Ultimate Boot CD

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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