A Hardware Geek's War Story
by Coral1
Once Upon A Time....
It was just another day-in-the-life of a normal [HA! --Editor] hardware geek. Little did our Hero suspect, the dark evil that the Hardware Gods had planned for him just for their own amusement.
(I should note here that this isn't a gripe or a rant. It's not even about hardware, except in an offhand sort of way. Although it might qualify as an object lesson.)
On with the story...
It had been pointed out to me that I use a lot of slang, along with other terms, that a newbie (someone just starting) might not understand. Since the web is already full of dry, boring articles loaded with "tech speak", I wanted to keep mine as close to "real world" as I could.
So.... For over a week, I have been building a glossary; to go with the definitions I include in my writings.
After FINALLY getting it to look almost the way I wanted it to, I spent a couple of hours arranging and cleaning up all the words and definitions I had just been jamming into a text file as I thought of them, along with some new stuff.
Fight Night
As it was starting to get into the wee hours of the morning, and things had been going very nicely. I thought I would call it quits.
Oh, what the heck! I still had a half a cup of coffee left, so I figured I would just quickly run it through my new spell checker. Pressed Control-Alt-F12. The little sweetheart popped right up and went through that text file like it was warm butter.
Caught a few misspelled words, I added a bunch to the Custom Dictionary, and clicked OK to finish.
Vaporized it!!!!
I'm talking it went from over 6K to a 0-byte file size.
That was NOT a sonic boom you heard that night. That was my head hitting the desk! I hadn't back it up yet, and the backup I did have was nowhere close to the changes I had made.
OK. Not a problem. This is what I do. Right??? Right!!
Round One
First thing... get a fresh cup of coffee. And some aspirin and an icepack for my head.
Next... crank up Disk Investigator (my current disk editor). Put it in Directory mode and look for the file. There it is. Double Click on the file name...
ERROR. Invalid starting sector.
Uh-oh! That can't be good.
Try for an UNDELETE.
ERROR ... File not deleted.
Hmmmmmm....
Go to View Sector mode ... No text there. Go back and forth a dozen sectors either way. Nothing!
I had been saving the file as I went along, so it HAS to be here somewhere!
Time to drink some more coffee, light up a cigarette, and have a bright idea. (Don't start about the cigs! I already gave up good booze and fast women. I'm keeping one bad habit!).
Ahhh-ha! On harddrives, Sectors are grouped into Clusters. Files always take whole clusters even if they don't use all of it. What they do not use is called "wasted space". And HD's write to the first empty sectors they find. Since I defragged not too long ago, my missing file should be toward the rear of the "used" area of the drive.
Soooo... if I write down the starting sector and cluster number of some of the files that were made about the same time as the Glossary one, it should put me in the general area on the HD. I'm a genius! Somebody call MENSA.
Let's see.... the files I picked range between clusters 251,697 to 257,478. THAT's 6,000 CLUSTERS! With 32 sectors in a cluster..... that's way too big a number. You better hold that call.
Ok. Most of the files are in the 255,xxx to 257,xxx range. Better, but that's still 2,000 clusters.
I will just check the first sector of the clusters around those files I picked then.
I spent a half hour poking around, still no luck.
Round Two
Still not a problem. I will just do a search for a keyword.Glossary... Yeah! That should work! Type it in, click Search.
Est. 2 hrs. to scan drive?!?!?! <insert dirty word --Editor>
4 AM: It finally finished. No Match Found <insert more dirty words> Alright. How about adding some html tags. Est. 2 hrs. to scan drive
Woke up about 9 AM to the sound of rain. Good! Don't have to go to work today. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Woke up again about noon. The computer is still on and a Search Results box is waiting for me. No match found.
!@*%$# %^$#@!!
Exit out of everything. Turn the system off.
It sounds like the rain quit. I think I will go outside and get medieval on the front driveway gate, and put the new one on. There are a couple of other things that need a good busting up also.
Round Three
7 PM: fired the system up again. The file had not magically reappear. <sigh>
Went back into D.I. and tried one more search. Since I only have about 5gigs of data on this 30gig drive, I scanned to just past 30%. That should be about 10gigs. Still no match.
OK! This is WAR! Time to break out UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD).
Exited out of D.I and Windows.
Rebooted into the BIOS and set the CDRom as First Boot Device.
Put UBCD in the drive. Then click Save Settings and Reboot.
When UBCD came up, I thought I would try something different. I ran a couple of the file managers first, just to see what they had to say about the situation.
Not the correct angle of attack.
Fired up a disk editor. For some strange reason it hung the system. GRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!
Rebooted and ran another disk editor. It came right up. That's more like it. Typed in the search keywords, clicked Search. Look at that bad boy just screaming through the HD!
Ten minutes later there is my text showing in the sector dump window. WooHoo!
What?!? No copy/paste to a file function?!? No sweat. I will just write down the cluster number, and exit out.
I take the CD out of the drive and Reboot back to Windows.
Run D.I. again, then type in the cluster number, and .... It's Not There!!!!
Impossible!!!
Start viewing the first sectors of the clusters on either side of this one.
BINGO! The numbers seem to be about 10 clusters off in D.I. It's a few clusters before what the editor in UBCD said it was. Copy/pasted the sector dump screen into a text editor and saved it. Then MADE A BACKUP, and I am back in business.
Post Fight
A little bloody and battered. BUT I WON!!!!
A couple of loose ends to clean up:
- The best I can figure, even though I was saving the file as I was working on it, I must have forgotten to save it that last time before I ran the spell checker. A couple of the last minor changes were missing. That might have been why it vaporized. Who knows.
- The spell checker has work great since then.
- Forget about that 6,000 cluster spread I quoted earlier. It was more like 30,000. I was looking in the 257,000 range, when it was really in the 288,000 range. Still.... considering that there are over 1.8 MILLION clusters on this 30gig, it was a good idea. For those that are curious, that's just short of 59 million sectors.
I can not thank Esopo [an ERT Mentor -- Ed.] enough for snail mailing this cd to me. Once again UBCD makes me wonder how I got along without it.
NS,NR!!
