[BBLISA] disk corruption recovery ideas?

[Eric Smith]

 I'm looking for suggestions here...

A few months ago I switched my home system's two external disks from
USB 2 to FireWire hoping for a speed improvement (which didn't come.)

Once I did the switched I've had a occasional problem.... When I print
(via USB2 on the motherboard) I have occasionally gotten a delayed
write failure from Windows. It happens when I am printing and then
tried to save a file from photoshop (to an external disk.) I'd just
save the file again and everything was happy.

Well, on Wed night I got a delayed write error - to the NTFS
equivalent of the Fat Table (I forget the name... $MFT?) I got this
both on my working disk and then on the backup disk. Everything seemed
to be working fine, and I have no idea what touched the drive to
generate the error (my anti-virus wasn't scanning, I wasn't running
any anti-spyware, I wasn't running anything in the background,...)

Now we fast forward today... and I discovered that I'm missing loads
of files from both disks. I ran a XP version of scan disk and it
recovered over 6500 files (all original photographs.) Some names have
changed (for example 110_4353.JPG instead of IMG_4353.JPG) but a quick
cross check shows that many of the "recovered" directories (but not
all) are gone from the "original" area of the disk.

Some of the recovered files are easily restored to their proper
location because the directory names are still intact. Some are just
"dir00015.chk" with files inside. So I'm going to have to do some
investigation (via EXIF data I think) to restore then (I store my
pictures by date taken.)  I've got some perl scripting ahead of me to
try to figure this out.

I might go buy Norton Utilities to see if they can recover more... but
their quality has dropped enough that I bet there is something better
out there.  Any ideas?

But how should I avoid this in the future? Has anyone else seen/had a
problem like this? I'm really afraid to use this setup again. I could
move one disk into the computer, but I have only one free IDE "slot"
free. Should I just move back to USB?

The hardware facts:
Win XP Pro with Service pack 2.
Athlon XP 2000+ box, 1G ram 1 120G internal disk.
3 external disks (1 USB, 2 FireWire) all 250 Western Digital EIDE 8MB
Cache "special edition drives".
all onboard USB 2
Adaptec PCI FireWire controller.
Epson 4000 via USB2

I'm looking for any and all ideas. I used the XP FireWire drivers, I
guess I could try to see if Adaptec has any.  I'd rather not try to
reinstall windows to do a "driver refresh".  I just don't trust my
setup any more, and that isn't acceptable.

Eric