[dba-Tech] VPC 2007 copy/paste disk crash

Fred Hooper fahooper at trapo.com
Tue Feb 12 07:42:35 CST 2008


I was preparing to use one of my saved virtual pc's after months of not
using the program. To prepare a new permutation I did a copy/paste of one of
the existing folders. (Oops!)

After a short wait (during which I didn't kick or jar it) the computer
rebooted and wouldn't start XP. After some flailing, I Checked the disk with
SpinRite and found about 5% unrecoverable data (with ~2 percent that I had
to skip as it estimated 13K hours to recover while working on it) and, after
about 50 hours, am now 56% of the way through the SpinRite run. (A couple of
months ago the disk was clean in the SpinRite run, taking about 18 hours.)

Most of my files were backed up to another hard drive and/or JungleDisk, so
it hasn't been a disaster -- just a time waster (particularly since I had
used a DOS batch file to do the backup, which copied many both
before-and-after file moves).

I've now placed a text file in my VPC directory with the name "Don't Copy
These Folders.txt", with an explanation inside.

It looks like my FAT was also damaged as an important directory (that wasn't
backed up) is missing. I have two requests:

1) Recommendations on a FAT-rebuild program that works with NTFS?

2) Recommendations on a backup program for copying files (with some
versioning) to a local hard disk. (I saw some nice comments on FileBack PC,
but haven't tried it.)

Fred





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