midtoad's blog

Lost all my music and photos

Catastrophe strikes! The drive that stores all my music (140 GB of it) and all my digital photos got hammered and became unreadable. I've spent most of my free time over a week trying to get it going. Along the way I learned a few things.

The major learning is that any drive, no matter how new, can suddenly be damaged (if not physically, then logically), so you'd better have a backup plan. I did, although I hadn't backed up that drive for a couple of months, so I'll need to replace a few items in my music collection.

The other learning is that external USB drives are not as safe to use as internally connected drives. They are more subject to corruption, as we shall see.

And I also learned quite a bit about master boot records (MBRs) and partitions along the way.

Here's how it happened: I was working on my Mac Mini and had a lot of windows open. There were a number of processes running and the computer became totally unresponsive for a period of at least five minutes. I decided that the thing was hung and should just reset it. Bad idea, because this meant that the USB drive would not be properly disconnected from the computer (and in certain circumstances, like mine, this can cause the drive to get whacked). When I restarted the Mac, the USB drive was no longer visible.

I disconnected the drive and plugged it into a Windows PC. Windows couldn't find any partition on the drive! Now I was getting worried. I removed the drive from its external case, opened the case of my desktop PC, and attached it via IDE cable. Windows still couldn't see it. Very bad.

Next I started searching on the next for data recovery utilities and found a few, like StellarInfo Phoenix. When I ran them, they invariably said that my MBR was corrupted... and they couldn't find any partitions.

Following that, I inserted a Mandriva Linux Live CD in the CDROM drive and restarted the computer. Linux could see my partitions! But, it also thought that there were 6 other small partitions on the drive in addition to my 4 data partitions. Worse, it thought that none of the partitions contained a FAT32 (Windows) filesystem; i.e. the drive was unformatted. And it told me that the MBR was corrupted.

Now, the MBR is the first sector on the drive, and it's here that the information on the partitions is stored, along with the FAT (file allocation table), which is the directory of all your directories and files. Since the MBR was damaged, any changes I tried to make to the partition table did not get recorded in the MBR. It didn't mater whether I tried the changes in Linux or in Windows (using Partition Magic 8); the result was same.

Eventually I found a DOS utility called MBRwork that allowed me to rebuild the MBR. It has to run off a floppy, so you need a bootable floppy; I got a copy of BootmasterPlus, which installs itself on a floppy along with the DOS files needed to boot the PC, and just copied mbrwork.exe onto that floppy. Then I booted the PC, exited Bootmaster, and started MBRwork.

After I had rebuilt the MBR, I restarted Windows and was able to use Partition Magic to create new partitions on my drive. Now, Windows will not allow you to create a FAT partition larger than 32 GB (Microsoft wants to force you to use NTFS instead, but that makes the drive unusable in Linux and Mac OS X); however, Partition Magic will happily make any size FAT partition your heart desires. If you don't want to spend the cash on that app though, you can just go to distrowatch.com and download a copy of the GParted linux distro, a special version of Linux designed solely for the purpose of parititioning hard drives.

Finally, I copied all the files from my backup drive to the newly rebuilt drive. Last task, look for replacement music files.

In the past 3 months, I've had two other drives fail. The drive on my wife's notebook simply died one day without any warning. (Actually, in retrospect there were warnings, like the notebook simply rebooting without warning, but we attributed those to voltage dips as the battery was dead). And a small external USB drive I was using one day woke up corrupted and unusable. So, the lesson seems to be that all drives will fail, so you'd be better be prepared!

It's a really good idea to make a copy of your drive's partition table. The truly paranoid will also want to make a copy of the drive's MBR onto an outside medium like a floppy, and put it aside for safekeeping.