SRS -

It seems to be the season for hard drive stuff. I just received a replacement (under warrenty) for a 160GB external that went toes up. I lost essentially everything on the drive, but fortunately there was only one file that wasn't replicated somewhere else in backups. (Somewhere in about 80 CDs?????: but I have indexes.)

The odd thing was that the drive kept accepting writes to the drive, and everything looked okay until I tried to copy back to another drive. Then about 60% of the stuff was "corrupted," and a lot of stuff that looked good was sort of questionable. My suspicion is a head crash, probably due to mishandling with the forklift at the retail place. Once it went, you could watch things crumble - rapidly progressive.

While it was still claiming all the stuff was there, I ran a DOS "DIR H:\*.*/S>filelist.txt," and it worked perfectly, so I know exactly what went down. (360,503 Files - 79,989,555,702 bytes, listed in a Word .doc 8,384 pages long.)

The good news is that recently my AV system scan only has to check about 480,000 files, so it goes a lot quicker. Not too long ago it was running just over 1,040,000 on 3 drives ... But I've cleaned things up since then as well ...

John