Captain's Log, System date 4th of December Year 2006.
It is 1:09AM.
After transplanting an old IBM hard disk from the once-glorious-but-now-ready-for-scuttle flagship over to my latest machinery for verification, I have concluded (reluctantly) that the 40GB worth of data stored within is lost.
Without warning, this Windows Dynamic disk somehow fell to the influence of the tainted evils and had its volume definition corrupted. Windows can no longer discover what drive volumes the disk houses. Viewable only as a "Foreign disk" under Computer Management, there is no good facility for Windows to recover the volume since requesting an import for it only yields an error message that the same disk group exists, and it could not complete the operation.
And plugging the disk to my new PC does not even allow me to try an Import. The only option is to convert it back to a Basic disk; forsaking its contents in the process. All that is left is to define a brand new volume and format.
I am waiting for the day when disk manufacturers sell transparent RAID1 products, where a physical device actually contains two separate disks for mirroring redundancy. Unlike duo (or quad) core processors, the operating system is largely not concern about this other than for failure monitoring. Today's implementation of RAID still requires a person to explicit purchase an additional disk of the same model and a RAID controller card. Quite a costly affair and only worth it for the storage of highly valuable data. In other words, still out of reach for the typical PC consumer; whom are forced to resort to other manual means of backup.
I am waiting for that day....