Something (possibly the Vaio) scrambled my external Firewire/USB2 Iomega HDD connected via Firewire to the Vaio. It's now been sent for data recovery and my fingers are crossed. This is gonna cost me. The details below... and maybe someone has an idea of what could have happened?
I was thrilled with my 17" custom built machine (XPPro, 1.8 GHz, 80GB 5400, 1 GB RAM from oempcworld.com and 256 MB installed by Sony)... BUT
I did notice that when the machine went to sleep it failed to wake up at least once before...fairly typical for a laptop. The power settings were set to a factory default called "VAIO Optimized" where everything is set to NEVER except "System Standby when plugged in" was set to 30 minutes.
I left the laptop on overnight connected via Firewire to 3 daisy-chained external HDDs. The first on the chain is the victim here, a NTFS drive. One other was NTFS, apparently fine, and other was FAT-32 (for interoperability with Macs) also apparently fine. Overnight the laptop went into Standby and in the morning would not resume. I pressed and held the power button, it turned off, I waited a few sec, I pressed it again, it booted. All three drives were recognized, although the NTFS one first in the chain showed a default drive letter and default name, not the letter (M) and name (Mutt) that I assigned it.
Double clicking on the drive yielded this message "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." I plugged it via USB1.0 into my old Inspiron 8000 and the error was "The parameter is incorrect." After several more tries (turning it off, letting it rest a hour, trying again) via firewire on the Sony the error became "The disk is not formatted. Do you want to format now?"
I removed the drive from the Iomega casing and tried booting it directly into a XPPro desktop machine (bypassing whatever Iomega has in there to control the drive) but no luck. I downloaded "Stellar Pheonix NTFS v2.0" which identified four logical drives on the physical drive, but crashed when trying to locate "lost files." I finally packed it up and sent it to Iomega Data Recovery, which is actually Actionfront Data Recovery and seems quite reputable.
The Vaio has Norton installed and was updated the day before the meltdown. Otherwise I have installed little besides Photoshop7 and WS_FTP Pro, the same exact installs I have been using without trouble on other machines.
I am now afraid to turn on the Vaio and deathly afraid to connect the other two drives to it. I'm waiting on the diagnosis from Actionfront.
Am I crazy to blame the Vaio? (I have used that drive for months on many other systems with no problems...) Am I crazy to not connect my other two drives to it? Any ideas what could have happened?
My beautiful new Vaio: drive killer?
I was thrilled with my 17" custom built machine (XPPro, 1.8 GHz, 80GB 5400, 1 GB RAM from oempcworld.com and 256 MB installed by Sony)... BUT
I did notice that when the machine went to sleep it failed to wake up at least once before...fairly typical for a laptop. The power settings were set to a factory default called "VAIO Optimized" where everything is set to NEVER except "System Standby when plugged in" was set to 30 minutes.
I left the laptop on overnight connected via Firewire to 3 daisy-chained external HDDs. The first on the chain is the victim here, a NTFS drive. One other was NTFS, apparently fine, and other was FAT-32 (for interoperability with Macs) also apparently fine. Overnight the laptop went into Standby and in the morning would not resume. I pressed and held the power button, it turned off, I waited a few sec, I pressed it again, it booted. All three drives were recognized, although the NTFS one first in the chain showed a default drive letter and default name, not the letter (M) and name (Mutt) that I assigned it.
Double clicking on the drive yielded this message "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." I plugged it via USB1.0 into my old Inspiron 8000 and the error was "The parameter is incorrect." After several more tries (turning it off, letting it rest a hour, trying again) via firewire on the Sony the error became "The disk is not formatted. Do you want to format now?"
I removed the drive from the Iomega casing and tried booting it directly into a XPPro desktop machine (bypassing whatever Iomega has in there to control the drive) but no luck. I downloaded "Stellar Pheonix NTFS v2.0" which identified four logical drives on the physical drive, but crashed when trying to locate "lost files." I finally packed it up and sent it to Iomega Data Recovery, which is actually Actionfront Data Recovery and seems quite reputable.
The Vaio has Norton installed and was updated the day before the meltdown. Otherwise I have installed little besides Photoshop7 and WS_FTP Pro, the same exact installs I have been using without trouble on other machines.
I am now afraid to turn on the Vaio and deathly afraid to connect the other two drives to it. I'm waiting on the diagnosis from Actionfront.
Am I crazy to blame the Vaio? (I have used that drive for months on many other systems with no problems...) Am I crazy to not connect my other two drives to it? Any ideas what could have happened?
My beautiful new Vaio: drive killer?
