Oh my god USB sucks and CHKDSK did something

[Garbz]

I'm here in paris and last night I was copying a movie to our laptop from the portable hdd which amongst other things I'm using to store my vacation photos. Then my sister jumped onto the couch.

Now I've heard USB is horrible before many times in the engineering world, and it's ability to be easily disconnected is the reason why the long outdated GPIB systems are still used quite extensively for all instrumentation equipment, but I never knew it would be so sensitive that the gental knock, not a total disconnection, not even a disconnection enough for windows to lose the USB drive and redetect the hardware, was capable of causing a 'delayed write failed' message.

So I disconnected and reconnected the drive and my heart stopped when My Computer showed 'Local Disk (E' instead of 'Holiday (E'. Sure enough it claimed the drive wasn't formatted. PANIC. 990 photos of paris, and the logistical nightmere of what i'll do with my photos the rest of my holiday!

Anyway after long and hard playing with it I ran scan disc. It failed. Fired up a dos prompt and ran chkdsk. It failed. Finally I ran chkdsk /f expecting the worst, that it will wipe up whatever is left of the filesystem. I figured if I'm going to spend $700 on data recovery then they may as well have a challenge on their hands rather than just a missing file system entry.

And it worked. I honestly thought that chkdsk was the type of utility that only ever deletes entries it can't understand. I mean that was my only experience with it. But it fixed EVERYTHING. Ok so I may have lost one or two mp3s off the drive, but other than that all photos are still there :cheer:.

/Rant

 

[icassell]

whew! well, at least it worked. I'd be sweating cuz I wouldn't have known where to begin.

Good job!

Ian

 

[Dweller]

it worked.

Glad to hear it. Now start burning to DVD or something so you have a second backup!

 

[clarinetJWD]

I've never had USB cause something like that, but it is a problematic connection. I'd get an eSATA drive if your computer will support it. Oh, and buy a second, giant drive for daily backups of your important files.

Also, I once formatted my drive accidentally before backing it up (quick format, luckily), and used a program called GetDataBack that recovered all 40GB worth of photos except for 3.

 

[Garbz]

Yeah this is just my vacation stuff. Things I don't want to do are carry around excess tech gear, or carry around gear which I can't use everywhere because I don't even have a laptop with me.

USB is flimsy at best but it's convenient. It just needs to survive a whole 2 months and then it gets dumped on the large redundant arrays at home.