I hate my computer. It all began yesterday when we decided to do a repair on my C: drive to try and get Windows to run faster. Joe ran the repair while I was still at work, but got a bunch of errors, so I ran it again when I got home. The second time seemed to work – things were running faster, particularly with the new RAM Joe installed. I was able to load all my programs and surf like normal the entire evening. Things were good.
Fast forward to this morning when suddenly my computer locked up on Joe and would not load Windows. Nearly all my personal files are not on the same hard drive as Windows, and I had backed up my bookmarks the other day, so we decided to do a clean install of Windows. Joe formatted the C: drive and ran the install.
Everything seemed fine after that except my computer would not connect to the internet no matter what we did, and trust me, we tried everything. Joe thought we should do another clean install but now I was getting paranoid and decided I wanted to back up a bunch of stuff from my secondary drive first just in case. I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but I’m glad I did!
Just so the following makes sense, here’s my current hard drive setup:
Drive #1 is the main drive. It’s 80GB with two partitions. Partition #1 contains Windows and all my programs and Partition #2 contains a backup folder where I put items from Drive #2 that I’ve not yet backed up to DVD.
Drive #2 is my secondary drive. It’s 160GB and contains all my personal files including all the photos I’ve ever taken and my MP3 collection.
So I was accessing Drive #2 to burn DVDs of my photos when I realized that while the directories were there, some of the photos were not. They had simply disappeared! Luckily for me most of them, but not all, were in the backup folder, so I burned my DVDs off that data instead.
I started poking around Drive #2 after that and the extent of the damage became clear – either files simply disappeared as I tried to move them or they wouldn’t open up at all. Most noticeable was how suddenly my MP3 folder, which was nearly 30GB the last I checked, was only 13GB.