Wake Up Sheeple! It's Not the Drive, It's the File System

Alternative title: NTFS is a dirty rotten liar.

OK, here's the lowdown for all of you Windows users. I'll try to do this quickly before my blazingly fast fiber optic internet self-disconnects for eight hours. Again. (Am I cursed, or what?)

When your drive "fails" (and it will), unable to mount, unable to clone, reporting "cyclical redundancy errors", when the OS claims that your partition that once held all of your precious stuff is now RAW and must be formatted, and your data recovery software finds 0 files and 0 MFTs, do not despair. It's all just a little misunderstanding between Windows and it's precious "new technology file system". Or to put it more succinctly, a FILTHY DEMONIC LIE FROM THE PIT OF HELL.

That's right, it's all a lie, an illusion, a smoke & mirrors con. You see, all of your data is still right there, unmolested, untainted, uncorrupted. It's just that one of the largest, most respected (cough, cough) software companies in the world can't find it.

The solution? Simple. Here's what I did.

Find an old live CD Linux distro (any flavor, doesn't matter, even the worst one is better than Windows), or if you don't have one on hand, DL one and burn a CD (and store it preciously, you'll need it someday). Boot from this CD into Linux. You'll notice that Linux will find and mount all of the drives (if the "bad" drive is external, just plug it into a USB port) and you can browse through them normally. Now go to your "bad" drive and copy all your files onto a another volume that Windows hasn't screwed up yet. If, perchance, you get an error message when copying, still do not despair, simply unmount the volume, shut it down for a minute and remount it. Everything will be back in order.

Voilà. In minutes, you're done. Now reboot and remove the CD to return to the hell that is Windows, with all of your stuff intact, unless it was your C: drive that "failed", in which case you will, like me, have to reinstall your OS and all of your programs and accounts and settings and updates and rue the day you had to migrate from Linux to Windows.

You see, it was all a scam. NTFS is, and has always been lying to you. Wake up sheeple!

PS. I appologize to Western Digital for all of the unprintable things I've muttered about them over the last few days. I realize now that they're only trying to do the best they can with the FILTHY, LOUSY, CORRUPTING FILE SYSTEM that has been imposed on them.