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Miserable
15 years ago
General
I'm kind of in a situation where everything that could go wrong did go wrong...
I've been experiencing BSoDs pretty much daily for about a week. I was getting kind of sick of it, so I figured the best course of action would be to back up my hard drive and reformat with a fresh installation of Windows. So I boot up a Linux CD, back up my hard drive to an external, then stick my WinXP CD in, format the internal drive, and install Windows.
The first sign of trouble was when the external hard drive I had backed up my data to showed up as unpartitioned space. I didn't really think much of it because I wasn't going to be installing anything to that drive.
The second sign of trouble was when I went to install my hardware drivers. I kept them stored on that same external drive. That drive wasn't showing up in Windows, but my other external was.
I booted back into Linux. The drive didn't show up.
I ran the WinXP setup CD again. The drive didn't show up.
So now I've got another dead 1TB drive, only this time I wasn't able to back it up, and it has things I need. I have a large number of paid downloads on there, and I don't know if I'll be able to get them back. I have a number of soundfonts that I downloaded a long time ago and the websites I got them from no longer exist. I have my WinXP hardware drivers on there...
The drivers don't seem like they'd be an issue, right? Yeah, well, this computer's 5 years old, and Dell's website doesn't seem like it supports it any more. I went to the driver download section and entered the laptop's service tag, and it was correctly identified as XPS Gen 2, but it said there were no downloads available. So I can't even install my wifi card's drivers to get online.
So how am I online right now? Linux. I didn't really want to do it since all of the software I use is made for Windows, but since all my software installation files were on that external, and I can't get Windows drivers for my wifi card, I don't have much of a choice.
So yeah, unless some miracle happens, everything's gone. All my instrument libraries, all my project files, all my presets, everything.
I've been experiencing BSoDs pretty much daily for about a week. I was getting kind of sick of it, so I figured the best course of action would be to back up my hard drive and reformat with a fresh installation of Windows. So I boot up a Linux CD, back up my hard drive to an external, then stick my WinXP CD in, format the internal drive, and install Windows.
The first sign of trouble was when the external hard drive I had backed up my data to showed up as unpartitioned space. I didn't really think much of it because I wasn't going to be installing anything to that drive.
The second sign of trouble was when I went to install my hardware drivers. I kept them stored on that same external drive. That drive wasn't showing up in Windows, but my other external was.
I booted back into Linux. The drive didn't show up.
I ran the WinXP setup CD again. The drive didn't show up.
So now I've got another dead 1TB drive, only this time I wasn't able to back it up, and it has things I need. I have a large number of paid downloads on there, and I don't know if I'll be able to get them back. I have a number of soundfonts that I downloaded a long time ago and the websites I got them from no longer exist. I have my WinXP hardware drivers on there...
The drivers don't seem like they'd be an issue, right? Yeah, well, this computer's 5 years old, and Dell's website doesn't seem like it supports it any more. I went to the driver download section and entered the laptop's service tag, and it was correctly identified as XPS Gen 2, but it said there were no downloads available. So I can't even install my wifi card's drivers to get online.
So how am I online right now? Linux. I didn't really want to do it since all of the software I use is made for Windows, but since all my software installation files were on that external, and I can't get Windows drivers for my wifi card, I don't have much of a choice.
So yeah, unless some miracle happens, everything's gone. All my instrument libraries, all my project files, all my presets, everything.
You can find drivers elsewhere, if you know what you're looking for. It seems like the bigger issue would be to get your files back, though, so do that first.
I'd do what the guy before me said and try to run some data retrieval software to see if maybe you can get it back. To say that really sucks would be a huge understatement, I'm sorry all that had to happen :(