I had a lot of problems on a fileserver full of drives running windows 2000 pre-servicepack 3 or 4 (4 I think, but I can't remember), where it would blow holes in the filesystem at random. When you rebooted, it would whinge about bad clusters, and helpfully remap them by deleting the file that contained them! That was when I discovered getdataback for NTFS.

After a while, it ate something critical to continued operation and died completely. It turned out to mainly be some sort of bug in write caching to the drive, where it didn't always flush the buffer, but deleted it instead. Not apparently a hardware fault since I went through several drives, some RAM, and a motherboard in that machine as I slowly upgraded it, but the fault remained. I ended up upgrading to linux and ext3 and had no further problems It's still working perfectly.

I've never had that problem on any other 2000 box, of which I have a number.

I did have one drive which failed, and it turned out I could only get the data back under very specific circumstances, which was when the drive was at exactly 32 degrees C. Any warmer or colder and it errored constantly. I had to place it on top of the psu, with the room window open. If I closed the window the drive failed within a couple of minutes! If I opened the window it would start working again.

I got everything off it in the end, but it was really weird.

pca