First post, by bestemor
- Rank
- Oldbie
just in case someone in here are vaguely familiar with these things....
My (40gb IDE seagate) hdd suddenly wouldn't start up, or rather, winXP was complaining about something.
(had just fiddled ever so slightly in bios with some harmless settings)
Ended up with that 'did not load properly last time, what do you want to do' page, with the safe-mode and last-known-working-setup options, among others.
But no matter what option, it hung completely there, though safe mode got me down to loading the AGP driver(or so it seemed) before full stop.
Anyway, short story - I gave up, and restored(DriveImage2002) an older image of C-disk, or so I thought !
* * *
It STILL remembered! that old botched boot, and still refused to boot with the new image, even if I had completely killed the C-partion (D was untouched). What gives ? HOW does this happen, WHERE does stupid winXP get it's info from ?
AND, even weirder, I now notice that all the newest files in MyDocuments are still there, after the massacre.... ??
The rest of my previously installed programs etc was dead and gone, but not the above!
(I finally managed to get it to boot the new image, NO idea whatsoever on how, though all the prodding/testing/error checking may have helped)
SO, I must assume a complete reformat of the C-partion does NOT kill MyDocuments ?
And not even old boot failures (which was what I hoped for with my image restore/partionkill? )
How, if at all, can that(deleting) be done ?
* * *
- Granted, I HAD changed the location of mydocuments to the D-disk some time before(damn 'games for windows'! eating up my C-space), but that setting was NOT on the image, neither the year younger files.
Yeah, google etc, but I'm just so annoyed now, having spent hours trying to fix this, so I could play my game... sigh...
(and not sure which keywords would be efficient, as I only keep getting hits with the exact opposite! problem - lost files)
*
PS :
while checking the s.m.a.r.t. data on the disk via a different computer, I got this crazy raw value for temperature(9-12 digits), and some other stuff I don't remember, millions of read-errors among other things, with a warning of 'time of death' predicted to be TODAY!
But it now works just fine, again. As it did yesterday... And it read and copied like nothing had happened while I tested it on the other machine.
No strange sounds, no nothing. 3 year old disk with vEry light use, months without any action.
(and it was no problem reading/copying etc during the frantic testing, so... 😕 )
