My Maxtor also played up last month, and I too bought a WD MyBook replacement! Fortunately, I don't use any backup software that was mangled by the WD software, so the transfer of data was only painful in that about 10% of the image files were showing bad reads: I used the old DOS command XCOPY to do the transfer, worked very well in the background. I was also lucky (or well enough organised!) to have a second copy of the image files so that I was able to replace those that showed bad reads - nothing lost in the long run. The only issue I have now is that another external HDD now gets lost from My Computer occasionally and has to be remounted every now and then - possibly the firmware in the MyBook is interfering with it, but it's no biggy. The Maxtor now seems to be Ok, and I will use it for temporary file creation where necessary: can't rely on it for long term storage, of course.
John Coyle Brisbane, Australia -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Anthony Farr Sent: Wednesday, 1 August 2012 1:01 PM To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List Subject: Re: OT - Backups & Cockups, Netbooks & MyBooks, Hard Drives &, Dryers To all who've responded, thank you for the sympathetic comments. I guess I was correct to believe that PDMLers would find data backup to be a topic close to their own hearts, and that a saga about it would find interested readers. Something that I should point out is that the failed drive wasn't the WD MyBook 1TB, it was a Maxtor Basics Desktop 500GB which is about three years old. The WD MyBook is the unit I hold responsible for shutting down my Clickfree Automatic Backup, thus initiating my descent into backup hell. I uncased the Maxtor and tested it in a hard drive dock, and although spinning and free of any clicks it was absent from the drive list in 'My Computer'. Disk Management couldn't find it either. I took it to a data recovery service for a quote (not worth $600 for two months of uninspired unbacked-up work IMO) who said that many Maxtors Basics have a firmware fault lying dormant within, just waiting for some little stimulus like a bad shutdown to push them over the edge. The fault prevents them from initializing on startup. Maxtor users be warned. This year is the first in my time as a computer user that I've had any total hard drive failures, and now I've had two (the Maxtor and my netbook). In the past one or two of my drives had developed bad sectors, but remained in service once I'd run error detection and mapped the bad sectors out of use. regards, Anthony -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
