Dell is Un Well !

[geordie]

Our grandson turned his mum's computer off during defraging , on restart it would not boot in to Xp. The hard drive was take to computer shop and they werre told the is nothing on the hard drive, is this possable to loose everything off the drive? Its a Dell computer I suggested reinstall but if all has gone the restore partion must be gone also sounds abit odd to me. Anyone got any ideas.

[phkninja]

the partition table may be broken so i would check this first.

Firstly there is GParted apparently this will check your partitions (so you can make sure they aren't corrupt)

or try

TestDisk. This will allow you to search for deleted partitions and alloows you to recover the partition table.

Also Dells come with windows cd's etc "http://www.pctechbytes.com/dell.htm"]Refrence so a reinstall should be possible.

[pugwash2004]

By nothing on the drive I assume that its not completely dead i.e. ticking loudly rather than the usual spin up sounds.

At the computer shop while it was attached to another computer for testing (I'm assuming they did this) did it show the partitions on it but no / lots of missing files?

If it did then I've had to fix a similar problem myself, my machine appeared to be missing most of the folder tree and would not boot. To fix it, I used an XP bootdisc and with the manual recovery option, running 'chkdsk /V /R c:' at the command prompt. This should find and try to fix / recover any data in any corrupted sectors, certainly fixed it for me but it took a few hours to run.

[CoffeeFiend]

I would try some good recovery software before you try anything that can modify a single byte on the hard drive (possibly resulting in data loss). I've managed to get R-Studio working on WinPE (got an error during install, but it worked just fine). There's a trial version that'll let you see what it can recover (buy it and enter serial if you actually want to recover those files). There's lots more data recovery software out there, but none of the others I've tried last time could read a single byte off the partition. They just would crash hard, display countless error messages, or plain treat it as a unformatted/unknown partition (much like in your case).

Anyways, that's just in case you have data on there that isn't backed up already (family photos and what not -- something with more value than the asking price of the recovery software). As for a reinstall partition, there's recovery discs, install CDs and all that so no worries (I wouldn't want to reinstall from a disk image that's off a recovered partition either, just might be corrupted and crash).

[CptMurphy]

I was actually defraging once and for some reason it failed. Then I couldn't access anything on that drive and the OS reported it as formated in RAW. Turned out the master file table had been corrupted. I used a utility to restore files from deleted/formated drives. I wasn't able to restore more than about 50% of the stuff, maybe less, but at least I didn't loose everything.