HELP WANTED: Computer geeks reply please

by Lady Lee 11 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Lady Lee

  I spoke a bit about this on another thread but think I might get some info from the computer geeks here

  I use a 40 GB drive as my main drive and I have a 60 GB hard drive installed on my computer.

  The 60 GB has always been used for storage only. It was partitioned into several drives. Somehow in my recent computer crash the 60 GB drive lost the partitions and all the data on it.

  Anyone know how to get the data back.

  A little about my computer know-how so you will have a better idea of what I can do if I had the instructions

  • I built this computer myself
  • installed a new motherboard,
  • AMD Duron processor,
  • video (Radeon 7500),
  • 2 hard drives and 2 CD drives (1 Plextor R/RW) and one regular)
  • I know how to:
  • format the drives
  • install programs usually using "Custom" install to get just what I want and omit the stuff I never use.
  • I also know how to get into the BIOS and change some settings
  • I have several peripherals not yet installed (still working on installing things after the format)
  • scanner,
  • printer,
  • webcam,
  • camera

  I have WinXP Pro installed (new to me this morning so I'm still finding my way around it) and just discovered that the old Win98 is still on and that I can boot on either one (I have read about dual OSs but sure was surprised when I did it by accident)

  So if you have any ideas how I can recover the data I sure would appreciate it.
• 

  stillajwexelder

  There is a company you can send the hard drive to who specialize in recovering data -they then reburn onto another medium - it is expensive 200 dollars per drive I believe
• 

  Finally-Free

  I've recovered hard drives using Spinrite.

  http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

  W
• 

  ballistic

  What is the current state of the drive? i.e. I am guessing you think it's lost the partitions because you cannot see the drive letters in windows? But can we be sure the drive is still connected to the system and is spinning up ok? It seems strange that you had a computer crash which normally involes your C: drive and yet it is the secondary drive you cannot see?
• 

  Lady Lee

  What is the current state of the drive? i.e. I am guessing you think it's lost the partitions because you cannot see the drive letters in windows?

  Well I can see it in the BIOS as the system boots up but I went into the BIOS and sure enough it is there. When I look at it in Windows Explorer it shows just one big drive though. Hmmmmm Maybe I should go back into the BIOS to see if it is still partitioned

  It seems strange that you had a computer crash which normally involes your C: drive and yet it is the secondary drive you cannot see?

  That's the thing that has me stumped. I was downloading the newest version of Acrobat Reader. I always save downloaded programs into a folder on the second drive. So when the download crashed my system I think it might have jammed up both drives because the download was controlled by the master drive but was being sent to the slave. FF thanks I'll check it out
• 

  Nathan Natas

  What Finally Free said.

  SPINRITE is worth a try - it will take hours to do what it does, but that's the way it goes. SPINRITE won't cost you nearly as much as a data recovery service will charge.

  Good luck!
• 

  Lady Lee

  Well I did a search for recovery programs. There are a lot of free one and since $$$$ is really tight I'm going to try one of them

  Cross your fingers for me
• 

  ballistic

  ok, so you can see the drive in Windows, whats on it?
• 

  Lady Lee

  Windows says there is nothing on it.

  But I used one of the free recovery programs and was able to get 328 jpg files off it.
• 

  Lady Lee

  Ok after some investigation I discovered that the 60 GB drive has 2 empty files on it bootlog.prv and bootlog.txt. and shows no partitians

  The really odd thing is that the smaller master drive has 3 partitions on it and they have all the data that was originally on the last two partitions before the format. So only the C drive got formatted leaving the rest of the partitions alone.

  So why does one keep the partitionsa while the other didn't?

  Hmmmm one other problem. It says the drive is only 610 MG. And it should be 60 GB. So perhaps it is only seeing the first partition and not the rest?