Ultimate Boot CD saves the day again! This time, my 500 GB drive with lots of important stuff backed up to it randomly wasn’t being detected. Windows saw it as a raw, unformated disk, and Linux wouldn’t mount it citing disk problems.

Of course, I had some problems at first… It’s a 500 GB drive, which is greater than 137 GB. It’s also mounted over USB, thanks to this brilliant piece of technology. So DOS-based file tools were understandably a bit confused. I ended up throwing the disk in my old desktop machine, where it was used as a “real” IDE drive instead of a USB external drive. And it turns out that most of the programs can cope with it being 500GB.

Of course, this is one of those classic problems where I have no idea what actually “fixed” it. I ran a bad block check (which takes forever on a 500GB disk!), and was actually somewhat irritated when it finished having found nary a bad block. But as I poked around looking at other options, I found that filesystem tools were showing me files on the drive. All my old data? Intact!

Seriously, burn yourself a copy of UBCD and keep it with your computers. It’ll save the day. Previously, I’ve used it to reset computer passwords for a professor, and to fix a broken (err, missing) bootloader.

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