I'm busy trying to recover from catastrophic computer failure in my main
machine. A sudden spontaneous reboot led to C: drive disk errors that
caused more machine crashes every time XP booted. Finally a chkdsk
cleared that up, but left my XP install unstable and broken. So I moved
off my info and wiped that partition, planning to reinstall Windows.
Problem was that XP install then would not recognize the partitions on
that drive. Any of them, which was a problem, since the larger
partition was for storage. I copied everything I felt was important to
keep (about 100GB) and cleared the whole damn drive to repartition it.
XP install
still wouldn't recognize the new partition. Neither
would the old copy of Partition Magic I have on a boot disk. Grr!
While the drive was in my secondary computer, everyone worked fine.
That's how I got the data off and repartitioned it. But once back in my
main machine, there were problems. Finally I had XP install set up the
partitions and go along with the install. And this is when it decided
it had to do a chkdsk on my other hard disk (my applications partition)
and completely hosed it. Error after error after error. Dozens of
folders are now missing. Not only that, but the new C: partition also
developed errors that required a chkdsk run, right after a complete
disk reformat, repartition, and XP installation. So my machine is
in shambles. I may have lost personal irreplaceable data from my
applications drive that is unrecoverable. I think the problem may be a
bad IDE controller or cables, since errors were spontaneously occurring
on two separate physical drives. Tomorrow I'll pick up a new card and
cables and go about the fucking frustrating and ponderous task of trying
to recover what I can from my hosed applications drive.
