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Journal FortKnox's Journal: Journalback! 10

Journal by FortKnox
OK, I got the virus off my machine and actually preserved the data. It was a long and drawn out process (using most of everyone's ideas! THANK YOU!!!). If you really want to know all that's I had to do, I'll be happy to explain it, but I'm not in the mood to type it all now. The jist: Don't use Western Digital's proprietary "EZ Partition/Format Drive" program that comes with the disks. WinME doesn't recognize it as a 'true' FAT32 partition (and usually won't recognize it at all). Anywho, its done with.

Secondly... Taco speaks!!
Remember how I wrote that email to pater/malda/hemos? Well, taco came through and made a Meta Slashdot Discussion.

But, follow some rules please:
Don't bitch. He's being candid, and honest, and polite. Show him the same, please.
Don't go publicizing it, cause we don't want this thing to blow up full of users, where he can't answer the questions.
Read it first. He's answered most of the questions we all have.
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  • You had trouble with EZ drive? Was this an older machine where you had to use some drive translation software to recognize the large disk?

    Man, I've had more problems with the likes of drive rocket and such. Glad to hear you were able to recover your data.
    • I loaded on partition magic to try and see if it could recognize the drive or the partitions at all, and it did recognize the drive. But instead of it being the nice "FAT32" format, it was "EZ" format. That's why windows was having such a hard time with it.
      I found my old EZ disk, removed the EZ configuration from the drive.
      Then, now that windows could recognize it, it played slave to my new primary drive that I made out of my 4GB HD. I cleaned the virus out (which annihilated windows, and some utilities, but that was all. Only wierd thing was that it only recognized the first partition...
      Thinking that it was just a slave/master problem (2 active partitions, etc..), I went ahead and made the cleaned drive my primary again, and completely removed the slave (just in case). I was able to boot up, but just the one partition again. I had to reapply the EZ configuration, reboot, and still one partition, but partition magic was able to find the second partition.
      The wierd thing here was there was like a 253MB empty space between the first and second partition, and it couldn't find the last partition.
      I uninstalled the EZ configuration again, loaded windows, and still couldn't find the last partition. I was giving up. Moved the second partition over to the end of the first partition (so I could put that 'inbetween' empty space and empty space at the end of the disk all on one partition). In a last gleam of hope, I search the whole empty space one last time for the third partition and found it.

      After a few hours of virus clearning, reinstalling, updating, and patching various programs, reattaching my 'lifeboat' slave drive (sorry... Apollo13 reference), I'm back up and running like I was before the virus attack. But this time I got McAfee up and running, and fully updated...
      A tough lesson learned... but I was able to overcome the virus and defeated it with a little determination, some desperate begging for help, and some nice /. friends... ;-)
      • For fucks sake... this epopeia remembers me of when I was a kid and used win 3.0... LOL. Grow up and use UNIX, dammit. This ol'e crap of mine is running some ancient version of linux for 5 years without a hiccup (wooho, almost all partitions are reiser's these days) and im still delaying any upgrade, since it has all the goodies everyone needs like DVD, good sound, good video... The only shame is that the processor & memory are getting somewhat flaky after running overclocked all these years... Now I have to reboot every two months or so. damn.
    • I don't see any way to respond to the parent journal entry, so I'll do it here..

      Yonder on my workbench is a system with two 8.4g W.D. hard disks that were prepped with EZDrive v9.03w (functionally the same as the current version, except it lacks support for VERY large HDs) and it runs WinME with FAT32. This system takes all manner of abuse (poor thing is my junk-test box) and has been totally stable. (Well, once I got WinME beaten into submission :) Anyway, far as I know or have ever heard of, there's no problem between EZDrive and WinME/FAT32.

      In fact I use one version or another of EZDrive whenever I can (and run all FAT32 here), as it's the ONLY utility I've found that can reliably clean up the mess left by certain drive prep utils (whatever FreeBSD does to a HD comes to mind; using both linus and Win98 FDISKs on the same drive is another mess it can fix). It can also convert from and clean up after old versions of Disk Manager (with or without the DDO). Plus it makes quick partitioning no-brainer simple.

      Anyway, if you had a problem with EZDrive, I'd guess it was a side effect of a virus, or the drive is borderline for losing all its marbles, or something like that. Also, some W.D. HDs below 1.2g won't accept FAT32 formatting at all, or won't hold the format if you manage to forcibly apply it. (It's apparently a firmware thing.)

      BTW Drive Rocket is a hard disk caching utility, not a partitioner. It's known to cause data corruption on some systems.

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