Hard Drive was pronounced dead at 8:44pm EST

[Darth Viscera]

Goodbye 6 months worth of chat logs, pornography, KaZaA files, savegames, bookmarks, and other frivolous but occasionally important bulljive. I'll miss you dearly.

It was an IBM 60GXP, 60 gigs. I bought 2 christmas 2001 and this was the 2nd one, the first one died 6 months ago. I'm now trusting my data to Western Digital, thank you very much.

Avoid IBM hard drives like the plague.

Christin and Charley, this won't affect your discs. I keep that stuff on a separate hard drive, which is only for important stuff like video editing.

I sure am getting good at diagnosing critical system errors though. 2 hours after my hard drive died I was fully up and running again with full drivers after re-partitioning my video editing drive (used WALTER2 computer to do that-had to have a bootable first to use Partition Magic) to be my new system drive.

Again, don't buy IBM hard disks.

[Shawn]

I've heard nothing but bad things about IBM drives. Yet, my IBM 30gb "Death Star" (so named for it's reputation of breaking down) has lasted me for about 5 years now, whereas my Maxtor 60gb died after a year or so. :\ I know what it's like to lose tons of misc. but really useful stuff.

[imported_Marcus]

Back ups. Always do backups.

[Darth Viscera]

^
Yeah, I kept procrastinating on backups. I'm not too fond of waiting for CDs and DVDs to finish burning, and always delay it as much as possible.

[Charley]

I had a 50 gig splat on me, and Dell picked it up on warranty and got me a new one. Miraculously, I was able to recover the files from my old one.

[Ryan Pode]

I've had one HP die... don't by HP laptops.

[Darth Viscera]

IBM has a very nazi warranty & replacement policy, and they'll only replace a 60GXP hard drive with another 60GXP, problem is every single model of the 60GXP line is faulty. So warranty = worthless in this case.

*shakes fist in air in general direction of IBM*

[Ryla Relvinian]

*Shudder* I wouldn't trust my toenail clippings near a Maxtor. They tend to go toes up randomly.

[Darth Viscera]

I'm getting serious hard drive leakage now. Not literal leakage, but my hard drive space is disappearing into the void.

All the files in my bulk data partition in total amount to 79.8 GB. On the partition's info, it says 93.6GB used space.

This has been occuring for quite some time, on other drives too, and the only way to reclaim that space is to format your drive, which I can no longer do, as my bulk data partition is now my bootstrap. My pagefile is only 512 megs, I have Windows set to "Show hidden files and folders" and have "hide protected operating system files" disabled. I have the Recycle Bin set to delete its own contents if it becomes bigger than 1% of the partition's total size, and I'm obsessive compulsive about manually emptying the recycle bin if I only put one thing in there anyways.

Defragging doesn't help, I wasted about 6 hours trying to defrag dozens and dozens of gigs once, still had hard drive leakage.

I'm using NTFS and Windows XP. Can someone help me out with this? I'm going through a huge space shortage on that partition, and having 14 gigs lost to gremlins is very irritating.

It doesn't stay at a static 14 gigs of leakage, either, it fluctuates depending on what files I delete. Say I delete 5 gigs worth of files, I'll then compare my new free space to what I had before I deleted the old files and find that I now only have 4 more gigs free instead of 5. It adds up over time.

[Darth Viscera]

Gotcha!
It was System Volume Information, even after I deactivated it on that partition it was still taking up an ungodly amount of gigs, so I had to jump through a lot of hoops in order to access that folder and delete some DVD files I had left there a while ago. Microsoft sure goes through a lot of trouble to make me think that's an empty folder, I found out how big it was when I saw how fragmented Speed Disk was saying it was.

No more hard drive leakage! hurrah, take that !#@$sock