My hard drive has died :(

[faithx]

Just wanted to tell you all how sad I am. My desktop started booting up really slowly about a week ago and now it won¿t boot off the hard disc at all. The windows event log indicated that I was getting I/O errors and timeouts. Before you ask, no I haven¿t got a backup! I've swapped it over for an old hard drive with Win98 on it, to prove I could boot off that, therefore I assume it must be the hard drive and not the controller. I¿m hoping I can get a new hard drive and restore my basic system on to that, and hopefully be able to access my original hard drive as a slave and be able to salvage something from it !

Wish me luck

[kee-lo_]

Poor babs

[faithx]

I¿ve downloaded an evaluation copy of a tool called ¿GetDataBack¿ and proved that I can read some of the disk and see my files. The only problem is, to recover them I¿d have to buy the software ¿ buggers ¿¿¿¿¿¿ but at least it gives me some hope, just need to find some free software that can do this too :smileythinking:

[chris_lewis]

Hi Faith,

They say the best things in life are free....

But get a PC involved and you can kiss your cash goodbye:smileysad:

I have a techy mate as most of us do!!
Will see if he can offer any software ideas.

C

[faithx]

hahaha, yeah I have a few techie mates too thanks, all help gratefully accepted Chris I really don't want to part with any cash :smileymoney_eyes: It's looking a little more promising now though, as I've re-run the "GetDataBack" utility, starting a bit further on from the dodgy sector it hit last time and it's merrily finding lots of files, so hopefully I should be able to get most of my data back ................. somehow

[TygerTyger]

That's the MAJOR problem with that piece of software, it doesn't/can't recover file names. However the files themselves are perfectly fine, you just have to rename them. It's an extremely painful process in many respects especially if you have loads to recover but I suggested it because it's the only one I ever found that was free. And as I say, although the names are screwed up the files themselves are right. I only needed to get a few back last time I used it so renaming the files wasn't much trouble.

[kee-lo_]

Who makes GetDataBack, Roxio?

[TygerTyger]

Roxio make great stuff.

[kee-lo_]

It's not Roxio - thank goodness, it's runtime software

Personally I don't like Roxio, their Easy CD Creator sucks

[faithx]

Thanks TT, I might end up doing this as a last resort, but like you say it would take bloody ages :smileyhypnotized:

[kee-lo_]

Yeah a lot of the time the files will be in 8:3
Hope the windows files are the ones corrupted and not personal ones....