BlazeHedgehog Posted October 3, 2007 Report Share Posted October 3, 2007 tldr: Harddrive go boom, lost a ton of data. If I cannot recover the data, almost every project I've been working on for the last 3 years is canceled and I'm forced to start fresh from square 1 on pretty much everything. ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you were looking forward to: - Castlevania: Ballad of Autumn - Shadow of Chaos - Sonic 2k6 2D Final Version Chances are I have lost all of the data for these games forever. Most recently, my cousin discovered he had an excess of spare computer parts and offered them to me as long as I bought a motherboard to support them. After plugging everything in, my old HDD moaned about the new hardware. I expected this. We tried to re-install Windows and it wouldn't take - being a new mobo, I didn't know how to operate it well enough and it was having trouble booting from CDs. It would refuse to boot from the DVDROM and would instead try to boot from a failing CDRW, which wouldn't read the disc. It wasn't until a week later I found the option to force it to boot from the DVDROM first. He took my HDD home with the intent of erasing C:\ and re-installing Windows which caused a bizarre cascading harddrive failure; his Windows disc seemed to be causing the problem, so he got a new one. After finally doing everything correctly, my HDD began bitching about something else: "ERROR: Direct Drive Overlay not loaded." The Direct Drive Overlay is a useless driver installed on the Master Boot Record of a HDD. You see, old motherboards and suchlike only supported HDDs up to a certain size - about 100gb or so, as I've heard. The DDO helps older motherboards cope with this limitation by allowing them to read much larger HDDs. My HDD, being 160gb, probably came pre-installed with a DDO, and somewhere in all the formatting and re-installing it either became corrupted or it was removed. The weird thing is, both my cousin's and my own motherboard don't need a DDO - Logical Block Addressing (LBA) removes the 100gb limit, but enabling it in the BIOS wouldn't do jack shit. My cousin gave me my HDD back a few days ago and I sat wondering why it was bitching about the DDO. I noticed that, when he gave it back, the jumpers were set funny: [ IDE Cable ] [ : : [] : ] [ Power ] That's not listed as a valid jumper setting on the drive itself, so I set the jumpers to make this drive the master drive: [ [] : : : ] After doing this, the motherboard refused to make it past POST. POST, for those who don't know, is the little space inbetween turning a system on and the beep it makes. POST is where the system checks for errors and such to make sure the system CAN boot, and the beep it makes will tell you if everything is functioning properly. Since then, the motherboard refuses to recognize the drive even exists - meaning that, most likely, the drive is dead and gone, and all the data that was on it went with it. I'm not sure if it was accidental electrostatic discharge (though I doubt it) or what, but the drive seems to be gone. That means all my music, all my sound effects, sprites, textures, and games. MMF2 is gone, as are all the games I listed above. I understand that backing your data up is important - but when you have a busted, practically non-functional CDRW for three years, it gets very difficult to make sure everything is backed up properly. The only game I've backed up recently was the game in my sig - the legendary, in-development-for-way-too-long, Sonic: The Fated Hour. I uploaded the .mfa to a webserver during SAGE, so, assuming I can get a copy of Multimedia Fusion 2, I can at least work on that. But everything else? Gone. Fininto. Dead. I have bits and pieces of Sonic 2k6 2D Final Version floating around - test builds and the like. If the drive really is dead forever, I will package up these EXEs and release them here at SFGHQ, but all the features I had planned (Racing ghost time trials, an expanded mission mode, a boss fight etc.) were barely even started when all of this came down. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VectorSatyr Posted October 3, 2007 Report Share Posted October 3, 2007 Yes... the time has come for you to join us in the dark side of the force... *points at sig* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blue Frenzy Posted October 3, 2007 Report Share Posted October 3, 2007 If that happens to me, my heart would stop. Tryed on a different pc? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Shadix Posted October 4, 2007 Report Share Posted October 4, 2007 BF: Your world won't stop if you back your stuff up. While this really blows, and don't take this the wrong way, because it really, really sucks to lose that much work, but I can't help but feel somewhat happy that now TFH might have a chance of getting worked on. ;3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Midiman Posted October 4, 2007 Report Share Posted October 4, 2007 I Feel you, Blaze. I have stopped working on fangames because of huge losses of progress because of data loss, and it's a HELL of a pain to get back on the ball again knowing that you might lose all your progress that you worked on for so long. Here's to hoping that you'll be able to recover your data. and if not, here's to hoping you can have an easy ramp up to speed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowgoten Posted October 4, 2007 Report Share Posted October 4, 2007 Blaze, if you were anyone else I'd call you ambitious, but as you've proven yourself through and through, it makes me sad that you've lost so much work. AT LEAST TFH is still alive. All 3 trailers though were badass. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OverbounD Posted October 4, 2007 Report Share Posted October 4, 2007 That sucks big time. It happened to me once which is why Time Twisted is taking so long to progress. But I have to say, TFH is what I alway looked forward to the most so at least that's still around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlazeHedgehog Posted October 4, 2007 Author Report Share Posted October 4, 2007 Good news-ish: Took out all the jumpers on the drive and the mobo recognizes it again! It's still moaning about the DDO, though. But at least there's still hope I haven't lost my data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epon Posted October 5, 2007 Report Share Posted October 5, 2007 Why didn't you try a USB external case before effin around with other motherboards? Or did I miss you saying that already? Check your inbox, too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blue Frenzy Posted October 5, 2007 Report Share Posted October 5, 2007 I think your data is not lost. It is very difficult to lose the data since, even after HD is formatted you can already recover most of it. As I said, the best thing is to use another computer because it is very possible that it's a mother board incompatibility. Else, it could be that HD driver is damaged, and then it is impossible to make it work with normal methods. Professionals can open your HD, get the discs and place in a machine that will read it to backup. Then, the hd is lost forever but you have your data, or at least most of it. If you think it is important enought to spend your money on recover data, you can always contact a professional service to recover data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlazeHedgehog Posted October 5, 2007 Author Report Share Posted October 5, 2007 Why didn't you try a USB external case before effin around with other motherboards? Or did I miss you saying that already?Check your inbox, too. And how am I gonna get a USB external case? ;P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epon Posted October 5, 2007 Report Share Posted October 5, 2007 Most people have an external USB drive lying around. They're super easy to open up and plop another HDD into. I do it quite frequently when I get my hands on a new HDD (and by "new", I mean "second hand") Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DimensionWarped Posted October 5, 2007 Report Share Posted October 5, 2007 ... And here I just assumed that USB external harddrives weren't like regular harddrives and instead were some manner of proprietary technology. I had no idea that you could just replace the harddrives on them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blue Frenzy Posted October 5, 2007 Report Share Posted October 5, 2007 Yeah, you can. But most of the external HD uses portatile pc HD that are much smaller. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epon Posted October 5, 2007 Report Share Posted October 5, 2007 Yeah, the more expensive, "non-powered" external USB drives are just laptop 2.5" HDD. They consume less power and need less amps, so they can run off of the USB 2.0's power Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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