AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!

[ffutures]

This is Murphy's law in action....

Yesterday I went roung to my niece's flat with my old TV and my brother in law and nephew to help move the damn thing. I was also going to help my niece transfer a few megabytes of files off her old computer to her new one. In order to do this I wiped my spare pen drive.

In the event I got there and she'd already taken the hard disk out of the old PC, and was planning to shove it into an external case to transfer the files, so I couldn't do the transfer. But since I wasn't using the old pen drive anyway I gave it to her.

Three guesses what happened today, and the first two don't count...

I wanted to do a little work at lunch today, and put my new shiny pen drive into the PC. It says it can't read it, and that the disk hasn't been formatted. So do two other PCs. Then the thing dies completely...

So unless I can come up with a fix, which seems unlikely, I'm out twelve quid for the drive, various bits and pieces I've written in the last couple of weeks - fortunately not the games stuff, that gets backed up on two different hard drives, and some bits and pieces of fanfic I wrote ages ago but never got to the point of posting - say 15-20,000 words in a dozen or so stories. Which, needless to say, were formerly backed up on the pen drive I gave to my niece yesterday.

There's a moral to this, but I don't think I want to use that sort of language.

Comments

[uninvitedcat.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't laugh at that run of bad luck/timing, I really shouldn't. So I'll sit here and muffle it as best I can...!

[i_kender]

Oh, hard luck.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Murphy's Law indeed, and the rule of inverse karma.

I recommend taking off and nuking something from orbit.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Laugh all you like - I deserve it...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, but how do I get all the world's spammers into an area small enough to nuke?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The really annoying part is where I got into this mess by being helpful to people. I have a suspicion that the drive got bashed while we were moving the TV...

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

They say something like 90% of the worlds spam is the result of half a dozen individuals.

... It really shouldn't be that difficult for internet users to club together, and take out a hit on these half dozen individuals I'm thinking.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I presume you've already asked your niece if she's erased the old drive yet?

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Most of the world's spammers live in Baton Roca, Florida, according to the Guardian Online Technology column.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Commiserations!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Don't have her number on me - I'll check when I get home.

[w00hoo.livejournal.com]

According to your post you wiped it yourself before taking it across...

I don't know if they are undeletable, I guess so, they're only memory after all.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It may be possible - I doubt it, I deleted 60-odd megabytes from 128 - but it's worth trying.

The other possibility is it's a problem with the new stick that can be temporarily cured by e.g. freezing it long enough to transfer the data.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

And the answer is she's used it today, no chance of any files. So it goes.

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

Was the old stick runing under Windows or Mac OS? The information is most likely still there, just the pointer information to files and the partition being removed. There's a lot of tools that you can use to recover that information.

I was going to suggest the new stick might be fine, but some other problem has occured. I had that problem with a previous laptop where the firewire controller died and corrupted an external drive, and the same thing with a newer USB enclosure that ended up corrupting data on an external drive.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's completely dead - not even recognised by computers now, I think the controller has died or something. No way is it worth paying for data recovery. It may still be under warranty, but I don't want another the same - I'll have to see what the vendor says.

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Good luck with it.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Any chance that the old files are still somewhere on your niece's flash drive, and that a suitably tricky piece of software could copy all its bits to another drive and piece the files together?

[dsample.livejournal.com]

There's a moral to this

No good deed goes unpunished?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Not really, not now she's used it - and to be honest the stuff one that pen was oldish backups, none of the work in progress, so it wouldn't help _that_ much.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Pretty much sums it up.