As mentioned in 'Getting organised', my hard disk recently crashed...
The crash happened during a power blackout, and it appears to have
corrupted the drive's Master Boot Record. I run Windows XP on an Intel
machine, and the damaged drive would still connect via USB and appear
as a device, but Windows could not open it. Likewise, none of the
supplied Windows disk utility programs could repair it.
I downloaded a free program that claimed it could rebuild the MBR, but
it didn't help at all and, if anything, looked as though it was about
to do more harm than good. Before I tried another program, I
remembered that the drive was formatted FAT32, and soon discovered
that it operated perfectly on a Macintosh; I'm assuming Mac OS and
Windows create their own versions of the MBR (or similar type of file
directories) on a FAT32 formatted drive. Is this correct?
I spent most of yesterday using a borrowed Macintosh to transfer all
the files off the damaged drive onto numerous smaller hard drives I've
got hanging around the place (had to format some of them to FAT32 so
the Macintosh would write to them), then reformatting the original
drive. Today I am transferring everything back on to it. With over
700GB of stuff, it's a slow and tedious process, but it looks as
though I've lost nothing.
>From now on, I think I'll keep formatting my drives to FAT32...
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