Re: external drive failed?

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As to your 1st point, there were 2 partitions on the external disk, 'H' and
'I'. 'H' was being used by Norton Ghost to back up my 'C' drive, which is
intact, so no loss there. However, the 'I' partition was being used for
stuff I preferred not to keep on the 'C' drive. As I said, not critical
stuff, but losing it is an inconvenience.

As to your 2nd point, it occurred to me also that updates requiring a reboot
(almost all MS updates do) might be a problem, although I could not have said
why. I will take your advice about how to do Windows updates.

To answer your question, the drive is no longer seen by Windows Explorer or
Norton Ghost. It is however, seen by 'Computer Management/Disk Management'
and there the drive appears not to be initialized or partitioned, as I said
before.

So, to summarize your points, the cause of both problems could have been the
computer going into standby while it was trying to do something else.

Now, I've been using the external drive for about a year just for extra
storage and not for backup. I've also allowed Automatic Updates for at least
that long. The interval until standby has been 5 minutes for at least that
long as well.

Now, since neither problem occurred until the Ghost installation, my
prejudice is that it was the conflict between standby and Ghost doing it's
thing that caused both, or between Ghost and something else. It just seems
unlikely that Ghost was not involved since I'd had the aforementioned setup
for so long without a problem and Ghost installed for only a week or so when
the problems occurred.

At any rate, to implement your suggestions I'm going to try to use Scheduled
Tasks to run backups and Windows Updates. This should prevent the
aforementioned conflicts from occurring.

Thanks much for your input. It was most useful. Frankly, I really hadn't
a clue as to what might have caused what seems an outlandish pair of events
and therefore unable to prevent their reoccurrence

..--
ray124c41


"Ghostrider" wrote:


ray124c41 wrote:

Indeed. I went to the Maxtor web site and through their troubleshooting
procedure ended up opening 'Computer Management/Disk Management' which
reports that Disk 1 is 'Not Initialized' and has 189.2 GB capacity and is
'Unallocated'.

According to the Maxtor page, WE will 'see' the drive when it's
initialized, etc., but, as has been pointed out, this will wipe out what's on
the drive and there is a lot of stuff I would like to recover (none of it
critical), so I will make some attempt at data recovery.

You see the irony here: 'H' was my backup partition. LOL. 'I' had the
aforementioned stuff on it.

Thank you all for your input, especially the tips about data recovery.

By the way, any ideas about:
1}what caused the computer to not be able to come out of standby and
2)what caused the drive to crash?

One additional thought. There should not be any concerns if the
data backed up to Drive H still exists in its original, source
location. If not, then there was no backup. Backup implies that
there is a minimum of 2 sets of the same material.

As for the failure to come out of standby, the conclusion of the
[automatic] updates might have required a re-boot, control over
which was intercepted by the computer going into standby or
hibernation. It is not really a good idea to do Windows updates
blindly.

Finally, did the external hard drive actually crash or is it no
longer seen by this particular computer. Was the external hard
drive tested in another computer? An unexpected shutdown, such as
a result of going into standby or hibernation, can be disruptive.


.

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