I have two PCs, one for browsing the net with 2 hard drives and one for making music with 3 hard drives.
Earlier today I noticed that drive no 2 wasn’t showing up in MY COMPUTER. I checked and it wasn’t showing in the BIOS either or in DISK MANAGEMENT. I tried installing it in a different IDE slot it but still won’t show. I can’t see if DOS will reveal it cos it is formatted as NTFS.
So I’m thinking SHIT GRRR FAILED HARD DRIVE but no great loss cos it is just full of MP3s and porn. This is where it gets really strange…
I decide to install this hard drive into my other PC to see if that will reveal it. I trade it with the 3rd hard drive. I check MY COMPUTER and realise that hard drive 2 has now disappeared on this other PC. Taking the other hard drive out hasn’t made any difference to this…
This 2nd hard drive is full of all my samples, tracks (both bounced and the song files themselves). I have some stuff backed up on the hard drive I took out so obviously I am very reluctant to reinstall this one in case the same thing happens to it. Most of the music I have made in the last six months and my many work-in-progresses aren’t backed up anywhere.
I know I’m really stupid. Ironically I installed a DVD writer into the music PC recently but haven’t got round to backing anything up yet.
If anybody can be of any help at all then I will be eternally grateful. It just strikes me as VERY weird that the hard drive on the other PC disappeared when I installed the first one into it.
I tried to install Debian a week ago or so. When partman started (the program for partitioning and selecting which drive should contain what) I realised that Debian doesn’t know shit about ntfs. I had all the stuff on my 20 GB ntfs partition, there were my songs there (including sourcefiles), samples, VSTs, collection of scene demos, graphics, games (and saves from those) and lots of other, mostly important stuff. However, the Debian installer formatted the ntfs partition into linux swap without asking if I want it this way, it even didn’t tell exactly what was happening. I lost it all.
And just like in your case - I bought myself a DVD burner just a month ago, and didn’t think of backuping the stuff.
Luckilly, I have some beckups, though very old ones, and they don’t contain all the stuff I lost.
I have four harddisks in my PC, one of them, a 40gig, is my workdisk with all my songs, graphics, samples and so on. On another one (a 60gig) I keep 5gig free all the time and I wrote myself a little xcopy batch file which does backup all the important stuff (song-sourcefiles, own-made-presets for instruments, my own graphics) every night. And when I finish stuff I put it in a special folder, and whenever it hits the 700mb mark I burn it on CD.
Ofcourse, this only takes care of all the stuff I made my own or cant recover at all (not including sample-cds and stuff like that), but thats okay.
Backing up is really not that hard and once you had an experience where you lost everything you really see how important it is. A few years ago my daughter, two years at that time, pulled at the cord of my keyboard, and instead of unplugging it she did pull my entire PC off my table, with two harddisk completely crashed. since then I never put my PC above groundlevel and there is a rule that no one is to be in my work-room if I am not in there. However, there are so much ways of files disappearing and harddisks crashing, the only thing you can do is to backup the stuff.
Please check your AC / DC adapters. Its very often, that youll loose a drive when your AC / DC is a standard one, that it can´t handle all the stuff. A german test magazine judged 75 % of all common ac / dcs as insufficient. Youll often have the problem, when you are using usb 2.0 equipment, many hd`s and at least 2 cd drives.
Sorry to hear about your loss too…