Just lost 236 Gb of Junior Idol Content =(

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xeffects

Active Member
Jun 5, 2009
532
150
Last night I was installing the new Windows 7. My system was previously running Windows XP. However, I was running on a RAID configuration, that means two hard drives united as 1. Everything went fine and upon reboot, I got a message saying "Partition System not found or missing, please re-install the operating system." I was away when this happen so I never saw the RAID config screen come up but I tried a reboot again and saw the RAID config screen; it seems that the Windows 7 installation ruined the RAID array and made the partition un-bootable. I tried everything I could to save it but it was done for. Once a RAID array is corrupted, you can pretty much kiss your data good bye, that would be different however, had it been a mirrored array.

So I lost several gigabytes of Junior Idol content; AVIs, MP4, DVDs....I had enough stuff to watch non-stop for hours and hours and just in seconds, it was all gone. :nooo:

The worse part now is, I've moved and my land lord does not allow me to put comcast on and I must pay her $30 a month to share her crappy DSL connection which I can't even upload or download like I used too. Back then, I could download torrents at 800kb/sec, now all my downloads run at 80kb/sec and since I can't configure the router, I have no access to it, my uTorrent does not benefit well from incoming connections and my download/upload speeds are really messed up, the highest I can go is 60kb/sec.

I have managed to download 5 torrents over the last two months;

* Ami - Sakuragumi.mp4
* CAFE004.avi
* FALI002.avi
* GOD027.avi
* GOD-031.avi

These combined total out to 3.75Gb or the size of 1 DVD aprox. I think had over 26 DVDs, 26 MP4s and 13 AVIs .... I think, I never really kept track. I just know the folder was jam packed with so much stuff, it was crazy. I would download torrents like crazy every day but mostly all Junior Idols.

Now I miss my stuff! :cry: :...: to start over again will be very difficult and honestly I can't do it with this internet connection, I'm already considering moving out of this apartment and into a place were I can put comcast again and get back my 800kb/sec downlods and 360kb/sec uploads.

Have any of you lost so much stuff like this before? Man this simply sucks, I almost had tears coming out of my eyes. Now i'm running windows 7 I have a new 24 inch LCD flat plannel, everything looks pretty but lost all my stuff, everything. Now I just simply stuck with 1 partition, I got a secondary hard drive and decided I back up important stuff to the secondary and will use it fo the Idol movies.
 
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Rollyco

Team Tomoe
Oct 4, 2007
3,556
34
I lost 1 of two drives early this year, which contained my boot and program files partitions. If it had been my second drive, containing my documents and downloads, it would have been disastrous. So I finally bought a 3rd drive and now I have daily full backups of my 2 1TB drives. It's a good feeling :)

I don't use RAID mirroring at the moment because onboard/integrated solutions are all unreliable and I can't justify the expense for a good controller card.
 
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Rhinosaur

Outside Context Problem
Sep 23, 2007
2,007
614
I feel your pain. Years ago I lost a HDD that had all my writing (music compositions, riffs and about 2000 lines of lyrics) on it. It was heart-breaking! Since then I live by the maxim, "back up, back up, back up"!!
Never used a RAID config but I have 4 drives with multiple partitions on each with one being solely used for the OS.
 
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astraygold

New Member
Apr 5, 2007
1
0
I backup my stuff using DVDs. Sure they degrade, but generally don't suffer from disk head crashes ;) They are cheaper per GB than HDDs as well.

Of course the problem is convenience. Burning them, then looking through stacks of DVDs for the stuff you want. I think Blu-Ray should help with this problem a bit, but they are so expensive now :(
 
lowleg26

lowleg26

non-active
Oct 25, 2009
1,766
212
Sorry about losing your stuff, man, that's a bum deal! Sucks how hundreds of hours of downloading, which translates into possibly thousands of hours of media, can just disappear in seconds.

You said that you only use 1 partition now, I'd actually recommend sectioning off the OS to its own partition even if you're backing up data to a different drive. It makes it painless to reinstall the OS if its ever needed.
 
rnishimura

rnishimura

Well-Known Member
Jan 19, 2008
627
569
The first mistake was putting anything important on a raid 0 drive setup. I've done that before and paid the price. I lost it all and my backup was over 2 months old. My video and music collection I was never able to get back though. Even after trying out (and buying) several data recovery softwares.

Since that happened i've installed a storage drive, so there is less of a chance the data will getting corrupted. Believe it or not a UPS unit helps a ton. It's amazing how bad my power is in this place. I've had so many pieces of electrical equipment die because of that. Several hard drives got "zapped".

All hard drives fail eventually. Nobody makes a drive that won't. Even the most expensive drive is going to die. I even had a Western Digital Raptor die out and I thought it never would. It is worth paying more for a more expensive model though. For example, the Western Digital Black seems more reliable then the "green" versions.

My suggestion for people with a large collection is to set up a raid 1 array. I use mine with the onboard controller and for a secondary drive it's fine. I also backup my main drive and the raid 1 data to an external eSATA 2gb drive. I let it run all night and it only takes a few hours. USB is worthless for backup. I imagine many people hate backing up data because it's so slow. With eSATA you can copy data to a an external drive as fast as you could onto an internal.
 
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scarletsnow

New Member
Oct 7, 2007
177
3
RAID data mirroring is for redundancy in case of a hardware failure of a drive in a server so the server can continue functioning uninterrupted. RAID is not for backup. In most cases RAID 1 will not save your data once but mess up your data twice.

Also RAID data striping does often not yield significant performance benefits. RAID data mirroring can speed up data reading by using split seeks. If one wants speed one could consider short stroking a HDD or using a SSD.

Most harddrives fail in the first month or after three years.
 
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xeffects

Active Member
Jun 5, 2009
532
150
Yeah, i'm not messing around with RAID anymore. I bet the Solid State Drive would be a lot safer and faster but they are very expensive right now. Downloading CAFE006 as we speak, its 79.8% complete @ 11.1kb/sec yeah that sucks, according to uTorrent, 14 hours until the download finishes + seeding afterwards. With COMCAST I could download 4 at the same at about 230kb/sec and I remember that was pretty nice.

The person that mentioned the DVD, thats a good idea but could you imagine backing up 236gb of stuff on DVDs? That is about 50 DVDs or about 10 Blue-Ray Discs.

I've had hard drives fail on me but never the backup drive. I have however, found that what fails on a drive is the access head; the magnet that actuates movement of the arm some how looses its magnetism, either the coil burns off or it got zapped.

I was able to save one of my old hard drives once, an old EIDE drive. I had two identical ones and bought a spare but never used it, some 2 years later, it failed. This was during the Windows 98 era. I opened the drive and carefully removed the heads and took the shiny disk plates out as carefully as I could. Then I opened up the other drive and took out its disc plate, kind of stupid messing up a drive that was in a brand new condition but my data was more important, I put the plate from the bad drive into the box of the new drive and I didn't think it would work but when I booted up, all the data was still there and I could access it. I quickly backed it up to my main boot drive and months later, I started getting access errors on the drive, I believe small dust particles got under the head and eventually covered it completely.
 
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xeffects

Active Member
Jun 5, 2009
532
150
Rollyco said:
I lost 1 of two drives early this year, which contained my boot and program files partitions. If it had been my second drive, containing my documents and downloads, it would have been disastrous. So I finally bought a 3rd drive and now I have daily full backups of my 2 1TB drives. It's a good feeling :)

I don't use RAID mirroring at the moment because onboard/integrated solutions are all unreliable and I can't justify the expense for a good controller card.
Click to expand...

Just quoting you but I remember I had that video of the girl in your AVATAR, what was that one called again?
 
lowleg26

lowleg26

non-active
Oct 25, 2009
1,766
212
xeffects said:
The person that mentioned the DVD, thats a good idea but could you imagine backing up 236gb of stuff on DVDs? That is about 50 DVDs or about 10 Blue-Ray Discs.
Click to expand...

Its still not a bad idea, DVDs are pretty much dirt cheap nowadays. When I almost lost all my iTunes data, I backed it all up to DVDs. Filled about 12 DVDs, and only took an evening to do (roughly 4 hours). If you're watching a TV marathon or a DVD box set or starting up a new RPG its not a big inconvenience either. Just watch a show, burn a disc, watch a show burn a disc. :dizzy: I've never had to use them, but its good to know they're there if I need them.


xeffects said:
I was able to save one of my old hard drives once, an old EIDE drive. I had two identical ones and bought a spare but never used it, some 2 years later, it failed. This was during the Windows 98 era. I opened the drive and carefully removed the heads and took the shiny disk plates out as carefully as I could. Then I opened up the other drive and took out its disc plate, kind of stupid messing up a drive that was in a brand new condition but my data was more important, I put the plate from the bad drive into the box of the new drive and I didn't think it would work but when I booted up, all the data was still there and I could access it. I quickly backed it up to my main boot drive and months later, I started getting access errors on the drive, I believe small dust particles got under the head and eventually covered it completely.
Click to expand...

Wow, that WORKED? I've been told that, if you crack it open, that pretty much ruins the platter. Its good to know its worth a shot to try it. :goodboy:
 
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scarletsnow

New Member
Oct 7, 2007
177
3
I have about 300 unused dvds wasting away, because I too find dvds too much of a bother for backup.

For speed I use slax loaded from a usb-stick into ram. For backup I use 3.5" drives in pairs containing the same data and a 2.5" for bittorrent.

And a disk platter transplant is quite tricky with a single platter, absolutely daunting with multiple platters. Backing up is so much more easier.
 
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xeffects

Active Member
Jun 5, 2009
532
150
scarletsnow said:
I have about 300 unused dvds wasting away, because I too find dvds too much of a bother for backup.

For speed I use slax loaded from a usb-stick into ram. For backup I use 3.5" drives in pairs containing the same data and a 2.5" for bittorrent.

And a disk platter transplant is quite tricky with a single platter, absolutely daunting with multiple platters. Backing up is so much more easier.
Click to expand...

I got lucky, it only had one platter, it was an 8gb hard disk ..... thats a joke now a days. The funny part is, I only had 2 Gb worth of stuff on it, a mix of small applications, some mp3s and other things.
 
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Gamedude

New Member
Nov 27, 2009
2
0
yeah....upgrading from XP to 7 makes you loose everything....but I have Vista so all my music stayed in my PC.

but one time I got a virus....and lost a lot of important files...
 
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Rhinosaur

Outside Context Problem
Sep 23, 2007
2,007
614
Gamedude said:
yeah....upgrading from XP to 7 makes you loose everything....but I have Vista so all my music stayed in my PC.
Click to expand...
Que!?!
I went from xp64 to Win7 64 and didn't lose a thing!! Why would you lose anything??
 
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Gamedude

New Member
Nov 27, 2009
2
0
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Rhinosaur

Outside Context Problem
Sep 23, 2007
2,007
614
Ah, I see what you mean now.
I have a dedicated partition for my OS with all my apps backed up. I format and re-install about once every 3 months.
I never used Vista (other than a brief look at it) as XP64 was soooo stable, but jumped to Win7 at the end of September. Awesome OS!!
 
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