So you have the backup religion and you bought an external hard drive to backup all your data, all is well– right? Maybe, but what if the back up fails?

That is exactly what happened to the owner of a LaCie 500GB, 300721, USB/FW External Drive. After using the LaCie for over a year to backup important research data, the drive failed without any warning.

I tried to recover the data using Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional but I could not even read the drive. As a last ditch effort, I disassembled the external drive and found no obvious clues to the crashed drive. See the image below of the drive disassembled.

The LaCie 500gb drive consist of two Maxtor Maxline Plus II 250GB ATA/133 HDDs.

I was able to read one of the drives using a
USB 2.0 to SATA + IDE (2.5 / 3.5 / 5.25″) Cable Adapter and recover all the data on that disk. All the data on the other disk was gone, or at least unrecoverable with the tools at my disposal.

I contacted LaCie and found that the one-year warranty had expired. I tried Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) and they said they do not warranty drives that are used in LaCie drives.

Once again, hard drives can fail without warning and valuable data can be lost. Make multiple copies/backups of your important data.

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Have you ever needed a printout of files in a folder or list of your folders when using Windows Explorer? At times it is handy to have a list of the files that are in a directory. If you have tired to get a list of file names in a folder, you know that Windows does not have a way to do this task.

There are several ways to print a file and/or folder list. One method requires a little bit of code writing (no fear, it is very simple), and the other is a free program that makes printing the lists very easy.

First, for those who are a little more adventurous, you can simply add a few lines of code into a .bat file.

Start Windows Explorer. To do so, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Windows Explorer.

On the Tools menu in Windows Explorer, click Folder Options.

Click the View tab.

Under Hidden files and folders, click Show hidden files and folders.

Now, click the Folders icon on the tool bar.

Open Notepad. Click Start, then Programs and then Accessories.

Select Notepad. This opens Notepad.

Cope and paste the following code into Notepad:

@echo off
dir %1 /-p /o:gn > “%temp%\Listing”
start /w notepad /p “%temp%\Listing”
del “%temp%\Listing”
exit

On the File menu in Notepad, click Save As.

Save the file in at c:\Documents and Settings\<User>\SendTo.

You can save the file in your profile, All users, or any other profile you wish.

Before saving the file, you must name the file with a .bat extension.

In the File name box, type “Listing.bat”. You must include the “” to ensure the .bat extension is saved. You can also give this file any name you choose, just remember to use the .bat extension.

Close Notepad.

Thats it!

How to use the code.

Go back to Windows Explorer and highlight (click once on the folder) the folder in which you need the file list.

Right click the folder you want and select Sent To and point to the file that you created earlier (mine is Listing.bat).

The code will execute and open Notepad with the file list. You can print this list or save it.

Click on the thumbnail below to see an example of the output.

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