Major data recovery program needed, FAST. Urgent

F

fury

Administrator
Staff member
I need the fastest, free-est data recovery program you know of. I'll explain later. Thanks in advance.
 
fury said:
Thanks for the linkage. However, I need about 20-30,000 times more data recovery than it offers (says "Limited to 1mb data preview") :mope:

That 2nd link shows up to a blank page. Well, not completely blank, I see a logo.
Click to expand...

Sorry hon, I didn't read the specs before I posted. The second link works fine for me, the product is called Winternals ERD Commander if you want to do a google search. But like I said, it costs $200. One of the other options here is probably better.

My company policy is we don't do backups for employees or data recovery. So I don't get much of a chance to do it anymore. :shrug:
 
greenfreak said:
Sorry hon, I didn't read the specs before I posted. The second link works fine for me, the product is called Winternals ERD Commander if you want to do a google search. But like I said, it costs $200. One of the other options here is probably better.

My company policy is we don't do backups for employees or data recovery. So I don't get much of a chance to do it anymore. :shrug:
Click to expand...
What do you do it for, then, shits and giggles? :lol:

I found what I was looking for. Thanks for the help everyone.

Now for the explanation.

I was setting up my new motherboard, and decided I could save a lot of airflow space by putting one of my drives on a Serial ATA channel, with the adapter that came with the board. I intended to put my second hard drive on the serial ATA because it is higher up in the case, and I could push the rounded cable for the main hard drive which was a lot lower down, away from the airflow space pretty well. Well, I didn't know it at the time but I had accidentally switched the drives around, put my main hard drive at the top of the case with the serial ATA connector and the second hard drive with the parallel ATA. So I booted up and put the Win2k CD in and went to set up Windows, and found out my 2nd hard drive was set up as the main, because it only had one big partition on it. I shut down and switched the drives around, this time with both on parallel ATA connectors. This is because I had noticed was that one of the drives was sounding a little odd (spinup and spindown was louder than usual) but I had hoped it was because of case vibrations and/or some kind of incompatibility from the serillel adapter. So I booted up again and started the setup, and it's telling me that the drive is either new, has been erased, or is running an operating system that is incompatible with Windows 2000.

Insert heart attack here. The drive that I have all my emails, all my web sites, all my obsolete downloads that I can't get anymore, the drive that I wanted to be the one that DIDN'T die if either of them ever died, was erased. Apparently the serial ATA controller wanted it to be a RAID drive even though it was the only drive on the SATA controller, so it decided to erase the boot record.

Insert panic, 2 more heart attacks, installing Windows (at least temporarily) on the other hard drive, a call to Sammy, some failed attempts to boot to the Win2k recovery console on that drive in order to do a FIXMBR, and this post, and there's where I'm at.

At this point, the drive is still sounding odd. Spinup and spindown is still louder than normal, but apparently the drive is still working, because I see "Unallocated (111.79gb)" in the disk manager in computer management.

An old friend gave me some recovery software that he had no use for and I'm recovering using that now. It's picky about how I tell it the partitions are set up. It doesn't seem to want the first partition to be more than 1gb, even though it's 4. Anyways, I tricked it into finding both partitions, and am now recovering files from the 2nd partition. 15gb of 36gb... This might take a while.

I have the WORST luck with hardware, don't I?

Why didn't I just look on the web to see if there were any major issues with serillel adapters before I stupidly went and stupidly did this? :mope:
 
You need a ghost server or something that only holds backups of your stuff and the stuff of people's computers you're working on. :D Sounds like you've got it under control, glad you're able to get your stuff! I know about those heart attacks, NFG! :eek:

To answer your question, my company has always told our users that they should not store anything on their C drives. They should store everything on the server which is backed up daily. Still, when people's hard drives went bad and wouldn't boot, I would wind up backing their stuff up to Zip disks through a DOS prompt. PITA to be sure. Then they changed all this and said, no more emergency backups. So I don't do it anymore. :shrug:
 
whew, dennis i am glad that you are getting the files back. which software did you end up using? I know last night was pretty rough on ya. thought i was gonna have to call a meat wagon for ya. I just dont trust those "new adaptors/convertors" yet. they work well in theory but in RL not so good.
Anyways guess youll be needing a serial drive here before long. gotta see if they are as stable as the ide drives.
 
YES! I have recovered everything important... my emails, websites, documents, p...uhh...ersonal files... Easy Recovery is my new god. :beerbang:
 
great. that looked to be just the right fix for ya. :)

and ya really think "OLD" was necessary to describe me? :p
 
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