The drive is a Western Digital 7200rpm 80GB. I keep my hard disk in a noise reducing enclosure outside of my case, and I point a fan on it to keep it cool. Well, I didn't know the fan was necessary to keep the drive from overheating, and when I was cleaning my desk, I pointed the fan in the wrong direction. After a few hours, my sytem crashed. I took the drive out of the enclosure, waited for it to cool down, booted up the system and was told there is "No Operating System." I ran MS-DOS scandisk: data parition had some lost clusters, OS partition had several bad sectors/clusters marked as "B." Now, I plugged in a Maxtor 80GB 5400rpm drive (recent Compusa hot deal) and installed Win2k.
My first question is, is there a way to tell if the integrity of the files on the overheated disk have been compromised? Should I trust that my files are okay and copy them, or should I try to copy from my one month old backup as much as possible? My second question is, should I continue to use the old drive, at least for the OS? It is a 7200 rpm drive, I am currently using a 5400 rpm and I can feel the difference.
My first question is, is there a way to tell if the integrity of the files on the overheated disk have been compromised? Should I trust that my files are okay and copy them, or should I try to copy from my one month old backup as much as possible? My second question is, should I continue to use the old drive, at least for the OS? It is a 7200 rpm drive, I am currently using a 5400 rpm and I can feel the difference.