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Streak of Bad Luck

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 11:28 am
by dax
After years of running fairly solid PC's ( except for the nvidia / vista driver issues which the whole world was having) I received my toll of bad luck over the last couple weeks.

My 3 year old Seagate Raptor 10KRPM 74gig Hard drive decided to leave this world without any prior warnings. After trying freezer solution, replacing control board from another and various other solutions to try and revive my lost OS, documents, settings and of course game saves and configurations, I had to put it to rest. It has been buried in my back yard in a shoe box lined with red velvet cushion.

Not to fear though, I have a 3 month old Seagate 1 terbyte drive that I keep all my games and programs on,(labeled as my D drive) and of course a backup of my vital documents and game saves, configurations, G15 scripts, lachesis configs etc.
Purchased another Hard drive for my main operating system and re-installed Windows 7. I spent a few hours installing windows and reconfiguring differant aspects of the OS, reloading drivers ( which I had stored on my other drive). With real life projects and silly things like running two businesses, I was unable to devote more then a an hour or two at a time on it. After about 4 days of reloading stuff , including my registery, so that all those games on the D drive would acutally run I received one evening a message from my PC to format D drive because it could not recognize the file format. My heart stopped beating for about 45 seconds and I was in a panic.. OH NOO! 650Gig of Steam games and about 30 other games were on this drive, not to mention all backups and such. Sure enough after many attempts to access this 3 month old 1 terabyte drive with my lifes gaming history on it were unsuccessful. No additional backups of vital things like Mass Effect 1 playthrough saves ( for mass effect 2 pickup), to all my wonderul key bindings for Zoey in Left 4 Dead (smirks) along with numerous other important items (sheep porn) were now lost in hard drive limbo. Not to mention I never got around yet to restoring all these vitals back to the C drive yet.

I have been in deep depression for about a week now and I have requested my wife take me to a mental hospital until I can learn to cope with the death of all my gaming data that has accumulated over the last 8-10 years. Donantions to my cause would be greatly appreciated and spent on a redundant backup system of my entire gaming history. There is not only a huge black hole in my gaming data, but one in my heart also. Its like I never existed in the gaming world for the last 8-10 years.. my gaming legacy died this week and I will have to start anew. :cry: Oh the pain....

:help:

<grins sheepishly>

Dax

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 2:00 pm
by OhMyHead
Got a few thousand bucks laying around?

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/

Have you tried an enclosure and popped it into another machine?

Have you tried chicken bones?

[ Start @ 1:17 ]
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Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 2:24 pm
by Simtech
That sounds baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.... :eek:

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 3:14 pm
by bloodbane
Which day was worse? The day the computer died or the day the put this sign up in front of your house? :lol:

Image

Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 3:45 pm
by dax
bloodbane wrote:Which day was worse? The day the computer died or the day the put this sign up in front of your house? :lol:

Image
laugh it up elephantitius boy.. laugh it up....

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 9:48 am
by KrispyKritter
Dax, what about all the old hard drives you have been upgrading from throughout the last 8 - 10 years?

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 1:19 pm
by Sissyboy
Is Win7 an upgrade and what were you running before?

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 3:03 pm
by dax
KrispyKritter wrote:Dax, what about all the old hard drives you have been upgrading from throughout the last 8 - 10 years?
Been wiped and thrown away.... but good thought though!


Dax

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 3:06 pm
by dax
Sissyboy wrote:Is Win7 an upgrade and what were you running before?
Yes I upgraded from Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional a few months ago.


Dax

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 3:21 pm
by Sissyboy
Well that shouldnt have anything to do with it then.

Did you try OMH's advice on using an enclosure and hooking up to it with usb through a different computer?

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 4:24 pm
by Diehard
:alright: :cry: I feel your Pain Man.

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 4:46 pm
by Sissyboy
Me too. Had a mother board die with raid on me...two hard drives setup

no back up
and thousands of pictures

couldnt find another MB like it anywhere
and wasnt sure about finding a raid card that would duplicate the MB

luckily about 18 months later I found a the exact refurbed MB
And poof I got it all back.
Backups and dbl backups for me now.

So don't give up~!

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 5:25 pm
by madmaz
Upgrades not good. Full blown ver. better!

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 10:47 pm
by KrispyKritter
Sissyboy wrote:Me too. Had a mother board die with raid on me...two hard drives setup
I had a similar problem once where the RAID software said, "what RAID you talking about" during boot. I reinstalled WinXP to C: as a first step to restoring the system, and voila, the DEF partitions showed up, with all their data!

Next time it happened, I took a closer look at the RAID menu and discovered I could have simply told the software which physical drives comprised the RAID. That makes it seem like the RAID descriptors stored on the HD were corrupted. It's happened several times since, but my system has gotten so funky, I'm not sure how long I can keep this up.

Posted: Wed Oct 20, 2010 2:10 am
by R00TX
Is anyone using an SSD drive and if so what kind? I just upgraded to a OCZ Vertex 2 120 and I gotta say I'm impressed. My benchmarks went from around 150mbs to 265.

Re-loaded Win 7 Ultimate on it and I think the whole process took like 15 minutes if that. Windows Index went to 7.8 on the hard drive from 5.9. Very sweet!

My middle name is "Backup". always have at least two current sets around on different media. You never realize how much pain you can get into until it happens. For me it wasn't a crash buy a computer theft, thank god I have all my data (and more importantly the wife's data :lol: ) backed up. Made the reload much less painful.