OK, not all my data, but pretty damn close to it - about 60GB worth!!! I'll try to explain to the best of my abilities.
Last month I bought a Soyo Dragon mobo and Athlon 1.4 (which I have OCed to 144FSB) and just put it in with my old ME install. I didn't have time to change OS and stuff, but it seemed to run fine. I bought a WD 60GB drive and partitioned it for storage into a 30/30 and it worked well. I'm using a IBM 9.1 SCSI for my boot drive.
On Sunday morning I decided to do a clean install. I copied a lot junk over to the IDE drive in case I needed files or whatever, and just did a clean install to the SCSI drive. Everything was going fine Sunday. I then bought a WD 80 GB drive. Suprisingly FDISK didn't want to translate the #s correctly, so I partitioned the drive in ME. Everything was running stable as of Sunday night. My 60GB drive was partitioned into roughly 30/30 and the 80 was cut 16/64 more or less. I installed the VIA 4 in 1 drivers and everything was cool.
Then Monday night I installed the DMATOOL which I guess enabled DMA on the IDE channels (not sure what it did). It seemed to help performance, and now my OS was seeing the drives as WD 60BB and 80BB series instead of the usual Generic Type 47 or whatever. I then installed the Promise Ultra Mode drivers because I was thinking of moving the 80GB drive from it's slave position off the 60 to it's own controller (the RAID channels onboard). I just installed the driver, never switched the drive or anything.
So I'm sitting there just cleaning up the mess I had done over the past 2 days. I tried ripping a DVD to my 80GB drive 64MB partition. I left the machine and came back to find SmartRipper had "Crashed" half way though the rip. So I closed it, and then noticed that Windows now did not recognize my 80GB drive as being formatted - it saw the 16 and 64GB partitions, but it listed them as local disks on Explorer and asked if I wanted to format them. I attributed this failure to the fact the 80GB was > 64 and maybe the controller went screwy or something. Didn't think much of it as I had only lost about 40GB of DIVX movies, nothing crucial. I would investigate it later right...wrong!
I kept using the system and soon the first 30GB partition on the 60GB drive disappeared into the void as well. Once again it was unable to read the drive and asked to format. Now I had just lost all my MP3s which I had spent 5 years making/collecting plus a whole bunch of junk I can't even recall (I'm in medschool and sick from dealing with kids right now). So I shut down the system, let the drives cool off thinking maybe the system was overheating. I rebooted to a Win98 floppy and still the drives were unreadable. Thought maybe my controller was dead or something, so I tried the drives on my dad's ASUS CUSL2-C and they can't read the partition as being there!!! Even Partition magic Pro 6 won't find anything, as far as I can tell.
Any hope of getting back the data? I have copies of my MP3s floating around with lots of people, but it would be a pain in the ass to go hunting for them, and there's other stuff I can't even recall what it is. I didn't have time to assess what I had lost because in installing the new drives and OS everything got jumbled.
This is the first time I have ever seen a system kill a partition. Here's my guesses to causes
1) Overclocking - I lost data before, but mostly directory corruption. The machine has been stable as a rock running 144 FSB and got crucial 256 DDR in there - probably not overclocking unless the new DMA update enabled higher speed death
2) The DMATOOL and Promise Ultra Mode Drivers might have played a role in this. When I first put in the board the 4-in-1 drivers worked fine, but I forgot to take out the Intel Ultra drivers, so I guess the DMATOOL never installed. FInally on clean install I guess they took. The drives seemed to move data faster. Don't know much about this.
3) Virus? I have Norton Internet Security and NAV2001 going, but haven't done a full system scan in a while, but I doubt it's a virus as NAV usually gets everything as it comes in.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!! I have limited time to work as I'm at the hospital 5AM to 10PM 7 days a week except when on call, so playing with computers is no longer fun for me except when building new ones.
Thanks,
colossus
Last month I bought a Soyo Dragon mobo and Athlon 1.4 (which I have OCed to 144FSB) and just put it in with my old ME install. I didn't have time to change OS and stuff, but it seemed to run fine. I bought a WD 60GB drive and partitioned it for storage into a 30/30 and it worked well. I'm using a IBM 9.1 SCSI for my boot drive.
On Sunday morning I decided to do a clean install. I copied a lot junk over to the IDE drive in case I needed files or whatever, and just did a clean install to the SCSI drive. Everything was going fine Sunday. I then bought a WD 80 GB drive. Suprisingly FDISK didn't want to translate the #s correctly, so I partitioned the drive in ME. Everything was running stable as of Sunday night. My 60GB drive was partitioned into roughly 30/30 and the 80 was cut 16/64 more or less. I installed the VIA 4 in 1 drivers and everything was cool.
Then Monday night I installed the DMATOOL which I guess enabled DMA on the IDE channels (not sure what it did). It seemed to help performance, and now my OS was seeing the drives as WD 60BB and 80BB series instead of the usual Generic Type 47 or whatever. I then installed the Promise Ultra Mode drivers because I was thinking of moving the 80GB drive from it's slave position off the 60 to it's own controller (the RAID channels onboard). I just installed the driver, never switched the drive or anything.
So I'm sitting there just cleaning up the mess I had done over the past 2 days. I tried ripping a DVD to my 80GB drive 64MB partition. I left the machine and came back to find SmartRipper had "Crashed" half way though the rip. So I closed it, and then noticed that Windows now did not recognize my 80GB drive as being formatted - it saw the 16 and 64GB partitions, but it listed them as local disks on Explorer and asked if I wanted to format them. I attributed this failure to the fact the 80GB was > 64 and maybe the controller went screwy or something. Didn't think much of it as I had only lost about 40GB of DIVX movies, nothing crucial. I would investigate it later right...wrong!
I kept using the system and soon the first 30GB partition on the 60GB drive disappeared into the void as well. Once again it was unable to read the drive and asked to format. Now I had just lost all my MP3s which I had spent 5 years making/collecting plus a whole bunch of junk I can't even recall (I'm in medschool and sick from dealing with kids right now). So I shut down the system, let the drives cool off thinking maybe the system was overheating. I rebooted to a Win98 floppy and still the drives were unreadable. Thought maybe my controller was dead or something, so I tried the drives on my dad's ASUS CUSL2-C and they can't read the partition as being there!!! Even Partition magic Pro 6 won't find anything, as far as I can tell.
Any hope of getting back the data? I have copies of my MP3s floating around with lots of people, but it would be a pain in the ass to go hunting for them, and there's other stuff I can't even recall what it is. I didn't have time to assess what I had lost because in installing the new drives and OS everything got jumbled.
This is the first time I have ever seen a system kill a partition. Here's my guesses to causes
1) Overclocking - I lost data before, but mostly directory corruption. The machine has been stable as a rock running 144 FSB and got crucial 256 DDR in there - probably not overclocking unless the new DMA update enabled higher speed death
2) The DMATOOL and Promise Ultra Mode Drivers might have played a role in this. When I first put in the board the 4-in-1 drivers worked fine, but I forgot to take out the Intel Ultra drivers, so I guess the DMATOOL never installed. FInally on clean install I guess they took. The drives seemed to move data faster. Don't know much about this.
3) Virus? I have Norton Internet Security and NAV2001 going, but haven't done a full system scan in a while, but I doubt it's a virus as NAV usually gets everything as it comes in.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!! I have limited time to work as I'm at the hospital 5AM to 10PM 7 days a week except when on call, so playing with computers is no longer fun for me except when building new ones.
Thanks,
colossus
