bobthedinosaur

AAHHHH! ok LLXX i ran testdisk and i ended up with a whole lot of info i didn't understand and probably never will so i tried PC inspector which i got off one of the links u gave me, it's a really nice prog, it scans the drive (1 friggin hour) and finds the old partitions and all my files with their filenames still mostly intact, xcept for the odd directory with a square instead of a normal keyboard character when i tell it to recover my files it does so very quickly until it gets to those dirs with the square in the folder name at which point i have to click 'OK' to make it continue (minor annoyance) then it occasionally gets errors reading from the sectors (LBA?) but this i can also simply ignore by clicking 'OK' after the previous two it came up with a rather serious sounding error about reading from the disk where i had the option of 'abort' 'retry' and 'ignore', clicking on either one just gave me another dialog box with the next sector number or whatever and the same message, i must've clicked like a hundred times and it still hadn't read past the bad bits... so to avoid the above i just cancelled the recovery process and skipped the directory that was giving the errors (ps. my drive was very thoroughly defragged by diskeeper before the crash) and then! while recovering the next folders the program decided to crash because it couldn't deal with not reading the disk! so now i have to go through the 1 Hour scanning procedure again before i can attempt to start recovering at the moment i've got easy recovery pro's Full Diagnostic test running (it's been an hour) to see if the disk has any physical damage to it, which it shouldn't as it's a very new disk and it got error checked regularly after that i'm gonna try PHOTOREC and see what that's all about but what i'd really like is a way to get PC Inspector to just not tell me about the errors and just go ahead with what it can recover! i tried easy recovery pro's recovery feature, which also gave me all my files back minus their file or folder names!!! which is just no good! i'm gonna go look for a disk editor now, any other advice would be cool!!!! EDIT: the diagnostic test finished, there's nothing wrong with the physical disk whatsoever so now i'm running the advanced recovery feature in easy recovery pro, its busy scanning for files over the entire HDD (it couldn't find the two old partitions only one large NTFS partition) and is coming up with file names as well (yay!) i'll check back in an hour when it's done and let you know if it worked or not...

ok jaclaz, relax, i didn't use that program to write anything to the disk, it couldn't get through scanning the 2nd partition (so there might be some physical disk damage) i haven't gone through the programs you told me about because i've been running around like crazy over here because my city's main power plant shut down this week and we've had chronic power outtages resulting in giant traffic jams and no working petrol pumps, at the same time i'm trying to set up a power generator for my house, varsity just started and i have to move into my apartment, and i only have like 50MB left on my ADSL account cos in south africa we pay for usage (as in per GB) so i don't want to download things i don't definately need but your help is much appreciated i've got the drive in my system as a slave now with a friend's 120GB as the master running windows and easy recovery pro, a program i've used with great success before, so if this doesn't work then i'm going to run Testdrive and see if i can fix the partition info first before i try to recover more files thanks for you help everybody

ok, so another question... @ctive Partition Recovery can see my original partition information on the drive, it also claims that the paid-for-version will be able to make a backup of the MBR and partition info will @PR be able to restore my partition information on the drive to the original state without writing over any data on the disk? cos if it could do that i'd be back to perhaps an easier to handle error where i only have to sort out (maybe) windows not wanting to boot

LLXX: i'm not sure what's broken and what's not basically the drive had two partitions, the first one about 30GB, this is where i ran windows from and the 2nd one about 160GB where i store stuff after the failure the pc simply wouldn't boot off the first partition as it usually did, but i don't know whether it was the MBR or only that partition, basically my partitions are all gone now after i ran bootfix which went and made a fat32 partition over (not sure yet) the whole drive i've got active partition recovery running on the drive now scanning for all lost partitions according to @PR the data is still there on the drive, the partition info is just gone, although, even if i could get the partition info back up, i probably wouldn't be able to boot from the first partition cos i think the error was an OS error basically i'm gonna go get another 200GB drive, install an OS and recover from the old drive with recovery software or i'm gonna try booting from this @PR disc and recovering unto the new disk from there can anybody give me any advice on how to overcome a problem like this in the future, like say, a harddrive raid configuration or some backup software or something, basically after i get the new HDD i'll have 2x200GB sata drives and one 80GB external, that's about 200GB space more that i'm using now, any storage and backup tips would help! thanx guys! ----- LLXX where can i get the disk editor for redoing the MBR?

ok, so i was in winxp fiddling with drive compression on my external 80GB, i basically said 'compress whole drive' and then 1 minute into the process i said cancel cos it was gonna take too long, cancelling started and i went to go make coffee, when i came back windows had crashed, so i rebooted the pc and wham! missing bootsector came up in black in white, it also sometimes says error reading OS and some other frightening messages so somehow fiddling with my external HDD's compression corrupted my internal 200GB Seagate SATA drive! this drive is very important as it has all my stuff on it, now i've had data recovery done off a broken HDD once and it was pretty expensive so i'd rather try do this myself basically i don't have another HDD to boot from so i can access the 200GB, can anybody point me to a bootable image or program to put on a CD that'll allow me to see the file structure on the disk and move stuff around? after the error i booted with windows install cd and went into the recovery feature (dos screen thing) and ran chkdsk which said the disk had an unrecoverable error, then i ran bootfix which went and made the drive FAT32 when it was actually NTFS, so the directory structure on the drive is probably gone by now too i have not done any actual writing on the disk tho, should my files still be there?! any advice would be much appreciated please help!!!

ok cool thanks i tried the WD util, it came up clean, drive is fine then i checked the drive for the dirty bit and it turns out the dirty was never set ....??? rebooted the pc, no blue checkdisk screen ran cmd, ran chkdsk, chkdks says it has to unmount the volume in order to do the test... ??? (USB drive by the way) right now it's doing stage 4 of 5 and it stuck at 0 percent but the drive light is flashing so something is going on will check back here if attempt is unsuccessful

it's quite an old drive, i think it's a WD 80GB, the type before WD started making crappy drives... the drive definately doesn't have any errors on it, all the data is still fine and every drive checking app i could find said that the drive is fine, i think it's something more along the line of windows stupidity

i dropped one of my external HDDs a while back.... sh*t myself and error checked it with everything i got including windows checkdisk, but windows insisted on rebooting in order to do the check before windows boots up completely all the checks i did came up with nothing, the drive is absolutely 100% fine, BUT! windows won't stop scheduling checks for the drive!! this makes it impossible for my Diskeeper defrag software to run effectively as it can't fiddle with the drive till windows has finished doing its thing, which is never! how do i get the drive check 'unscheduled' so Diskeeper can do its job and i don't have to go thru the blue screen error check before windows starts up EVERY TIME!? thanks in advance! Title Edited - Please follow the forum rules from now on -- Martin L