Hard Drive Follow Up

So I've determined that the most likely cause of my hard drive crash is my habit of disconnecting the drive without using the 'safely remove hardware' option. It didn't seem to be any big deal, as my files were always intact when I reconnected. No harm done, right? In fact, I'd always thought that I was doing a good thing for my drive's lifespan, since it would keep the drive from idling all day. Well, I was wrong. Every time I forcibly disconnected the drive, I was damaging the file structure of the disk, until eventually I corrupted the whole thing.

All this to say: you'd better use the Safely Remove Hardware option every time. I know I will from now on. But one problem is the way Windows often hangs on to the external hard disk and won't let it disconnect. Every time you try, you get the message "Device 'Generic Volume' can not be stopped right now." This happens to me regularly, and it's a pain to have to shut down the computer every time you want to safely disconnect your external hard drive.

I did a little Googling, however, and I found two viable options that will let you bypass this hassle and safely remove your drive. (Remember, it's for the sake of all that torrented Seinfeld.) First up is to disable write caching on the drive. What this does is make it safe to yank the plug as long as there's no visible read/write activity on the disk. The downside of this is that this trick slows down the speed of file transfers. Still, some will be interested so here's how to do it. With your drive connected, right click its letter in Explorer or My Computer. Hit Properties and go to the Hardware tab. From there, select the troublesome external drive and click the Properties button (next to Troubleshoot). Go to the Policies tab and then select "Optimize for quick removal" instead of "Optimize for performance". Feel free to thumb your nose at faster writing speeds and proceed to unplug at will.

The other method uses a freeware program called Unlocker. (Download version 1.8.6 here.) This little sucker runs in the background, and allows you to solve the Generic Volume problem - as well as those annoying messages that tell you you can't rename/delete/move a file because it's in use, etc. Install the program, and be sure to leave the Explorer Extensions enabled, because you'll need them. After that, right click the drive letter as before, then select the new "Unlocker" option. Unlocker will now display all the programs and handles that are clutching onto your drive, and you can opt to unlock or kill as many of them as you want. Typically I just click 'unlock all'. Your Safely Remove Hardware option should now work perfectly.

As I said before, I can't stress enough the importance of NOT just pulling the plug on an external drive, unless you've disabled write caching as outlined above. When I was first starting out with computers some time ago, a few unhelpful fakers constantly talked about how there was no need to safely remove your disks. I'm here to tell you that they were wrong.

Hope this helps.

It's Like a Piece of You Dies

Does anything suck worse for a geek than losing an external hard drive? At worst it can represent hundreds or thousands of dollars' worth of backups or intellectual property. Honestly, though, even if 450 gigs of that of that 500 gigabyte external drive is just ill-gotten goods from Limewire and BTJunkie, that represents a lot of time and effort. Stealing is hard work, darn it! Data recovery firms are fully aware that time = money, hence the phenomenally steep prices for their services. (It's basically SOL unless you're a business.) Let's just say I don't exactly feel like forking over $3,000+ for a few seasons of Seinfeld.

At any rate, there's a good reason why I'm talking about this. Last Monday I got home from work and plugged in my shiny new iPod. I had all my music on a 400GB Western Digital - since the hard drive on my laptop is dangerously close to being full from programs - so I hooked that up and set to work transferring songs. Only problem was that when I tried to access the drive, I got the gut-wrenching error message:


The following eight hours were pretty frustrating, as I tried program after program in an attempt to recover some of my files. Eventually I had to reboot, and when the system came back on my drive was now listed as RAW, with 0 bytes free. Bad news, so I went to bed at 3:00AM and tried to forget my worries. The next morning I found GetDataBack, a free-to-analyze, pay-to-recover program. It took all day to run, but after supper I had a list of all my files, and the ability to copy them over. The only hitch was that most of the files were corrupted - sure, they copied, but the MP3s only played for a few seconds, and all the videos were irreparably damaged. Still, I was able to save all my photos, my novels and short stories, and much of my homework. So I give points to GetDataBack for that.

Eventually I just called it a day, ran chkdsk /r /f on the drive, formatted it back to normal, and now I'm working on rebuilding everything. It's a lot of work, and I lost more songs than I can even remember right now, but I'll be back to normal someday. (Just in time for another crash, I know.)

I know I'm playing with fire by using the same hard drive. But really, I don't feel like I have any other options. I can't afford to lay down the $$$ for a second hard drive right this second, and DVDs take far too long to burn; besides...I'd need, what...almost a hundred of them to back up a 400GB hard drive? I'm sure my burner would die before I was able to write all that data. Web backup services would be ideal, but the free ones have very limited space, and sheer time is an issue when you're talking about 100Kbps upload rates. That would take forever.

All I can do right now is play it gentle - leave the drive disconnected when I can, always Safely Remove Hardware, and keep the important data on the laptop itself.

Oh, yeah. And watch the Sunday ads for a good deal.

Going With the Crowd

You know, who doesn't have a blog these days? They've become standard issue for anyone with even an ounce of original opinion. So hey, why not me? I've got a lot of opinions, and I encounter things that probably wouldn't get a lot of blog coverage otherwise. Maybe I can fill a gap, and give any fellow geek passerbys a helping hand. If that's possible, then I would guess the effort will be worth it. As such, this blog will be discussing the geek lifestyle: from the usual entertainment ramblings to tech to crazy internet phenomenons. You know, typical stuff. Watch for freeware reviews (because free is awesome), game commentary, industry thoughts, tricks, tips, gripes, recommendations, and heads-up warnings.

Most importantly, feel free to comment anything. Blogger isn't Xanga, but still - we're all in this together. Might as well share your opinion, too. I'd like to hear it.