ARRRGHHH - A Homer Simpson moment

So the story goes like this.

My Cf-51 started playing up - kept getting the blue screen of death. So I reinstalled windows XP and it made it worse. Eventually wouldn't start up at all, checked the error code on the blue screen and it was a boot device issue. So i decided to go back to my old hard drive (the original from the machine) and reload windows on that. So I went through the reinstall process - formatted the drive (A Hitachi Travelstar) and it still had a problem. So i replaced the Hard drive caddy and reinstalled - bingo it worked. So I then went to get all my backed up drives off my HITACHI 1TB external hard drive and nothing was there except a new windows installation. Seems what happened was that when I put in the old hard drive in the old caddy, it didn't see it and instead saw my external hard drive and I formatted and installed windows on that.

Note to self - don't rebuild windows when the laptop is in the docking station. I am now going through the process of recovering all my old backup files but boy does it take some time for a drive that big. So probably in about a week's time I will be back where I was except for only having a 80GB drive in the 51 rather than a 160gb drive. Also make sure next time that when I format a drive, check the size shown on the screen before committing to format it.

Oh well a bit wizer and a bit less hair and back to using myold CF-28 as an everyday machine until the drive recovery is finished.

 

I feel your pain, mate. I've done this more times that i care to admit. Nowadays i label all my external drives/storage drives/USB drives as "NOFORMAT".

Then again, after killing six drives (8tb overall storage) simultaneously. I've avoided external drives like they were cursed.

Never, EVER, use cable ties to tie the wires of external drives together. Cause if one goes, they all go along for the ride.

 

Good steer on the NOFORMAT trick, will do that. Also agree on not using the cable ties, I have 3 external hard drives and to keep things neat and tidy on the desk they are all run down cable routes and tied together, means I can't just easily pull one out as I don't have them labeled on my USB hub (will label them up now but I am certainly never going through a reeinstall whilst connected to the docking station again.

Gotta say I'm impressed at killing 6 drives simultaneously - that must qualify for some kind of award

 

Yeah, I was like, "So this red one goes from the usb hub to the computer"

*yank*

pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

F*ck...

 

6 drives at once ....that is quite an achievement.
I save all my real important docs to an usb stick immediately. I also have a physical drive for my windoze installation and a different physical drive for all of my files. I've done this to my desktop and my cf51. Eventually I will get around to doing it to my cf29. Both of my Toughbooks have media bay hdd caddies now.
I've been bit by virus's and moments of stupidity too many times. Now I can reformat and reinstall windoze without losing a terabyte of information.

 

OK I now have another 1TB drive to restore all the files ontoand I'm now going to get in the habit of backing up all my files to both by actually writing all files to the first and then using a backup program to backup from the first to the second. I'll just keep a few working documents on the laptop and sync those back to the hard drive. I think anyway that's the way I'll do it. i'm also going to do the trick that Ares came up with of changing the drive label to "NOFORMAT".

The other advantage is I can just make do with the 80GB drive in the 51 rather than getting a new larger one.

I'm pleased with the resotre program though, it';s taken 3 days so far but it has so far found 95,000 files so it's not far shy of the total amount of files I had on that drive (around 120K I think at last look). It's also only 86% of the way through so I am thnking I may not lose anything - here's hoping.