[Coco] W A R N I N G!!!

[William Astle]

I would be surprised if the docking stations or external connections had 
anything to do with the symptoms you describe.

Files disappearing on a file system while the remainder of the system 
seems intact (directory tree, etc.) is almost certainly due to bugs in 
the operating system itself (device driver or file system driver, 
probably) or yanking a drive before unmounting it properly in the 
operating system. You really do need to unmount drives properly in the 
operating system to make sure all data cached by the OS is actually written.

I assume each of these docking stations connect to a single eSATA port? 
If so, those docking stations are almost certainly SATA port 
multipliers. It's possible the driver for the SATA chipset responsible 
for whatever eSATA port you connected the docking station to isn't 
handling the port multiplier correctly, but it seems unlikely.

It's also possible you have a flakey cable somewhere, or a bad docking 
station, which is causing drives to randomly disconnect from the system 
and then reconnect.

In both of those cases, however, I would expect operating system level 
errors to appear, and much more random file system corruption.

On 2018-09-20 12:27 AM, Joe Schutts via Coco wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> While this warning pertains to Windows (and Linux) Based Systems it can also pertain to CoCo Users as well, especially if you are using a SATA or an IDE HD attached to an external SATA or IDE HD Docking Stations.
> 
> I have a 2-Port External SATA Docking Station that I use mostly for long-term Program and Data storage using mostly 1TB (and up to 4TB) HD's. I recently added a 3-Port External Docking Station (1 IDE and 2 SATA Ports) to my system.
> 
> Somewhere between using the 2-Port and the 3-Port Docking Station (I'm still trying to figure out WHEN AND WHY this problem occurred) ALL of my information disappeared on several HD's. And when I say several HD's, I mean OVER 8-10 HD's. I figure I have lost OVER 10-16 TB worth of info. Now the weird part is that ALL my Directories (AND my Sub-Directories) are STILL there and show up without any problems. The MAJOR problem is that ANY Directory (or Sub-Directory) that had ANY info in it, has disappeared... It's completely gone...
> 
> Now I'm afraid to put anything on my HD's (using any external HD Docking Station of ANY type) to transfer files to any external HD.  Now I'm pretty sure that the info is still there, but the question now becomes "HOW do I recover or access my old info?"
> Something else that enters into this puzzle is the part that ALL of these HD's were formatted in NTFS format. So now what program do I use or HOW do I recover my lost info???
> 
> If ANYONE has ANY ideas on how I should proceed AND/OR which program I should try to use, PLEASE let me know as I've run out of ideas and VERY desperate...
> 
> I hope this helps and that NO ONE else runs into this problem. I'd hate to see anyone else have this problem like me...
> 
> Take care everyone...
> 
> Joe...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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