Disaster!

[OBIO]

I was just doing some file management on D drive...my sim drive...getting rid of pics and videos and files that I no longer need...cleaning the drive up and getting it ready for a defrag.....now my system shows D drive as unformatted....250gig SATA drive that is less than a year old...and it looks like everything on it is gone. A lot of the stuff I have backed up on external HD...but there were so many paint templates that I was working on, so many aircraft projects that I was working on....that were not backed up....the Alphasim Bobcat, C-130, C-141, Akemi's Boomerang, Brian Gladden's C120/140, John Woodward's DHC-2 Beavers, so many projects that are most likely gone...gone...gone. Well over 1000 FS9 aircraft...most of which I had tweaked in some way to my personal flavor...POOF!

The sim stuff is a major loss, (but can be reinstalled, redownloaded, redone)...but nothing compared to all the family pics and videos that I had sitting there to be arranged into albums and burnt onto DVD.

This New Year isn't starting out so well...on a number of fronts.

OBIO

[Matt Wynn]

damn sorry to hear that Obio, glad i'm not the only one having a bad start to 2010... i won't enlighten you all

[MaddogK]

Ya, I hate SATA drives. You could try reseating the cables (with the system UNPLUGGED from power) to see if BIOS will re-recognize the drive and partitions correctly.

[Desert Rat]

Tim,

I feel your pain, had a similar thing happen to a 500Gb drive in the last year, was less than a year old too.
I lost the source files for the CFS2 Hampden conversion I was working on, many hours lost on just that one project, many other projects on top of that. But as you say it's the personal stuff that matters, the rest is just gravy. It seems that no matter how well you organise your files and get them ready to back-up, life makes you forget to actually burn the dang discs!! I had several folders labelled 'DVD1, DVD2, etc waiting for the spare time to burn, up to #8 IIRC. Lost the lot.

Your right also about the new year, me and my family all got Swine Flu for Christmas, that's me and the wife plus 3 kids all suffering at once, we only discovered it was swine flu when we took our 10mnth old to hospital on the 27th with breathing difficulties. All are on the mend now thankfully.

Hope your other fronts work out too.

all the best,
Jamie

[nigel allen]

Sorry to hear that obi i had that to back in the summer not funny and last xmas 22 dec just before xmas i lost my sweet heart just starting to come to term's with it i hope this year will be better it cold and lonely here now
flight sim seem's to be the only fun
nigel

[Cees Donker]

I hope this New Year brings better things for you all!



Cees

[OBIO]

Looks like a dodged the bullet to some degree....I was lucky enough to have left the originals of the family pics on the 2 gig SD card...so no family pics are gone...or if there are some gone, it is to a much smaller degree.

Ran some utils...and nada on the drive....I get messages saying the the utilities can not read the boot sector. Either there is a bad spot on the drive...or...and this may be where my problem came from...it may have been trashed by some malware. While using Eraser to overwrite the files I was getting rid of, one of the videos would not over write, would not delete. I went into Safe Mode and Erased it there....when I restarted the system in normal mode...D drive was shown as being unformatted. The drive is being recognized in the BIOS and by Windows...just being shown as unformatted.

Well, I will count myself lucky that I did not lose family pics that could not be replaced. Lost a lot of work....but it can be done again. I suppose this will give me another chance to install FS9 and customize it again....maybe end up with a leaner install...that is if I can keep myself from downloading every plane that I see...just need to focus on the style of flying that I actually enjoy the most...low and slow, small GA and old transport type....with a few more modern planes thrown in the mix here and there.

OBIO

[OBIO]

Been doing a little pre-reinstall planning.....going to keep my install modern...since I live in the here and now and not in the 1930s...but will use the GW3 ground textures to improve the look of the sim for my low and slow flying. Sure, most of the planes I fly on a regular basis are from the 1930s, 40s and 50s...but I will just fly them in modern times...with the creature comforts that come with having a vintage plane restored and upgraded...GPS, cd players, some bling bling on the wheels.

Making a list right now of the planes that I actually fly...those that I go to when I fire up the sim....no point in having 800 aircraft just sitting on my HD for the sake of having them....Looks like I will be downloading, installing and tweaking less than 50 aircraft.

OBIO

[Willy]

Silver Wings uses the same ground textures as Golden Wings and doesn't remove a bunch of major airports.

[OleBoy]

Sorry to hear about this dilemma OBIO. Not a good thing no matter what. All this technology is suppose to alleviate this. Even the DVD's and CD's are not immune to data loss..as I've had many of those become non-readable by any drives. I've learned the hard way also.

As far as pictures, nothing beats non-digital when it comes to having them around for many decades. That's proven.

[dandog]

You said it cannot read the boot sector. Can you run it as a slave drive to try to access files? Had to do that before in a crash.

[OBIO]

The drive that went down is my secondary drive (D drive). C drive is fine and the system is running smoothly....

OBIO

[dandog]

Then I can only say, "To err is human. To totally screw things up takes a computer". My heart felt sympathies on your loss. I am thinking of trying out Carbonite (not affiliated or meant as an adertisement).

[Daube]

OBIO, have you tried TestDisk ?
This little gem has allowed me recently to recover a hardrive boot sector that had been destroyed by a virus.
It scans the disk and tries to recover automatically the boot sector/partition table.
If the first scan doesn't find anything, like in my case, a deeper (and slower) scan is proposed, and that worked for me.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

You'll find some nice instructions/explanations on that site. Here for example:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

[michael davies]

Whilst its of no use to you now, heres what I run, three internal drives and two extenals, the primary is a SATA (yes I hate them too but most MOBOS only come with one IDE slot now) and the other two are IDE back ups(primary & secondary, The external drives mirror the two internal back ups, once a month everything internally goes external, once every three months the externals are reformatted and re loaded again with the current internal drive, thats the biggest risk time as if you lose your internal during that copy then its pretty much all lost. The externals are never connected or powered when not used.

So far its worked fine, but I am seriously considering another two externals to back up the back ups and I do have on DVD a drive image of the two internal drives thats re burnt every six months, sadly there can be well out of date as I can easily amass 1-2000 digiital images a month.

There is only one hard and fast rule with PCs, Backup, backup and more backup and with the cost of external USB drives being so cheap its a cost that can easily be nullified if you just have to restore once.

Sorry to hear of your woes, if you need any of the Alphasim stuff then let me know and I'll try and dig it all out for you again.

Kindest

Michael

[huub vink]

Sorry to hear this OBIO, when you need something from the past don't hesitate to ask, as I have quite some stuff from my CFS2 days onwards.

Huub

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

OBIO .. first of all Happy New Year despite the circumstances.
This is interesting to read :

http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-3...-system-is-raw

[OBIO]

Found a utility called EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard, Beta 4.8...so far it has found 1.5 million files..not sure how many of them will be fully intact....hoping the Alphasim Bobcat is fully recovered....that one I had just about ready to upload.

OBIO

[Z-claudius24]

Hi,

Methink you are on the goodway to recover your "lost" files

I found a data recovery software for beta (free), which compatible with latest Windows 7, it can recover files even if you deleted the files from Recycle Bin, formatted the partition, the partition lost, partition became RAW, partition cannot be accessed, etc. I have tried it, works like a charm. It ends at Feb 2010, download it quickly from http://www.easeus-software.com/drw-beta/

[OBIO]

Well, the utility sure did find a lot of files....guage files, standard FS9 files....very very little of any of the planes or paint templates were recoverable in usable form. Oh, well....I'll just start over from the beginning...just like the day I got FS9 a year ago...but this time I will stay focused on the planes that I actually fly, will spend more time setting the sim up in terms of visual appeal....especially in the Pacific Northwest area (Washington State, Alaska, British Columbia, Northwest Territories), the Mountain States (Idaho, Colorado, Montana)....places that are suited for bush flying and flying along mountains and canyons.

OBIO

[tommieboy]

My mickey-mouse solution to backing up my hard drive has been the use of Norton Ghost once a week. More often if I am generating a lot of work during the week. My 320 GB hard drive takes about 30 minutes to clone; that's a lot faster than trying to copy gigs of info over to another hard drive via the window's explorer copy command

I use two identical hard drives, and clone the first one to the second one.

I always clone the disk prior to installing new software too, just in case something goes wrong.

I like this method better than a mirrored drive set-up, as mirroring a hard drives has it's own major downside to it.

Something to think about in this new year.

Regards,

Tommy

[Wing_Z]

I'm always fiddling, and like to keep an up-to-date copy of the last best files in case the last fiddle ruins everything
So I went looking for a utility that will only update newer files, rather than laboriously copy everything, the way Windows Explorer wants to do.
I found the freeware Karen's Replicator which whips through and updates files to another network drive in short order.
It can be automated to do this daily, say.
This way, I always have a backup of the last set of critical files in the sim.
So far so good, thought this might be useful to you too.

[OBIO]

Wing_Z

Will give that utility a try....being able to back up just the changed files will be a nice alternative to having to back up an entire sim install.

OBIO

[middle]

I've had it happen too, Obio. after we moved here from Hawaii, before I had had a chance to backup my files on another computer(which I should have done before moving) my secondary hardrive containing an enormous amount of my music...lyrics, live performances including the last show I did on Maui before we left and a bunch of other irreplaceable stuff.. bit the dust....I had a couple guys try to retrieve the data, especially the live shows and lyrics but, sadly it's gone...the hardrive is still around here somewhere and maybe someone will come up with a new technique for retreival. Such is life...I feel for ya, Bro!

[modelr]

Hey, Obio, do you have an external tray for SATA drives? I have both an external enclosure, and a hot docking station. They are very inexpensive, and since they are USB, they can be used to turn your HDD into a slave, so you can retrieve the files without the boot sector working. I had this happen with two IDE drives, just removed them from internal, mounted them in external enclosures, and saved all the files. After that was done, I simply reformatted them, and reinstalled internal. They are both still working in my wife's unit, 3 years later.