I bought a 2TB external drive to make a backup of all my data; I like to do that at least once a year. Started the “Backup your home directory” program but chose my data drive instead of my home directory. Backup failed. Then shit started disappearing. One directory at a time.

So I started running “Photorec” and managed to get a lot of (unsorted renamed) files before even that quit working. But not the stuff I wanted, of course. All those pictures I’ve been scanning and sorting over the past couple of years. All our personal video files from our day trips/vacations over the past year. All my Paperport documents and .pdf files. Who knows what else!

Tried pulling the drives and putting them in another computer I had laying around; just in case it was the Motherboard. Linux Mint did NOT like that. Kept stopping on a drive missing error. Never did get it to run.

So I put the drives back in the original box. Managed to get completely booted in some kind of recover mode and modified fstab to comment out that drive. Ran mount –a (I think) and all seems to be working. Except that drive, of course. Had to reinstall VMware …

So, since I can’t access the bad drive internally, I need to shut down, remove the drive, and reboot. Thinking of buying a new drive before I do all that.

Think I’ll hook the bad drive up to the Windows 7 machine and let “testdisk” and “Photorec” run as long as they need to run. I have older backups of all my pictures (and just rescanned all them for a test) that I’ll have to redo some of the sorting and stuff. Mostly I’m looking to recover video and .pdf files if I can.

Other than that life has been proceding as usual around here. Has been hot and sunny but today there is the possibility of thunder storms. Gonna have my video camera ready!

Maybe more later. Just wanted to catch up while I could. If all this works after rebooting maybe?