Lightning-related: I lost ALL my Lightning pictures, videos, soundclips, etc.

My shizzle is gone. All my MP3s, divx movies, videos, pictures, homework, projects, saved emails, receipts, etc. are all GONE. What's funny is that everything else works perfectly. All the diagnosis programs I ran checked out. No bad sectors, no virus detected (according to Norton AV), nothing. No ports accessed (according to my port watcher logfile).

Now I am wondering about the integrity of this Western Digital HD I'm running.

So I guess I'll build another combo more rock-steady than this current one and just move my hardware to another case/PS. Looking at the new AMD Bartons, the KT400 MoBos, and some Serial ATA 10k HDs. Also an external firewire HD for backup ghosts.

Lesson here: you can never run too stable and you can never be too secure. Watch your ports and make sure they ALL close unless otherwise modified. Oh, and Windows 2000 Advanced Server isn't as stable as I thought it was.

 

Backups?

It wasn't your H\D. If the integrity of your drive is good and you boot-up and the rest of your data is ok then you probably got nailed by a old virus that came in via e-mail. It's been a long time since of heared this scenerio but there are viruses (older ones) that would only destroy multimedia type files, re-associate them, etc....

Very sorry to hear that, it stinks to loose data. When you get your new hardware dont forget the backups. No amount of money can buy perfect hardware!! We have million dollar systems, w\backup servers, C\D juke boxes, tape backups, off site backups etc.. we have still managed to loose some data over time. Hardware WILL fail you eventually, and it will fail you when your backup tape drive is full and the T1 to the backup server is down. :-)



-0light1

 

OUCH!

My laptop and homoe computer has 2 harddrives.
1 for the programs and crap,
the other for movies, MP3's, School notes and papers and research.. etc..

I had to reload Windows XP on my laptop, but all my info was there, just hte programs were corrupt.

I feel for ya.

Obviously you got the internet up and running though

 

depending on what happened and what you hgave done to "fix" it there are some really good recovery tools avail now

I have had good luck with Ontracks EasyRecovery Professional Edition

Doug

 

Sorry Cyntaxx, THAT SUCKS
I Hate when that happens
I've had hard drives go bad on me twice over the yr's,
Dougs right, there are lots of Recovery Co.'s that can help you.
Sometimes you can freeze the bad HD and get it going one last time too, so you can do a quick back up

Last time I lost over 3g's of Music, and prob a thousand lesbo Vid's. &(!@!#$!*(#!$(#!#$!#$!*(!$*@!$#(!$#(!#$!(#$!#

Now I put all my important stuff in "My Doc's" under sub folders and keep a CDRW in the extra drive 24/7 and run a back up every week or so of the complete "My Doc's Folder" I currently have 12,777 files in it, contained in 549 Folders

I also have CDR's of each and every entire program I've ever loaded into my system. (So "EVERYTHING" can be re-installed)

Other CDR's of All my Pic's
Other CDR's of my Vids
Etc.....

Oh, and of course a Restore and ""Go Back"" Program

 

yeah, I have a partition map recovery tool too that you can try.

Dan

 

Yep I have that but don't know exactly how to use it? Guess I will try to figure it out...

The computer runs fine. Even when I found out my data was gone, the programs and Internet and everything ran topnotch. And the diags showed nothing wrong. It's as if someone physically walked into my apartment and deleted everything.

 

You didn't happen to recieve/open any VBS attached emails?

There are a few virii, some derivatives of ILOVEYOU that delete all mpg/mp3/jpg specific files...hence, your system looks fine on everything else, but all your data/music/graphic files have been deleted.

It also would have taken some time to finish, surprised you didn't notice advanced disk activity at any point.

Get an ILOVEYOU variant scanner and check your machine.

You should be able to "undelete" all your files with this program:
ActiveUnDelete
or
File Scavenger 2.0

Works really well on NTFS and Win32 paritions.

Dan

 

This is off topic and should be moved.

By the way, learn Linux

 

JDM approves of Ontrack products - So it stays

 

We figured that out about you Doug...

 

Hmm my Norton AV is pretty well-updated and did not show any variants of ILOVEYOU found. Also, I was away with the computer on for the better part of the day (about 9 hours) so any increased CPU usage and disk activity I would not have noticed.

Do those above programs require a second hard disk or partition? I have Ontrack's Easy Recovery and it tells me the destination folder of all files tagged has to be on a seperate drive.

 

Chuck, like i told you last night. Its a problem 99% related to Win2k Server, which isnt exactly the best OS to be running on a workstation.

 

Well I hope to switch to something else soon...

 

Really sounds like a virus, but who knows...

Best bet is my solution (a little overkill)

DSL->server->home network (server as two NIC cards)

server runs Win2K server as a full Domain server.

Server has 6 disks:
2 for a mirrored system partition
4 for a RAID data drive

Powerfile DVD writer (200 disk DVD+R) backs it up occationally...

all "My *" (documents/pictures/videos) gets redirected to the server, so you'll really never lose anything.

Coldie