, should be able to recover those files.
@AmigaDave
What's the point of partition a small drive like 1TB? Wouldn't it be happier as just one large drive?
I know that 1TB drives are not the largest you can get in most retail electronic stores anymore with external 2TB drives becoming more common, but a year ago when I bought it, 1TB was considered a fairly large external USB drive. Having more than one partition makes it easier for me to keep track of the 3 computers that I backup onto it.
Or was your entire line of questioning about my 1TB drive being sarcastic?
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No, I just find that partitioning drives leads to instability. It's never more frustrating to have a large video file and not have room because of bad partitioning. But I suppose if you are booting multiple OSs...
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No, I just find that partitioning drives leads to instability. It's never more frustrating to have a large video file and not have room because of bad partitioning. But I suppose if you are booting multiple OSs...
This is an external 1TB hard drive with a USB interface that I take from computer to computer and only use it as a storage device for backup archives. I don't boot anything from this external hard drive. It's sole purpose is to keep my backup archives safe in case one of my computers goes down.
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Sorry to hear of your loss, I just hope you not blaming xp entirely.....if its a Fujistu, IBM, Seagate or WD. Its like the the drive if formatted a few years ago, probably degraded...the older Maxtors are the only ones we found that seem to survive storage for any length of time. Not forgetting the cheap caps and dodgy drive controllers these types of drive had. We at one count nearly 2000 dead drives hanging around to be destroyed that all failed well inside their MTBF and many just stock drives were DOA even before we put them inside a pc. Early to Mid Naughty's PATA and early SATA drives have not been the best advert for the above companies and their management of OEM drive failures nor picking up the mess afterwards.
Unfortunately keeping data on Magnetic storage devices hasn't proved the best method in recent years. To TBH unless its retained in RAID or RAID + Tape the chances are data more that 10 years old is at risk. Even wonder storage like DAT,DLT,LTO1-4,MO, DVD, CD and other tape haven't faired well. The only thing that seems to work is "Storage Refresh" and Migrate every 18-24 months or so. Our earliest still accessible data is now 25 years old due to its storage migrations and we are obliged to retain it for 75 years. Edit:yes we still have Databases from the days of Ashton Tate knocking about and even the record data from VMS/PDP11, VMS Mumps is still alive and well, Mckesson PAS is still the main stay of patient records.
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Heh, thanks for the sympathy, all. It's true, the drive is old and there is a bit of physical damage - the drive crashed and powered down as I was reading the then-working-perfectly directory in question. But I'm blaming Windows more than FAT32 because Windows writes garbage to the drive even when reading files or browsing in Explorer (thumbs.db, etc). The primary reason Windows is on the naughty list this Christmas is that nature of the corruption has left me with an unreadable file in place of the directory called "USBvxyzx." - suggesting something idiotic with the USB driver for massstorage.
No luck with file recovery programs so far. Any recommendations for programs to try?
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Not sure of any programs, however if the drive is IDE (Might have already mentioned this, and I just skimmed it), it might work in the USB-IDE thing you have, and a different controller might help. If its a 40-pin drive, most USB interfaces will need a 44-pin adapter, though. Also, if there's a way to write-protect the drive while salvaging data it might help with further corruption. If you have an Amiga USB device, fat95 seems to try active fixing partitions whenever they're plugged in that way. (My Sandisk Cruzer takes a minute or 2 to mount because Fat96 doesn't like how either windows or SanDisk formats VFAT stuff) This could cause more problems, though. The following won't help, but might make you feel better:
(http://www.animated-gifs.eu/computing-computers-crash/0017.gif)(http://www.animated-gifs.eu/computing-computers-crash/0023.gif)(http://www.animated-gifs.eu/computing-computers-crash/0028.gif)
(http://www.animated-gifs.eu/computing-computers-crash/0033.gif)(http://www.animated-gifs.eu/computing-computers-crash/0035.gif)
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@ kvasir
I actually get the most cathartic benefit from good ol' Winsongs 95 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjDSY8LczFw) :)
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@ kvasir
I actually get the most cathartic benefit from good ol' Winsongs 95 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjDSY8LczFw) :)
Was that an A1000 with a Win95 display I saw on that flick?