Update on backup HD

[gdgrana]

Well.

Freezing might have done the trick, because as of the 28th of December, 2 of the 3 partitions on my external harddrive were perfectly readable, and the third, while recognized, was considered "not formated". So I poked my head around the internet and found a couple of suggestions for this issue; the one that worked, ultimately, was having TESTDISK repair the partition table so that windows could recognize it. And recognize it it did, because when I rebooted the computer, chkdsk said my volume was dirty (that slut), and is now stepping through every. single. file segment record to determine which ones are unreadable; as of the writing of this entry, so far they all are. Now, I'm not dispairing too much, because from what I've gleaned from the scant information on the net, the FSR being unreadable does not necessarily mean that my data is unrecoverable. I've also learned that there's at least one FSR for every file on that partition.

I have over 50GB worth of data on that drive ><

So, I ask anyone who knows more about computers than I do, 1) am I right about the relationship between FSR and the files? and 2) is there any way to stop CHKDSK while it's running?

Thanks.

Comments

[jennifer.livejournal.com]

In other computer stuff: did you call Verizon, or do I need to look up their number in order to call and yell?

[david-grana.livejournal.com]

I'll call them in a bit and yell for the both of us.

[tiffuchan.livejournal.com]

"chkdsk said my volume was dirty (that slut)"

I understood none of your post, but good god, that cracked me the hell up.

[cutriss.livejournal.com]

You should be okay with CHKDSK. I'd leave it running if I were you. Better to let it finish than to stop it in the middle of something.

There probably was a better way to restore the FAT for that volume than using TESTDISK, but it's too late now. All Microsoft filesystems store two copies of the partition table and I'm pretty sure also the FAT. On FAT16 and FAT32, they're stored at the beginning and end of each partition, but in NTFS, the second is stored in the middle of the partition.

What CHKDSK may be doing, however, is to produce file segments, which won't actually translate to "files". That will frustrate you even more. I don't know offhand of any automated tool that will piece them back together either, but at least *making* them doesn't actually render the data inaccessible.

[david-grana.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure if the FAT was damaged on the drive; the only other things I tried was a DOS-based program called FindNTFS, but that was taking too long.

[cutriss.livejournal.com]

Well, FAT is what tells the operating system what files exist, how many clusters they are, and where they are. If your FAT was fine, then that would mean that you don't actually have any files. :P

[david-grana.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok ^^;

Looks like CHKDSK is gonna be here a while...it's only on 1500 as of this writing ><;;