[X] My Assistant

[tedstryk]

Well, it looks like I am out of business, at least for the time being. My computer suffered a catastrophic crash. I am a bit better prepared than when this happened a few years ago - more backups - but not everything is backed up (recent stuff). And I have no machine to work on. We had a big power outage today. When I rebooted, the hard drive acted funny, and then, at about 7:00 tonight, died. The recovery software I have is showing it as empty and partitioned (which is odd - my hard drive is not partitioned. I am working on some last ditch efforts before taking it to data recovery experts, but, assuming these efforts fail, I am without a functional computer. What I really hate is that my archive of family, friends, and landscape photography is mostly totally lost if I can't recover the data from the drive, as well as e-mails dating back to 1993. Ironically, I had ordered a 260 Gigabyte external drive to forever end my backup problems, and it shipped two days ago...It should be here any day now, and would have prevented loss of personal data in this. Ughhhh....

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

I already suffered this problem twice, so I understand your feeling.

So I insist upon everybody to make backups of everything they want to keep, even if it is a really tedious task (especially for emails, which have to be saved one per one, as Outlook Express seems unable to recover emails from a backup of its own files, even in the very improbable case we are able to locate these files). I do a backup every month, and it now requires two CDs. I also have an old hard drive that I use as a backup more frequently, so that even if my main drive is dead, I still have this one.

When my mother bought a computer (she knows nothing about it) I strongly recommended her to have windows and softs on the C: partition, and her files on the D: partition (even if most softs alway try to save data files each in the most improbable place such as in c:\program files). She also installed a CD burner, but seldom used it. When she had a software crash, she had no way but reinstalling windows in the C: partition, but she recovered all her data intact from the D: partition.

Once I had a window crash (thanks to a virus) and I had to reinstall windows, but I was able to boot on my windows installation disk and make a complete back up before reinstalling windows. But this is not possible on several laptop PCs which have "special" installation disks!!! The only problem I had was when reinstalling programs, as I did not saved the downloaded file! I had to beg for a CD of this program. So when you buy an (expensive) soft, alway: 1) have a CD backup 2)write the installation key on this CD!!

In your case tedstryk it seems that there was a survoltage or other power problem which broke your drive. It is very difficult to protect from this, and also from lightning. The only protection against lightning is to completelly disconnect the computer from both power line and phone line as soon as we hear thunder. There are some power protections which can be efficient, but only at a certain point: when lightning is close enough to make the power plugs spark, I think nothing can do.

But also it happens that Windows cannot bear a power cut. Once I lost a file like that, and had to run scandisk to purge any false entry. But bad softs too can play tricks, such as softs written in C:. This language can use indexes on the whole drive, so in case of any bad functionning it can write anywhere (anywhere will be in most case on the famous FAT, which index is near zero) and I had my first big crash like that. There is no protection against this, except... making backups.

To avoid any window problem, I tried Linux... but there are OTHERS problems there and I quickly prefered to come back to Windows!

[tedstryk]

I already suffered this problem twice, so I understand your feeling.

So I insist upon everybody to make backups of everything they want to keep, even if it is a really tedious task (especially for emails, which have to be saved one per one, as Outlook Express seems unable to recover emails from a backup of its own files, even in the very improbable case we are able to locate these files). I do a backup every month, and it now requires two CDs. I also have an old hard drive that I use as a backup more frequently, so that even if my main drive is dead, I still have this one.

When my mother bought a computer (she knows nothing about it) I strongly recommended her to have windows and softs on the C: partition, and her files on the D: partition (even if most softs alway try to save data files each in the most  improbable place such as in c:\program files). She also installed a CD burner, but seldom used it. When she had a software crash, she had no way but reinstalling windows in the C: partition, but she recovered all her data intact from the D: partition.

Once I had a window crash (thanks to a virus) and I had to reinstall windows, but I was able to boot on my windows installation disk and make a complete back up before reinstalling windows. But this is not possible on several laptop PCs which have "special" installation disks!!! The only problem I had was when reinstalling programs, as I did not saved the downloaded file! I had to beg for a CD of this program. So when you buy an (expensive) soft, alway: 1) have a CD backup 2)write the installation key on this CD!!

In your case tedstryk it seems that there was a survoltage or other power problem which broke your drive. It is very difficult to protect from this, and also from lightning. The only protection against lightning is to completelly disconnect the computer from both power line and phone line as soon as we hear thunder.  There are some power protections which can be efficient, but only at a certain point: when lightning is close enough to make the power plugs spark, I think nothing can do.

But also it happens that Windows cannot bear a power cut. Once I lost a file like that, and had to run scandisk to purge any false entry. But bad softs too can play tricks, such as softs written in C:. This language can use indexes on the whole drive, so in case of any bad functionning it can write anywhere (anywhere will be in most case on the famous FAT, which index is near zero) and I had my first big crash like that. There is no protection against this, except... making backups.

To avoid any window problem, I tried Linux... but there are OTHERS problems there and I quickly prefered to come back to Windows!

I have confirmed from others who lost electronics that we had a power surge. But it was during a nice sunny day, not a storm, so I had no way to predict it.