RARgh!

This post concerns data backup and continues from here, which was part of a sub-topic that began approximately here, in a thread that started with this post.

Many of the files that I needed to back up were split RARs and I wanted to join them before saving to DVD-R. With my HDDs nearly full there was no easy way to do that, so I finally took some advice and bought an external drive, a WD Elements 3TB USB 2.0, for $110.

I was unpacking RARS to the external drive when things took an alarming turn. The IDE channel that supports my 2 internal HDDs kept dropping from UDMA 5 down to PIO mode. With the drives as full and fragmented as they were, this was no surprise. Removing the IDE channel through the Device Manager and letting it re-detect would make things alright again for a while. But soon my PC began crashing frequently, and Windows would want to run chkdsk on a partition or two when it rebooted. Sometimes chkdsk recovered a few orphaned file fragments, other times it found no problems.

*CRASH*