1.5Terabytes of Photography Gone and Back, and How Windows 7 Installs and Fixes Itself!

Last Thursday morning, Windows 7 popped an ugly message … cannot read Drive S: and after I closed the message, I immediately opened Windows Explorer and there was no more drive S:. Suddenly, a rush of panic engulfed my senses. It was in that drive that I recently consolidated all my photos, and yeah …. 1.35TB of RAW files since I got into the digital photography madness. I load up event viewer and one item says, “The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, has a bad block.”. Loaded up Disk Management and Drive S just wasn’t there. I rebooted and my PC’s BIOS telling me I had a bad disk.

After a fresh restart, I immediately opened Windows Explorer to check on drive S:. Thankfully it was there but it cannot be opened and accessed. I immediately went on recovery mode. First thing I did was to test if my chances for recovery is high. I ran an old Sandisk tool RescuePro and recovered files without subjecting the faulty hard disk of any write operation. Though very effective, RescuePro just went on and dumped every file it can recover in a single folder with the recovered files named as 00001.cr2, 00002.cr2 …. xxxxx.cr2. After a few files recovered, I realize it would be a nightmare trying to check each file for its content. I cancelled RescuePro and run TestDisk which I had used with my faulty CF and SD cards before. This tool is very advanced in terms of disk/file recovery but its UI is as old as those character based DOS apps of the 80s. Running TestDisk, I was able to peer into the folder structure of the faulty hard drive, and have each recovered to another disk 1.5TB disk. It took me almost 24 hours to have everything recovered. Yeah … ALL files were recovered.

Just as I thought my woes are over, while verifying each folder if it indeed been recovered, Windows 7 PC blue screened. If you are just a street away from me that time, you could have been deaf by the curses you have heard from me. I restarted the PC and it says something about a missing BootMgr. What the !@#$!!!!! Upon further scrutiny, I realized the problem started some couple of years ago when I had this PC freshly formatted when I added some new hard drives. I remember when I had the first HDD upgrade, I set the BIOS to boot on the new 1.5TB HD instead of the switching cables so that boot order would match corresponding disk ports. What happened was I had the following setup:

• BIOS Boot Order on Device 1
• Device 0, 320GB, Active Primary D:\, …
• Device 1, 1.5TB, System, Boot, C:\, ….

Earlier this year, I replaced the old 320GB with another 1.5TB and forgot to reset what was in the BIOS all these times. So I had the following setup:

• BIOS Boot Order on Device 1
• Device 0, 1.5TB (new)
• Device 1, 1.5TB (old)

Without this HDD crash incident, I could not have known that Windows 7 did the following when I had it reformatted right after installing the new 1.5TB HDD some months back.

• BIOS Boot Order on Device 1
• Device 0, 1.5TB (System, C:\, C:\Windows)
• Device 1, 1.5TB (Boot)

As you can see, BIOS tells the PC to boot from Device 1. Since it has crashed, it could NOT find the necessary boot info, thus I got the “BOOTMGR is missing” message. I attempted to BCDEdit, but the app hangs as it accessed the faulty drive. I have tried Windows repair and all to no avail. Windows repair only managed to fix the partition issue but it does not repair BOOT miscue. All these until I got Hanselman’s blog on BCDBoot where he happen to be in a similar situation.

I immediately ran BCDBoot and restarted the PC, changed BOOT Order to Device 0 and it just wont boot properly.

Thinking, BCDBoot had already corrected the BOOT miscue, I thought Windows Repair could do things differently this time. I popped the Windows 7 installer and went on Repair mode and voila … the PC booted normally. Checking on Disk Management, my rig now says:

• BIOS Boot Order on Device 0
• Device 0, 1.5TB (System, Boot, Primary Partition, C:\, C:\Windows)
• Device 1, 1.5TB (Active, Primary Partition)

I then physically removed the faulty hard drive for one last reboot … and everything just are back, all 1.35terabytes of RAW files and some new knowledge on how Windows 7 installs and fixes itself!

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Google+ … And What It Means For Photographers Like Me

First of all, BIG thanks to my friend Rhamille for sending me a Google+ invite.

I started with Flickr, using a Canon A40 point and shoot and remained a paying customer for years to publish my photos when I realize I want more. At first I thought Flickr was all that I wanted. Hi-resolution, un-tampered photo quality, album management, peer feedback, specialized photo groups, and Explore!!. Then I realize my friends, the people that I also want my photos shown, were not there.

Then Facebook came. I am actually a late Facebook adopter as it has been quite sometime before people were able to convince me to take the social networking plunge. I resisted Facebook for some time but as soon as I experienced the power of the “Like”, I never looked back. I still have my Flickr account, which I don’t update anymore since August 2010 and it says, “Hey Toto Gamboa (Not Uploading Pics Here Anymore)! Your Flickr Pro account has expired. Don’t panic! You can only see 200 photos, but the others are safe & sound. You can see them if you renew.”. As if I care if I don’t renew! 😛

I have used Facebook’s photos for my photographs since last year but there is so much to be desired from Facebook’s Photos. And there are lots of negative things a photographer can say regarding Facebook’s photos. And you will always hear from everybody that Facebook is, first and foremost, a social networking site and not to be compared with against photography centric sites such as Flickr and the likes. And, did I say that the first note I wrote in Facebook was on how I was so disgusted with its photos? Lols! I had sworn that the moment there is another social networking site that will give photos some importance, I wont hesitate to quickly adapt to it.

And voila! G+! seem to be the answer to my prayers. Not to bore you with what Google+ is, but as a photographer, it’s like Facebook and Flickr rolled into one and then some and A LOT MORE! Here is my quick experience with Google+ Photos:

• (UPDATE As of Aug 02 2011) Hi-resolution. Great implementation I must say. Documentation says one can upload as large as a 2048 x 2048 image. Though true, you can only view “as is” this size in your browser if your monitor is large enough to contain this big of an image. But since most monitors are way smaller, you cannot. G+ adjusts the size of the display of your image to the size of your browser. The rationale is that, you must be able to view a photo in its entirety without forcing you to scroll horizontally and vertically. However, you can still get the 2048 x 2048 photo by downloading this. There is one quirk with this design though, since most monitors are orientated to landscape, vertically cropped/framed photos are re-sized on display that the result makes them really small. This is done so you can still view the photo in its entirety. Wish G+ have an option to turn resizing off on vertically framed photos.
• (UPDATE As of July 14 2011) No compression, No Re-sizing. I uploaded a 1280 x 720,  782KB photo, and Google+ retained all its gory and glory. It seems that when you upload photo that is within the limits of Google+ (as long as your browser size is capable of displaying your photo’s full resolution), no compression and resizing is done. Woooohooo!+1.
• Image linking is HTTPS-based which assures me that my photo won’t be further degraded by any other means. You can check out my other blog on this very issue.
• Linking with Picasaweb. This means that I can now reach another set of audience for my photos. The photography-centric ones, which I lost, when I stopped using Flickr.
• EXIF. I don’t have any issues showing the shooting info of my photos to everybody so this can be a plus to me.
• (UPDATE As of July 20 2011) Auto Language Translation. Ever wonder how to understand when someone post some comments in your photo in Italian or French? Google+ does the translation for you!
• It’s FREE. No limits. You can upload as many photos as you like as long as you upload via the Google+ interface. If you upload via PicasaWeb, you are only limited to 1GB of space.
• And my friends, other than those photography-centric folks I interact with, can see and appreciate like they are in Facebook.

Google+ is just 2 weeks old since invites were started. And a lot of things remain to be seen. However, despite being in beta, it looks very promising and most of the things I wanted from Facebook are there.

Of course, for things to get better. All my friends in Facebook need to join Google+ first! 🙂

Now it’s for you to find out what is in store with Google+ photos! … check out my Google+ albums! 🙂