So it took a couple hours to format the new drive. Now that that's out of the way, I tried to copy the whole shebang over in one go.
My biggest mistake there was going to bed immediately after. But I can be forgiven for that. It was 4:00 in the morning.
Needless to say, Windows's default copy has a nasty habit of cancelling an entire copy operation if just one file fails. After managing to get about 1/5th of the total filesize transferred while asleep, I started using DirSync, a useful little Java program I picked up a while back that I'd been using to synchronize my WoW addons and mp3s between my desktop and my laptop. It's far more robust.
But it's not perfect. After trying again to transfer the whole drive (it automatically skips over files that are already the same on both ends, so it won't duplicate the effort already expended) I ran into the same problem as before--the drive suddenly failed, Windows throwing "delayed write failure" errors like they were going out of style.
I picked up the enclosure and, while it wasn't quite hot enough to burn my hand, it was definitely uncomfortably so. I suppose this is what I get for ordering cheap from Hong Kong--the enclosure works fine as far as its primary function, but there is NO cooling system save having a thin metal box wrapped tightly around the drive, hopefully acting as a heat sink.
In retrospect, I should've gotten the black model instead of white--it'd at least have some radiative cooling.
So it might be the same problem of a failing hard drive, or it might be just overheating now. There was enough dust in my tower that it could've been overheating BOTH times.
But by using DirSync to copy in chunks, I've managed to recover the most important utilities and games, old files that have been recovered from failing hard drives at least twice now (found a few that are slightly over TEN YEARS OLD--and not downloaded more recently than that, created over ten years ago: the original files for my abortive attempt at a furry fanfic/novelization of Final Fantasy 6). And one of the larger subdirectories is transferring slowly but surely, chugging along with no hard drive failure so far.
Apparently I downloaded FAR too many games from Steam--over 100GB of files are in the Steam directory. I'm going after that one LAST, because worst case, I can always reinstall Steam and redownload the games. Several might even have the saved games already fine, because I know some save data on the system (E:) drive.
So yeah--slow going, but it's looking like eventually I will have 99.99% of the files recovered, the remainder being those one in a bazillion (i.e. 10000 by my figure of 99.99%) that cause the hard drive to go "AIEEE!" or that simply refuse to transfer (there was one that was a small file for a program I don't even remember, that said "cannot copy file--disk is write-protected or file is in use".).
I've also taken the opportunity to cull a FEW subdirectories which I was able to determine were NOTHING but cruft--eg. my "Application Data" folder from two computers ago.
At this rate, it's looking like I'll do my Molten Front dailies on my laptop again tonight. After that though... mayhaps transferring my addon data and finally having a decent fog distance again...
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13 years, 12 months ago
25 Jul 2011 05:14 CEST
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