Wedge

I am VERY paranoid when it comes to important data, that's why I got 2 external hard disks, my main PC got 2 1TB HDD in RAID1 and I got another 2 servers(Both at different locations, one at my dad's office, other at my cousin's house) which contain complete data in case I manage to lose some. I do a weekly update for anything.

What a stupid idea...
I simply wanted to insert my hard drives into the PC, since, well, at some point I was gonna add new hard drives wasn't I...???

Well, turns out the setup inside the box is quite complicated. The GFX card is so huge, it simply shuts me down from one of the Sata slots. i.e. I can only have 5 disks, not 6. Yay. Then it's the cables... The power unit's cables are shown in a way that I just can't use them. Only one cable is available, which used to power the 1TB drive they gave me... And the other entry (plug?) in that cable is extremely hard to handle. As a result, the power cable is stretched to the maximum and I'm scared at the idea of destroying my hard drive by breaking the power slot over time.

What do you think..? (Yeah, I know, without seeing the picture it's hard to get an idea...)

Oh, that's why I didn't want to build my own rig again. I had this kind of shit happen to me back in 2005.
At least my original Antec case had some pretty cool slots for hard drives. I just had to put them into rails and insert them on the side. They were easy to access and everything... Not so with the new machine -- even though it's still based on another popular Antec case. The entire set of drives is enclosed in a case, and it's that case which is on rails, not the drives themselves... And the drives are positioned in a way I can't access them directly. I have to remove the case. And in order to do that, I have to unplug all of the cables from the drives...

Needless to say, I don't see myself doing that too often...
I fear I'm going to have to go without my extra drive. I'll just plug it into my eSata port and that's all... Uh. And I'll compensate with USB3 drives. (I don't remember... Are USB3 drives supposed to be usable as destinations for programs, or are they only suited for storing movies and such?)

PS: sorry, but it makes me feel better to talk about this crap even though I know nobody will answer... :P

If you got those 4 pin molex connectors, you can use that to a SATA power converter in order to power the drives.

And how many eSata ports do you got?

I think I only got 1 eSata port... :(

Sata power converter?

Oh, and the follow-up to my old PC's story... I just plugged in my system drive. It's dead. It's offering to format it... Boooo hoooo hooooo.

I build my own system and now you know why! I hate prebuild system, there always a catch in those system.  At least your system specification is awesome!

That gives you 3 sata ports(Presuming your DVD drive is SATA), which should be enough quite a while.

Go into any PC hardware store and ask for a 4pin molex connector to sata power connector, just make sure you got enough molex connectors in there(Here's how they look)

That's how I've powered 2 of my drives in my PC.

Here's how they look.

As I said, I can't physically add more than one drive... And I already did it. So now I have 3 drives (128gb, 1tb, 1tb), instead of 4 drives (300gb, 320gb, 750gb, 1tb). Although I'll probably keep that eSata drive up and running... So it'll be the recipient for my 750gb drive, if it isn't broken.

Oh my... That's horrible. In addition to all of my XP settings, I lost so many things. My entire fucking to-do list for Wedge!! It was stored in C:\, at the root... Grrr!! My Locate32 database... Where I could have at least retrieved the list of my C:\ files, enabling me to redownload the stuff I'd lost....
My entire photo database... 5 years worth of pictures... >_<

"Thankfully", my CD collection wasn't on that hard drive. 500gb of data... I'd have hated to lose that in addition to my C: drive...I... Don't see the point?

I thought the only limitation you had was because of short cables, didn't read properly, sorry.

No, it just can't be explained in simple words... Yes, the cable is too short but I guess I could 'fix' it by moving the farthest drive to the center of the rack.
It won't fix my lack of slots though... :P Nor will it fix my lack of cables. (I don't think I've got any remaining power cables... Hmm.)

Oh, forgot to mention -- managed to retrieve C:, actually! The partition that was dead was another one (which didn't have a LOT of interesting data in it anyway), while C: itself was further down my partition list, so I didn't see it immediately.

That good to here, data recovery cost is expensive.  You may want to invest for a Blu-Ray rewriter, or just use DVD rewriter if you already got that.

I had a Seagate drive with a buggy firmware known for bricking itself which it did, it's had all my photos and luckily I was able to fix it and update the firmware, I had to buy a USB to TTL Serial Cable to do that.  I just made a backup copy of all my photos and put it onto a DVD.

http://www.mapleleafmountain.com/seagatebrick.html

I still got the hard drive and is working perfectly fine with a new firmware, so far so good it didn't brick itself again. I hope not.

That's good to hear. Losing 5 years of pictures would drive anyone mad. Now go make those backups you should've made years ago! ;)

Unfortunately, after a careful evaluation (i.e. using xcopy to mirror the partition to a folder on my safe drive), C: wasn't safe in the end... :(
Although it was 'readable', I only recovered 30gb worth of data, instead of 187gb. Meaning I lost 157gb here... :(
Among other things, I lost my entire SMF folder -- i.e. all of the mods and work I did... Including all file data for all of my SMF websites, and files for Wedge. I guess the files ARE still there, just the MFT or something is corrupted, because yesterday I was able to access the Wedge folder and retrieve all of its data...

I don't really what software to use to attempt to fix the non-trivial data.
For instance, "chkdsk f: /f" simply tells me (in French) "File system type is NTFS. Unable to determine volume's version and state (status?). Cancelling CHKDSK".

So, chkdsk is out of the picture... Anyone got any got experience? Or should I really use Linux...? (I don't want to burn a DVD for nothing really. Plus, my major drive crash happened yesterday while downloading it.... :whistle:)

Going to bed... This wasn't a funny day for me. (Except the moment when I launched my new PC for the first time.)

I'd use Linux at this point, mount it readonly and see what you can scavenge out of it. There is a took I acquired years ago, called SpinRite, that's pretty good at fixing issues - but I don't know if it works on NTFS or not.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk would also be worth trying at this point.

Fuck!!! The file that mattered the most -- my list of passwords, uh -- got corrupted... It was copied fine, but it's all a bunch of binary gibberish... :snif:

Linux -> Okay but I don't know a thing about Linux so I don't know which to use, how to install (I've got a self-booting copy of Mint on a USB key but my PC simply doesn't boot it...), and what to expect of it.