How Ironic!

[JohnWPB]

We were JUST talking about Hard Drive crashes in chat a couple days ago. I mentioned both my roomates HD's died within 3 days of each other, My best friends died just 2 days later, and explaining how busy I was getting everyone back up and running. Someone mentioned in chat that their main drive just died, and someone else chimed in and said theirs did as well.

Then someone came up with "It must be solar flare activity"

Well now MY MAIN HARD DRIVE just bit the dust! a 200 gigger none the less.... Yea, I have backups of most everything, but still installing HS from SCRATCH and getting all the codes in, plugins working, comm ports ect... what a night mare this is going to be!

Well I thought I would recommend a program, if you guys haven't heard of it, its called GetBackData. Sorry I seem to have lost the bookmark haha. It has recovered about 98% (good guess) of everything. Stuff that wasnt backed up, like the last weeks worth of: Favorites, bookmarks, Digital Pictures, email, downloads, documents ect.

This program takes a couple hours to scan the drive, and shows the original disk structure, in tact, with the full length file names. I have used R-Studio in the past, and it makes a mess of the folders and crops to the old school 8 letter file names. This one seems to work VERY well.

I have my work cut out reinstalling EVERYTHING & finding & entering all those darn registration numbers.... Argh.... Oh, and training the VR all over again.... keeps getting worse the more I think about it....

 

[DavidL]

I run Raid0 (motherboard supported) SATA 160 gig drives as the boot drives for my Homeseer server. This setup has already helped me twice when a drive failed. The first time was a week after loading everything from scratch... glad I didn't have to do that again!

Of course with twice the drives doing the "work" of one, I should see higher number of drive failures.

 

[JohnWPB]

Goody for you! ! Just kidding, that is my frustration talking, kicking myself in the butt and wondering why I didnt have the foresight to do that. (With a small bit of jelousy thrown in for good measure) I may actually go do that. Wal~Mart has 160Gb drives for $97 (NO rebate required). I know from my 2 roomates and best friend mentioned in my first posts

Well at least SOMETHING good came out of this, I installed MediaCenter as the main OS for my machine. It is the latest build of XP, so hopefully that makes it a BIT more refined...but knowing MS....well thats another story.... (ME for example) Maby it's time to jump ship and get a Mac! Heck, I already stopped using IE, and use Open Office instead of MS Office, A 3rd party shell replacement for the desktop, so I guess I have been TRYING to get away from MS a bit all along

I am ragging on MS and I know you are thinking they are unrelated, but trust me the HD crash is an XP problem from what I can tell. This drive is just 6 months old. When I put it in another machine, is says "Drive is not formatted, would you like to format it?". I did some research on the web and the conceses is that XP just up and does this now and then. I seriousally doubt the drive is bad, as I was able to get all the files off it it smoothly with a recovery program. When all the data is recovered, I will run a through disk check on it and see what turns up.

Here is a quote from one of the search results I came up with:
This problem is one of the few mysteries with Windows XP, and most XP users with a computer hobby must have encountered it at least once or will eventually when working with multiple drives.
I would think by now M$ would have come out with a proper fix, unfortunately for now resolving the problem appears to be a crapshoot.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

John: Get THIS hard drive deal instead.

 

[JohnWPB]

BSR, Wow, that is a good deal! Mabey will order a couple and put my DVD's to Hard Drive like I have been wanting to do for a long time..... Sheesh! Dont even have this computer back to 100% and I am already virtually upgrading the Media Center PC!

As for the one I bought, it was worth the extra $9 to be able to drive over, pick it up and have it back at the house within a half hour

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

As for the one I bought, it was worth the extra $9 to be able to drive over, pick it up and have it back at the house within a half hour

WHAT!, How are you going to incorporate a RAID-5 with only one!

 

[JohnWPB]

I was refering to the one I bought yesterday to get things back on track again.

Now that that is 95% complete, I am seriously thinking about setting up a Raid on this computer. The motherboard does have it built in. I must say however, there is nothing like a fresh install of an OS! This thing is flying! It's a 3.2Ghz with a gig of ram, and up till this fresh install it was starting to seem like a 1ghz with 16 megs of memory! hahaha

I am just thankful that after my last ordeal, that I learned to make consistant backup's. To both a USB External drive, and really important stuff to DVD's as well.

THANK GOD HS is back up! I almost forgot how to tun on the bathroom lights manually!

 

[JohnWPB]

All is not completely well here

Anyone know what would cause this?

5/19/2005 9:52:22 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:25 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:28 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:31 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:34 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:37 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:40 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:42 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:45 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:48 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:51 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:54 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:52:57 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 225
5/19/2005 9:53:00 PM~!~X10 Received~!~B2 (Johns Bedroom lights) Extended 231 14
5/19/2005 9:53:00 PM~!~X10 Received~!~M9 (?) M Status Off
5/19/2005 9:53:01 PM~!~X10 Received~!~A13 (Christmas Small Tree) A9 (?) A Bright 1
5/19/2005 9:53:07 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Dim 54
5/19/2005 9:53:10 PM~!~X10 Received~!~A3 (living room Track Lighting) A Bright 1
5/19/2005 9:53:13 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Dim 32
5/19/2005 9:53:13 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Dim 1
5/19/2005 9:53:14 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Dim 1
5/19/2005 9:53:16 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Dim 1
5/19/2005 9:53:23 PM~!~X10 Received~!~A2 (living room lamp) A Dim 1
5/19/2005 9:53:23 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Dim 1
5/19/2005 9:53:23 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Dim 1
5/19/2005 9:54:35 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Bright 1
5/19/2005 9:54:35 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Bright 1
5/19/2005 9:54:35 PM~!~X10 Received~!~ A Bright 64

I have HUNDREDS of entries, with HS just running a few hours now. I do not have the W800 installed again yet, so it has to be coming through the CM11a. Anyone seen this before?

I know it is not noise, as this has never happened until re-installing everything.

 

[AutomatedOutlet]

Yep, what kind of coupler/repeater do you have? I see the extended codes......

 

[JohnWPB]

This one that I got from a place called AutomatedOutlet

Strange this has never happened till the complete new install.... Hmmm

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

You don't think perhaps that a power glitch or surge was the cause of your initial hard disk crash do you? Anything else in the house fail or having problems?