Posted on 05/28/2004 9:58:21 AM PDT by dennisw
60 gigabytes. Never had problems with it. Yesterday Windows XP froze a few times. Then the computer refused to boot up again. Boot sector wiped out? I can deal with that! I then installed this drive as a slave and it wasn't recognized... was invisible.
With Partition Magic this hard drive shows up as 60 gig of (exact words) unallocated space. It had 3 partitions which are now all gone.
I used the Western Digital Utilities and the hard drive checks out as being in good shape. No errors.
I was using Norton Anti Virus. Using a firewall on a cable connection.
I don't see any references on internet to hard drives being killed all at once.
The hard drive was 50% backed up.I will consider a data recovery company if the price is reasonable.
Interesting... I got a new computer a couple of months ago & was figuring I'd just get rid of the old one, but now I think I may keep it hooked to our home network, share the hard drive root directory and just periodically back up data on it.
If you're going to back up hard drive to hard drive, consider just using RAID 1 (mirroring). Most modern motherboards have RAID 1 built in. If the hard drive dies, a perfect copy is always right there and you won't miss a bit of work (until you get a replacement drive and rebuild the array).
(I'm buying a 250Gb this weekend for the Athlon 2800+ toy I'm about to build. Brand unknown - the FRY'S ad doesn't say, but what, WD's are NFG? Anyone else to avoid?)
Looks to me like he blew away either the partition table or the entire MBR, not the MFT - nevermind files, he can't even find the partitions. With a low-level disk editor, you can track down the backup boot record (if it's an NTFS disk) and write it overtop the corrupt copy - I pulled that rabbit out of my hat a couple of months ago, but it's not for the faint-hearted ;)
No. The interface is exactly like the full product. You scan the damaged drive and it lists the files it has found, along with their dates and sizes. It just won't allow you to recover files above a certain size. If all your files were small documents, you wouldn't have to buy the product.
When the file allocation table is lost it is tricky to reassemble fragmented files. (This might be an obscure reason to run defrag.) On the NTFS disk I recovered there were multiple "views" of the files. The directory trees were partially lost of scrambled. It took quite a few hours to recover the important documents, but I got everything I needed -- Quicken files, several thousand emails, thousands of image files. I didn't try to recover anything but documents.
I recovered ALL the data ALL by myself with this GetDataBack.
You'll need to get a new drive, install it and install your windows restore disk or WinXP, whichever works. Then install the 'bad' drive as D Drive and run this software. If the data is there, this program will find it. I got it done all by myself. It was very cool. Someone recommended the Knoppix fast boot CDROM, that's another good way to see the drive from a non-windows point of view.
Yes.
Just because Microsoft-based products can't see the data, doesn't mean it isn't there.
LOL
Backups rule!
IBM went out of the drive business over their 60 gig drives. I, of course, bought three of them for myself and for family members. One of the three died, and that is the one I used RT on.
In defense of IBM, it was my fault the partitions were lost. Before I pushed the wrong button, all I had was a drive that booted with a S.M.A.R.T. warning. It still had all the data.
I screwed up trying to use a Maxtor utility to copy from the old to the new. The utility didn't work and while trying to do a fresh install of Windows on the new drive I accidentally deleted the partitions on the old one. The recovery program did get the documents from the old drive, but it was painful and time consuming.
Hmmm. Perhaps my smiley was too small. ;)
GetDataBack really saved my chestnuts a couple months ago...I can't praise it enough.
Redundancy Rules!
Step 1: Grab a hammer
Step 2: Beat the _(&)^&(^(%*%*%*&^ out of the hard drive.
Neither could I, the disk just wasn't there. But the recovery software took care of it easily, even if it did take forever.
I pulled that rabbit out of my hat a couple of months ago, but it's not for the faint-hearted ;)
Nice trick, but I'm a safety nut and try not to alter a drive that's died. Like you said, not for the faint-hearted, but you pulled it off!
Good one!!
I've used "gpart" to recover a couple partition tables in the past. It has the advantages of being free and working with a great variety of partition types. It has the disadvantage of only running (natively) on Linux/FreeBSD:
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/
If the computer BIOS recognizes the drive then it very likley is not a hardware failure.
Try GetDataBack to recover the data.
http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm
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Thanks. Am trying get back right now. Hard drive does show up on bios and diagnostic utilities said it was in good shape.
Of course, you could say the same thing about brain surgery or assembling nuclear weapons - if you know what you're doing, and you're careful, it's not all that dangerous. But that still doesn't mean it's a good idea for John and Jane Enduser to take a whack at it ;)
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