Originally posted by: Hooobi
geez guys, way to kick me when I'm down...
I don't think anyone wanted to kick you. I think some of us were kicking each other, just arguing back and forth about the truly questionable suggestion that was made concerning the "superiority" of FAT32 for data recovery purposes. I have never lost data on an NTFS partition. Never. I have lost a couple of hours' worth of data occasionally on FAT32 partitions, and I've seen TONS of other people's data lost on them. Those were people who were counting on their FAT32-partition hard drives and not backing up their data. The only data I've seen lost on NTFS partitions was due to frank hard drive / controller failure. Again, backup to external media is the final level of protection.
actually, there's nothing really critical I need to get off the drives, as I do full backups every month or two... it's just mainly an issue of being able to access the 100+gb of stuff that's on there...
If most of the 100+ gb is replaceable, or at least not a real problem to lose, then it's a moot point as to how you back it up (or don't back it up). I suppose a separate hard drive (on a different machine?) would be sufficient for that type of backup. But if it's important stuff it needs to be backed up to external media, on both rotating (frequently replaced) and permanent media.
Regarding emergency disks, I've never had problems repairing a win2k installation from the emergency repair console of my win2k CD... problem is, my CD is either scratched or somehow otherwise corrupted because it won't install properly...
Yup. Scratches, corruption or loss of boot loaders due to problematic install routines or repair procedures on multi-boot systems, and other such stuff are exactly why you keep a current ERD and make a backup CD of the OS setup CD. It costs next-to-zero in time and effort. Look how much trouble it would have saved you.
I hope things work out for you.
- Collin
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