I'm looking for suggestions here... A few months ago I switched my home system's two external disks from USB 2 to FireWire hoping for a speed improvement (which didn't come.)
Once I did the switched I've had a occasional problem.... When I print (via USB2 on the motherboard) I have occasionally gotten a delayed write failure from Windows. It happens when I am printing and then tried to save a file from photoshop (to an external disk.) I'd just save the file again and everything was happy. Well, on Wed night I got a delayed write error - to the NTFS equivalent of the Fat Table (I forget the name... $MFT?) I got this both on my working disk and then on the backup disk. Everything seemed to be working fine, and I have no idea what touched the drive to generate the error (my anti-virus wasn't scanning, I wasn't running any anti-spyware, I wasn't running anything in the background,...) Now we fast forward today... and I discovered that I'm missing loads of files from both disks. I ran a XP version of scan disk and it recovered over 6500 files (all original photographs.) Some names have changed (for example 110_4353.JPG instead of IMG_4353.JPG) but a quick cross check shows that many of the "recovered" directories (but not all) are gone from the "original" area of the disk. Some of the recovered files are easily restored to their proper location because the directory names are still intact. Some are just "dir00015.chk" with files inside. So I'm going to have to do some investigation (via EXIF data I think) to restore then (I store my pictures by date taken.) I've got some perl scripting ahead of me to try to figure this out. I might go buy Norton Utilities to see if they can recover more... but their quality has dropped enough that I bet there is something better out there. Any ideas? But how should I avoid this in the future? Has anyone else seen/had a problem like this? I'm really afraid to use this setup again. I could move one disk into the computer, but I have only one free IDE "slot" free. Should I just move back to USB? The hardware facts: Win XP Pro with Service pack 2. Athlon XP 2000+ box, 1G ram 1 120G internal disk. 3 external disks (1 USB, 2 FireWire) all 250 Western Digital EIDE 8MB Cache "special edition drives". all onboard USB 2 Adaptec PCI FireWire controller. Epson 4000 via USB2 I'm looking for any and all ideas. I used the XP FireWire drivers, I guess I could try to see if Adaptec has any. I'd rather not try to reinstall windows to do a "driver refresh". I just don't trust my setup any more, and that isn't acceptable. Eric _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
