BrainStream: ADMIN: Catestrophic Data Failure

[bkdelong]

I hate Windows.

I came down at about 4am while feeding my son to see that my machine couldn't find my harddrive. Yay. I decided to ignore it until morning only to find that the HD has been corrupt. So I went out to grab a USB External HD case and mount it on Kirky's laptop.

Trying various shareware/freeware data recovery programs - GetDataBack at the moment - to see if it works. If I have the drive plugged in, Windows takes a LONG time recognizing it's even there...and even then doesn't let me do anything. We'll see.

Last resort is data recovery service.

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Comments

[alun-clewe.livejournal.com]

Once, many years ago, I had a similar problem with a hard drive on my computer. I took it to a computer store (I don't remember which one; possibly Fry's), and was told that while the hard drive could be reformatted, the data was completely irrecoverable.

Fortunately, I did not believe them, and went about laboriously trying to recover the data (using Norton DiskEdit, IIRC) by myself. Partway through the process, I finally figured out that the problem was that for some reason a sector offset had been introduced in the... dang, I forget what it's called now, but the small part of the disk memory that holds the basic information on how things are set up on it... and that therefore it was trying to read blocks starting in the middle. If I had known from the beginning that that was the problem, I could have fixed it and had all my files back in a matter of minutes. As it was, what I had done so far meant that some files now had the new sector offset, some had the old, and a few had become corrupted, but I was still able to salvage most of my data.

Not that this is at all likely to be related to the problem in your case, of course; I'm just saying that I understand how frustrating it is to not be able to access your hard drive...