OK, I'm going to get a hard drive to test Windows Vista Beta on. It's a crappy 40GB Maxtor partitioned in two, but hey, a disk is a disk. However, getting it was a complete accident. Here's what happened:
My Grandma was trying to take backups she'd made off her old PC, the said Sony VAIO, which has gone through not one, not two, but three TDR's*, and put them on her Dell Dimension E510. Sensible. However, as I showed her how to do it, and the Copying... dialog showed up saying 4 minutes (Microsoft minutes), I got an error -- not sure what it meant. So, I tried one folder at a time. I tried different folders. Same errors. I tried individual files. Same errors, and this time it locked up so we had to reboot.
While it's rebooting, I put the CD in my supa-machine to see if I could put it directly on my Flash drive. Same errors. Cursing under my breath, I went to good ol' CMD.exe to do it via the prompt. Same error, and every 290KB file took a Microsoft minute to tell me it couldn't copy! Then, she tells me that she had trouble making said backups. Oh... crap. The words corrupt disk flash through my head. Then she tells me it was off her D: drive (partition of C:). I boot up the VAIO and look in My Computer. It's still there. I think, "maybe I can get copies directly onto my Flash Drive". With 1GB at my disposal, this was no problem. Except, as I click on D:, the system locks up.
I reboot, and after the Windows XP (no service packs, it no longer had an internet connection and so updates were pointless) screen, it went black as it always does before the Welcome screen. And stayed there. I reboot again, and get some water and a Tylenol as it does so. Nope, no dice. So, I decide to slave the disk to the T-Machine (mine) and take off the data hdd to hdd. Logical, right? Well, anyone who's had one of these infernal machines knows that those machines are NOT built to be tampered with! It takes five flippin' minutes to get the case open. I figure it out, and I look in there. The hdd is the only thing not behind a metal plate. Unfortuneately, the CD-ROM drives are directly above the hard drive bay, and the CD-ROM bay is secured by a metal plate that offered no obvious methods of removing it to get to the *censored* hard drive.
I'm about to rip out the hard rive bay, not caring about damage, when I see this tab on the bay. One pull of that tab, and the bay is mine. (I then see similar tabs for the CD bay, but yanking them does nothing. Go figure.) So, I slave the hard drive to my PC, boot it up, and Windows recognized the Maxtor. After a "need to reboot because I say so to see your hard drive" from Windows, I access E: (was C: on hers) and backup documents and pictures. I go to F: (was D: on her machine -- her old CDs were E: and F: on the VAIO) and the whole freaking DRIVE IS EMPTY!!!! AAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
Right now I'm scanning her Maxtor for viruses, then it's a format away from being mine to toy with. (The only reason I scan is so I know if I need to worry about my C: drive -- two "no viruses found" messages from AVG tell me I'm fine)
The biggest kick in the crotch is that the pictures/documents I saved were from after the third TDR on the VAIO -- no trace of the ones currently on the corrupt CDs (all 7 of them!) can be found. Now, none of these CDs were full -- just looking at the bottom of the CD verifies that -- but apparently there is an entire batch of corrupt CDs with her stuff on them that we can't access.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH HHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*Totally Destructive Restore