Dang you, Microsoft!
Much to my dismay, I've discovered yet another way that Microsoft has built pathetically unreliable stuff.
I currently own one machine running Windows (and this is part of why). It's an eMachines from about a year ago, running Windows XP Home. When I got it, I stuck a recently purchased 160gb drive into it, so that it had two drives. I use the 160gb drive for my pics, media staging, family video project work, etc.
Apparently, that drive has been failing for some time. How do I know this? I went to preview some photos last night, and Adobe Photoshop Album (er, Elements 3.0 or whatever it is now) complained it couldn't find a recent pic it needed to show. I went looking. The directory was missing, and its parent directory appeared empty, even though that parent directory should contain subdirectories holding all of my roughly 5400 pictures. Hrm.
So, I go about diagnosing the problem. The other subdirectories read, so Windows is being screwy about finding files. Odd. Run a scandisk, get this:
Waah? That's not helpful. Really, just “Ok”, no “further info”, no “scream, then call for help”. That's from running scandisk, folks.
So, I figure, grab what I can, and start looking for missing bits from backups (I should at least have backups of all or nearly all of my photos.). I drag the offending directory, which probably does still hold about 3500 or so photos (none of which show up in Explorer) to an external network drive. That quickly results in this message:
Verrry helpful. Thank you so much! No files at all were copied before I got this message.
Much more digging, far beyond the level of the average XP Home user, discovers that, starting on January 17th, my machine has been logging disk sector errors for that drive. Yes, 2 1/2 weeks ago, it logged enough sequential disk errors that it, reasonably, should have alerted the user, yet I was told nothing. The average XP Home user has never even heard of the Event Log, so wouldn't even know to look there for an explanation given what I've already encountered.
Give me a break. This is pathetic error handling. There's no excuse for the first notification I get of this coming from application code unable to load files from a filesystem. And there's really no excuse for giving the user absolutely no help when apparently catastrophic problems occur. Heck, had I not gone looking, I might've just assumed that drive was ok, and continued to throw my precious bits into the great bitbucket in the sky. This needs to be fixed, more than we need a new graphics layer, or support for PCI Express, or any other new feature.
Microsoft, are you listening?