Crash related questions...

[another view]

This post isn't directly related to Digital Imaging, but something that could happen to any of us - and did to me. I lost my hard drive a couple of weeks ago. I've got a new one, this time with a drive cooler, up and running again although it was a lot of work to reinstall WinXP, Photoshop and all of the other programs I use. Today I got around to hooking up my external hard drive to make sure I could still access it, which is where I store all of my images. I also back up to CD fortunately. The file that I kept my images in was wiped clean. I don't remember how many gigs that was, but it's almost two years worth of files. The other files - with PS'ed prints, etc were OK. The drive checks out OK, but since most of the data was gone I reformatted it and have began to reload it with my files.

A couple of days before the crash, I had an error message in Photoshop CS that browser.exe was a corrupt file - this came up while accessing the file mentioned above. I am running Norton Internet Security and do live updates, as well as SpyBot Search & Destroy.

The theory that I went on before, based on talking to someone who knows more than me was that the HD might have overheated. Now that there are two drives with problems, I'm wondering if a virus of some sort got thru all of that and did me in. Both are good-quality drives, the internal was a 40G Seagate that was 2-1/2 years old. It was about 1/2 full but I took quite a bit out of it about a week before the crash. Probably had less than 10G on it. The external is a big Maxtor one-touch, only 3-4 months old and is still working fine.

If you're still reading, I thank you! And if you have any ideas what happened, I'd appreciate hearing them. Things happen, I just want to learn from this so that (hopefully) it doesn't happen again!

[Peter_AUS]

It is a fact of life with computer hardware. They do fail, and sometimes only partially fail. But even the best anti trojan, anti virus software etc is only about 80% effective most of the time, nothing is 100% totally effective, except staying off of the internet and never installing anything on the computer. But then life would be just so much more boring wouldn't it.

You may have been able to recover the hard drive, there are programs that can do that, pretty effectively these days, compared with the old days of hardware failure.

[Trevor Ash]

I did this stuff for a living...supporting a hundred computers at a time. Things fail, and they fail in unexpected ways. It sound like the hard drive just went bad on you. One hardware error leads to all kinds of strange software errors that may or may not make sense. Usually the software error messages point you in the wrong drection in case of actual hardware failure.

Most (I'd guess 99.9%) malware out there isn't designed to delete files and crash your system so that you must reformat it.

There's no sense theorizing these things. If there's evidence use it. Otherwise you'll drive yourself crazy wondering what caused the problems. Go with the most obvious assumption based on the info you have, which to me says hardware failure and move on.

Congratulations by the way. It appears you were well protected from these disasters! You're a rare breed. And you also have the benefit of now being able to actually use your disaster recovery method. That'll teach you a lot and I bet before your next disaster you'll have made a lot of solid changes for a smoother recovery.

[another view]

Thanks, guys. I actually lost very little info, just a couple of emails that I hadn't gotten printed out - and they weren't a big deal anyway. I was just wondering if this sounded like a bigger problem and if there was any way to avoid it in the future. Guess not, life goes on! ;)

[Peter_AUS]

There is no way to avoid a hardware failure at all, just do backups of all your important data and you will more than likely remain relatively OK.