I'm in a bad mood.

So last night I turned on my computer to upload about 800 soccer pictures from a tournament. And low and behold, this is what I saw:

"Boot error: operating system failure"

Awesome, my main hard drive fried itself, absolutely out of the blue.

Fortunately all of my photos are backed up on an external, however, all of my software was on the failed drive, and I do not have the backup disks (custom built computer, previous owner did not have disks). Out of my four hard drives I have it had to be the main drive with all of my software to fail.

Right now I'm on my brothers old computer, which is fine, but it does not have CS2 or any editing software for that matter, right now the only purpose it can serve is to transfer pictures to my external, and the internet(Firefox won't run on it, It will only run Opera) Not to mention the 30 gigs of music, and 80 gigs of movies that were on the second drive in the computer....

So as you might have expected, I'm in a fairly bad mood right now, as I have nearly 1700 pictures from the Soccer tournament this weekend, and no way to process them... sounds like as good excuse for CS3 to me

So there is my rant on the frustrations of modern technology for the night.

Ouch..sorry about that mate. Must be soo annoying
So you gonna have to buy CS2again?

yeah, it would appear so at this point. Although I can get it with a student discount for around 100 bucks, that's still a good chunk of change.

But what I'm really missing is all that music, i'm sitting here in silence. I can't remember the last time I haven't been listening to music while on the computer.

My sympathies. I am taking some fairly extreme measures to deal with data protection right now.. and my main computer's hard disk has thrown a bad sector. Maybe it really is a good time to work on protecting the data (I caught it before things truly went south).

The bad part is the work and expense.. but if we won't protect our own data.. no one will.

Digital has its advantages..and it's overheads. Still, having said that, I would not want to sort through a lifetime of shoeboxes containing photos just to share the ones I want.

Hmmmm...

Custom-built computer with no program disks... sounds suspiciously like rip-off city to me.

Consider this a learning experience. You now have two lessons learned.

1) Make sure everything you buy is legit, which means you'll have the disks.

2) NEVER fail to make backups!

There are ways to recover depending on how the drive failed and how it was partitioned. Usually when you see boot errors, the drive itself is ok but for some reason the boot partition got clobbered.
Anyway, if the drive was set up as one large partition, you might be able to recover much of what you had by installing a new drive, put the OS on and set it to the primary disk. Put the bad drive in slave mode and plug it in. If you lucky, the drive will still be readable and you can copy off all your stuff to the new drive.
If it was partitioned, you may be able to install a new OS into the primary partition and all of the other will remain intact.
For the lost programs, as long as you still have the valid license agreements, many vendors will replace the media.

If you have XP and a XP disc you can do a repair install of XP and it will not mess with any of your other files.

you could get photoshop via other means...

This just reminds me that I reeeaaally need to do more to backup - I have about 3/4 of my photos on DVD, but I really should get a third hard drive

anyone have an old hard drive?

Harddrives are so cheap, anybody who doesn't backup their stuff is dumb. I work at Seagate and feel sorry all these people who give me the line of "I'm a photographer and I lost all my stuff on this external hard drive". They think if their stuff is on another HDD, and not the same one that Windows/Photoshop is on, it's a backup.

I tell them, "Well just format the external drive, and copy your photos back over to it" and they give me the line "It's only on that one external HDD".

I back up my photos on 2 HDD and burn to DVD at a slow burn speed at that!

grphx wrote in post #2461514
Harddrives are so cheap, anybody who doesn't backup their stuff is dumb....

Yupyupyup!!! backup early, backup often. Anything your not willing to delete, backup.

grphx wrote in post #2461514
I back up my photos on 2 HDD and burn to DVD at a slow burn speed at that!

This will not help. Fast, slow makes no difference. A better scheme is back up with verify enabled. It doubles the write time, but you are insured that the write took successfully and without bit error.

Wooo, this happened to me this week.
I lost the D drive that had a hard time spinning up on my IBM Z Pro. I happened to get the drive running long enough to get pictures off. This was a SCSI drive and I then bought a larger used one (new ones are expensive).
However, I left a call back number on IBM's website and they called with I asked them to and since the machine still had five (5) days of warrantee left they offered to send out a serviceman to replaced the drive. I just had them DHL' it to me and since I was the second user, they also included the XP recovery disks.

I order an external backup drive today!!

Jake

My hard drive died on me in just over a month ago. I was one of the dumb ones though and lost all of my photos dating back to May of this year. I have two boys (ages 5 & 6) so it was a lot of pictures. I just hadn't gotten around to backing up. I have no one but myself to blame. I was physically ill when my husband told me they were lost.

My husband did run a retrieval program and thankfully I did get a lot of them back but unfortunately not all. I'm still finding/remembering pictures that I took that I no longer have.

~A

What a btich situation to end up in. I use a RAID array to backup every drive 100%. I've been through what you are facing and it sucks 100%. Good luck.