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[06:22] Data taste good, Windows EAT DATA
Date: 8/14/05 at 2:22PM
OK, so that's not strictly true - but I thought it sounded funny. Here's the lowdown.
Shona bought a BlueEye portable HDD enclosure before she left Oz so that she could easily transport all her Mail/Recipes/Patters/personal data/etc. She then stuck an 80Gb drive in it and - for maximum portability - formatted it with FAT32. Now, as everyone knows, Microsoft have been making it harder and harder to format things as FAT32 in recent years, especially things bigger than 32Gb. To be fair to Microsoft, they do it because it is insanely wasteful to try and use FAT32 on such a large partition but this is the beauty of choice. If I WANT to stick the loaded gun in my crotch and pull the trigger, I can! But I digress, where was I, blah blah BlueEye blah, ah yes.
So with the aid of Linux and the mkdosfs utility the disk was formatted (NOTE: It has come to my attention that someone has ported mkdosfs to Windows - I haven't tried it yet but I've downloaded it for later) and the world was a beautiful place...she took it home, plugged it in moved all her data onto it and took it out.
A week later, it was plugged back in and Windows asked, most politely, "The disk in drive F is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?". Obviously this is not the kind of question you'd like to be asked about the disk on which you have the only copy of your mail and other personal data (no, really). She moved it to another XP machine and it worked, back on her machine, "How bout I format your disk? Lemme format it, go on!", weird. There was no time for diagnosis so it just came over here and I had a look at it this morning.
I plugged it in and it appeared as a non-formatted "Healthy" device. I checked it out with Disk Investigator and it looked like there was data there. I pondered for a minute. Because it's a USB drive most of the traditional MS tools aren't going to work because you can't get access to the USB device from a DOS botodisk. I had a look on the ole internet and came across a delighful little utility called TestDisk. With the aid of the online documentation I had the problem sorted in five minutes. Hoorah for Open Source! Basically it took a backup copy of the FAT32 boot sector and overwrote a corrupted one however it's abilities seem to stretch a lot further than that - hopefully I'll never need them but I now have a copy of that snuggled into my USB toolkit (which is getting obscenely large now, weighing in at 281Mb). For more information on how you could fix the problem if you actually UNDERSTOOD the 1s and 0s on the platter, read here: How a Corrupted USB Drive Was Saved by GNU/Linux