My computer was being a little weird today, with a few odd errors popping up. I chalked it up to general Windows weirdness but then when installing new video drivers it just crapped out halfway through. When it rebooted it was very slow and many of my startup programs crashed. Not good. I planned on a rollback but couldn’t even get System Restore back up. I decided to reboot again to Safe Mode and that was the last I was in Windows. Apparently my windowssystem32configsystem folder is corrupt – that’s where the registry is kept.
I pulled out a bootable diagnostic CD and ran the Maxtor Hard Drive test on it and it failed almost immediately. It reported the error code Y3JS57 and told me to plug it in to http://www.maxtor.com/ – I did that (on Mel’s computer, where I’m posting now) and got no results. Thanks Maxtor!
Of course it waited until after NCIX was closed to do this so while I could have spent the night installing and formatting a replacement drive and then getting Windows (and all my software!) back on it, I’m out of luck until tomorrow.
I’ve got some really kick-butt hard drive recovery programs so I’m fairly confident I can get all my data back. Most of it is on the other drives anyway. It’s just going to be a pain in the ass to reinstall everything.
Update: I have a new drive and it’s formatting now. I’m not looking forward to getting everything reinstalled and working. It’ll take until after that before I can try to get my old data back. I had a lot backed up, but not all of it, including regularly updated things like my email file.
Well that’s crap. I had a Maxtor drive for several years before it finally crapped on me. It was still under warranty and I sent in back after running their diag software and sending them the error code. They send me a new, larger drive (guess they were out of 4GB drive so they sent me an 8GB) and covered the shipping costs.
Best of luck getting your data back sir.
Never had a Western Digital crap out on me (knock on wood), but I hear about Maxtors and Quantums failing all the time.
Oddly enough, my WD 200 GB drive somehow lost its partition information. I don’t know how this happened, but I’ve recovered the data from it anyway. I’ve reformatted that drive and am putting the data back on it, which should be done in about 30 minutes (need… faster… drives — it’s taken 1.5 hours already) and then I can put in the Maxtor and see about recovering that one.
Reinstalling my programs is a real pain, but it’s going well. If I can recover the old hard drive’s data I should be ok, it’ll just be two days of work wasted.