Beware what you do in Windows XP
I had the ultimate bad experience the other day. I have been changing hard drives around in this machine, got two inside it and one external hard drive. But I made a real goof, not knowing it could happen and Windows didn't even give me a notice or a chance to not do it or anything.
I had to send one of the drives back because I couldn't get the system to recognize it as being there, more on that later.
So when I got it back I pulled one out and put it in, it was an 80 gig the one I pulled was a 160 gig, my original and still C: drive is only a 40 gig. Anyway, the computer was shut down, asleep hibernating whatever it does on its own, enough so that I have to push the power button to get it to revive. I had a brief thought that I should wake it up and then shut it down, but I didn't thinking it wouldn't matter I just pulled the plug and opened it up and swapped the drive out, put the 160 gig back in.
BUT when I turned it back on Windows deleted all the contents of that drive, which just happened to contain all of my docs, music, videos, programs and way more things. It was my back up in fact.
But due to other problems I had to dump everything I lost from the C: drive in an attempt to defrag it. By the way I couldn't even defrag after removing a lot of things, it said that google earth was the problem, it had files that couldn't be defragged, I don't understand that but that's what it said.
So there I was with the drives all installed, the external hooked up and formatted and all my data gone in the blink of an eye, well a few seconds longer. The Documents folder was only a measly 4.7 gigs
This was not something I had even an inkling of an idea could happen.
So beware of XP, it makes decisions all on its own and won't even ask you for permission.
In the old DOS days I had a program, from either Norton or PC-Tools that did some great things, one of them was to undelete files. Back then a file only got the first letter of its name changed to a symbol, the computer seeing that symbol would ignore the file, not show it as being there and all you had to do was change the first letter back and it would show the file again.
I don't know how XP works but I'm hoping it is still the same way.
I am hoping that it is still possible to recover everything.
I looked at a couple of so called undelete programs for sale these days, but they looked way over my head and due to the amount of data lost I don't want to take a chance on really losing it forever. The greatest loss is the 4 years of data collecting I did on my property tax case. I have a not too good print out of the 92 page brief so I can scan a lot of it, but there was so much more I had that was a part of the findings.
The good news, the hopeful news is my youngest has a friend she tells me who knows how to do things like undelete lost files. I told her to find him that I would buy the software if needed and pay him for his time. I'm still waiting but I have high hopes she will find him.
The notice came today from the State Tax Appeal board, I've not open it yet.
If I need to type everything all over again from scratch I can do it but it's the web pages I had logged in that are the greatest loss. Mostly from legal sites and such, things that supported my position that True and Fair value is not Fair Market Value, things that took years to find.
Well just wanted to give you a little warning to not do what I did.
I said I would add more on the system not seeing the drive as being there. It did see it but not openly, seems if you delve deep into windows there is a place where it will show up, but not as an active drive, it shows a small red X in a circle like icon, how was I supposed to know all you had to do was click on it and follow the directions. It was a Hitachi drive I emailed them and they sent back how to do it instructions, which made me wonder if the one I had sent back wasn't actually good. You see when I installed the 160 gig, it was a Seagate it just showed up as being there and windows asked me if I wanted to format it, simple easy no problems. I expected the same thing, so at least I learned something new about XP. And that is XP I think has far too many hidden areas, areas within areas, within areas, of controls.
I had to send one of the drives back because I couldn't get the system to recognize it as being there, more on that later.
So when I got it back I pulled one out and put it in, it was an 80 gig the one I pulled was a 160 gig, my original and still C: drive is only a 40 gig. Anyway, the computer was shut down, asleep hibernating whatever it does on its own, enough so that I have to push the power button to get it to revive. I had a brief thought that I should wake it up and then shut it down, but I didn't thinking it wouldn't matter I just pulled the plug and opened it up and swapped the drive out, put the 160 gig back in.
BUT when I turned it back on Windows deleted all the contents of that drive, which just happened to contain all of my docs, music, videos, programs and way more things. It was my back up in fact.
But due to other problems I had to dump everything I lost from the C: drive in an attempt to defrag it. By the way I couldn't even defrag after removing a lot of things, it said that google earth was the problem, it had files that couldn't be defragged, I don't understand that but that's what it said.
So there I was with the drives all installed, the external hooked up and formatted and all my data gone in the blink of an eye, well a few seconds longer. The Documents folder was only a measly 4.7 gigs
This was not something I had even an inkling of an idea could happen.
So beware of XP, it makes decisions all on its own and won't even ask you for permission.
In the old DOS days I had a program, from either Norton or PC-Tools that did some great things, one of them was to undelete files. Back then a file only got the first letter of its name changed to a symbol, the computer seeing that symbol would ignore the file, not show it as being there and all you had to do was change the first letter back and it would show the file again.
I don't know how XP works but I'm hoping it is still the same way.
I am hoping that it is still possible to recover everything.
I looked at a couple of so called undelete programs for sale these days, but they looked way over my head and due to the amount of data lost I don't want to take a chance on really losing it forever. The greatest loss is the 4 years of data collecting I did on my property tax case. I have a not too good print out of the 92 page brief so I can scan a lot of it, but there was so much more I had that was a part of the findings.
The good news, the hopeful news is my youngest has a friend she tells me who knows how to do things like undelete lost files. I told her to find him that I would buy the software if needed and pay him for his time. I'm still waiting but I have high hopes she will find him.
The notice came today from the State Tax Appeal board, I've not open it yet.
If I need to type everything all over again from scratch I can do it but it's the web pages I had logged in that are the greatest loss. Mostly from legal sites and such, things that supported my position that True and Fair value is not Fair Market Value, things that took years to find.
Well just wanted to give you a little warning to not do what I did.
I said I would add more on the system not seeing the drive as being there. It did see it but not openly, seems if you delve deep into windows there is a place where it will show up, but not as an active drive, it shows a small red X in a circle like icon, how was I supposed to know all you had to do was click on it and follow the directions. It was a Hitachi drive I emailed them and they sent back how to do it instructions, which made me wonder if the one I had sent back wasn't actually good. You see when I installed the 160 gig, it was a Seagate it just showed up as being there and windows asked me if I wanted to format it, simple easy no problems. I expected the same thing, so at least I learned something new about XP. And that is XP I think has far too many hidden areas, areas within areas, within areas, of controls.
posted by The Emperor at 12:07 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home