I just lost all of my data.
Yesterday early morning I was preparing some of my usual Monday reports while downloading upgrades to my hardware. My downloads go directly do my biggest storage drive, a 320GB Seagate single stripped as a Raid drive, courtesy of my motherboard's built in raid and SATA driver. In English, it simply means that this big ass hard disk is wired to go extra fast. I installed it that way for my video editing projects, so they'd run smoother.
Anyway, from out of the blue, my downloads stopped. If you guys use Vuze (formerly Azureus) you'll know a download's stopped (or in deep doodoo) when the smiley face turns dark red and frowning. Lo and behold ALL of my downloads, whether the files I've been seeding or the ones I was currently downloading, were now beet-red frowning faces.
Shocked, I did the first thing any sane PC user would do when a usual problem like this would present itself--restart Windows.
That's when everything went downhill.
My system wouldn't start if my hard drive was attached, and if I was able to run windows it would hang every five minutes.
So, after an arduous and painstaking crash recovery process, I was able to back up some of my data, beginning with my personal files and projects... but that was a 320GB hard drive... you can't just transfter that much data in a working window of 5 minutes and hope to be ok.
Bottomline, what little time I had left, I used to save the things more important to me... my digicam photos. Yes, call me camwhore, but that was almost 10 years worth of photos and videos. I wasn't about to let that go without a fight.
Next in my list would have been my work folder, all of the projects I'd done in the past 5 to 6 years was stored in that hard drive. I was going to back up my projects folder starting with my most recent work when, lo and behold, the hard drive started squealing like mad. And then it died.
When your hard drive starts sounding like a teapot, it's time to let go I think.
So, I spent all of last night and this morning trying to repair it. I've even started talking to my hard drive and massaging it gently in the hopes that it might revive itself. Sadly, that only works on my knees when old age sets in.
Now I'm wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do.
Anyone know anyone willing to do data recovery for free? =(
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