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But lets not lose track of the first problem..the computer would not turn on at all, and showed no evidence of battery power or the charger/ac adapter being plugged in. This seems to point to an electrical event of some kind being the root cause of the hard drive problem...and still needs to be checked out.
Quote:
Originally Posted by confus-ed
It depends on how fragmented his hard drive was, and where on it, the new xp files were installed..its quite possible some of the files are still around, hiding under a long-gone partition table.....something like pc inspector can pull it off............it might crash a coupla times......but it might work :)
& good luck with your newborn, I unlike most guys (having to do it all myself) remember sleepness nights & 'squarking' very well indeed !
what the hell is squarking?......damn it......
(goes and adds 1 more question for potential wives-to-be questionaire..."how well do you handle squarking?")
All right! Proving once more that I just don't know when to shut up... Molly and confus-ed, yes some of these online proggies (proggies?) can actually recover data for you in spite of a reformat. Again, I (ouch) don't know everthing out there on the market, but Get Data Back has been very, very good to me. I have used it to recover data from drives that were so bad that the BIOS didn't even recognize them. A customer recently brought in a drive that he needed data from which he had actually Fdisked twice and formatted twice, once in FAT32 and once in NTFS. I got one hundred percent of his data recovered, which is not too shabby for a $79 program. Believe me I have spent much more on recovery software that doesn't work as well. I also know one of one company specializing in forensic data recovery that uses GDB routinely.
One nice feature is the network recovery tool. you can download a client to install on the machine with the data to be recovered, install the main program on a different computer and do the recovery via network or serial connection. It is painfully slow, but you don't have to pull the drive. Anyway you can run most of the operation at night while you are... oops! not sleeping anyway are you? You can also save the recovery operation and resume it from where you left off if need be. A trial download is free, and it does everything but the actual recovery. Bear in mind that the more the machine is used, the more unlikely complete recovery becomes. Just in case you want to know more or give the program a try, here's the link again http://www.runtime.org/
'Squarking' = waaaaaaaaaaaaah ! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! (and that mad little sobbing noise newborns make) ad infinitum ;) - its dialect where I live
Just a point on formating/repartitioning & writing data back on a disk .... Yup its perfectly feasable to recover data after a format (no data written except to either FAT of MFT -so lets build another), Yup its perfectly feasable to recover after repartitioning (only mbr is recreated - & they aren't in the data area anyway so no files 'really' lost) but start writing data all over the place & your chances of recovery go down hill fast, windows setup tries to write in very specific places on any disk - its designed to - so it specifically places any swap file 2/3 of the way onto the disk for instance - trouble is it obviously writes just where stuff was before, then with xp you've that lovely self tuning mechanism where it caches prefetch files all over the shop, the swap files busy being as large as it likes, setup itself uses about 5 times as much space as the final install if its available & then does a big fat cleanup , etc etc ... my take on it was if you had to ask in the first place, I don't rate your chances with someone elses data recovery tools as something has probably been there already - sure it might still be possible, but every write to that disk makes it less likely ;) & you have to pay for the damn things before they'll actually get you back what they reckon they can - I figure anything at home can't be worth all this ... :)
Ok , my 2cents. I just went through this for a friend. She wanted to upgrade her scabbed copy of xp to the real deal - not paying attention, she chose to format and not repair the install. upon reboot, no docs etc...
now that means this drive was reformatted to ntfs and xp pro installed ontop of xp pro.
I used getdatabackntfs and got 80% of what she wanted back (including some pix she had previously lost by deleting on old install) IT CAN BE DONE - I DID IT !! and boy was i surprised....
with that being said - the easiest way would be to get a 2.5 inch hard drive usb case and hook up drive on other system - run get databack on it - see what happens. You can download demo version which will show you what files it can find - but beware, not every file will be able to be opened. for my friend - i had to open som docs with wordpad or notepad and copy paste good text - gave her cd of recovered file ( over 1,000) and she went through rest to find what was actually good.
This means :
1. removing hard drive from notebook ( usually a screw)
2. Putting it in a USB case
3. Hook up to other PC
4. run getdataback or similar
5. cross fingers.....
Hope that helps
So, would it be a waste of time to run PC Inspector and should I just do GetDataBack only?
A couple questions:
1. The GDB instructions say to install its software on a working Windows computer. And, attach the laptop's HD to this computer as a slave. The Windows version the GDB would be installed on is Win'98 and the 2nd HD is XP Home. Win'98 is a FAT based system. XP Home is NTFS. Since the files are on the XP HD, the NTFS?
2. How do you make an image of your HD?
3. Ok, now I'm confused. I'm reading in a different area of GDB site and XP and Win'98 can use either FAT or NTFS.
I guess I can try both and see which actually gets the files in the right way?
Either Product may or may not do the job with varying levels of 'ability'. (that'd be preference ;))Quote:
Originally Posted by mdolls68
Its telling you to slave any disk to be recovered to try & avoid more writing taking place on it, as I commented earlier the less writing that has happened the better your chances of getting any files back, obviously the product used must be able to understand both file systems concerned FAT & NTFS
You can use either fat or ntfs with xp (that's down to the options you choose in setup). 98 however only understands FAT based file systems & won't 'see' any ntfs area.....
You make an 'image' of your cd with some imaging software (my that's informative :D - it does a sector by sector copy, different from just copying any files) the best known example is symantecs Ghost, there are others...
Yup you can use either, but without paying for the full version I don't think either will actually let you write the recovered result, which is pooh really as until its actually recovered you can't say for sure that its been recovered 'correctly' - just because it thinks its found a file - it ain't ! - its found the start of file marker, whether it manages to recover any subsequent parts of the file (files very rarely are 'saved' as just one bit as far as the file system is concerned, generally they are small bits (4k) 'linked' by a series of offset pointers which point to the next bit) , you won't know until after your 'full' version has written it back to disk :eek2:
Quote:
Originally Posted by confus-ed
pc inspector is free. that's why I recommended it. Did you see me suggesting this person running out and buying or pirating copies of software.......no......obviously there's like r-studio, on track easyrecovery, and a bunch of others......but..they cost money.....so.....pc inspector is a quick and free solution...free was the point i think, since this person doesn't have the budget for this.
Hello Molly! Hope you're getting some rest. But I'm kinda wishin' confus-ed would give it a rest. First off let me say that I like PCInspector. It's good, it's free. Still, I have just had better success, personally, with GDB and I like the network recovery feature. You have to remember, when you read these posts, that everybody's experience is different. Hey, feel free to experiment with some different programs.
I think we really need to address confus-ed's constant thread of " well, the program may say it can get it but there aint no way to be sure, etc" Actually, there is. GDB includes file viewers that will open many common files like jpgs. If you are trying to recover, say, MS Word files, and you have Word installed on the computer doing the recovery, you can open the recovered files and examine them. With the FREE trial version. Before you buy it. OK. Is this horse officially dead? Can we bury the damn thing before it starts to stink?
Runtime Software's website has lots of online help, tutorials, yadda. They are also located in Arizona, so they are on your clock. The staff is helpful, speaks English as a primary language (no "Dude, you're getting a New Delhi!" syndrome) if you need to give them a call.
Almost certainly, your drive is formatted in NTFS file system, so GDB for NTFS is the appropriate version. It runs under Win98 just fine. But you can run either triial version of GDB. As long as you are installing the recovery programs on some computer other than the one that contains the data you are looking for, and you don't write much to the laptop, you can experiment with and compare several different programs. These posts aren't rules, they're more in the way of guidelines.
I really hope that all this has been more helpful than confusing, and good luck!
So ... numpty ain't that what I said ?Quote:
Originally Posted by slgrieb
How can I say from here without the flipping disk, which 'util' will have a better chance of getting stuff back completely intact ? If infact either will, my experience is that both 'lie' & that you think you can fully recover stuff only you find later that your file is corrupt & that the real proggies won't infact read it at all, yet the util said it would .... that HAS been my considerable experience...
This dudes is a home user, so they are gonna take their lappie apart, get a converter so they can slave it into a.n.other machine, then use whatever util, do the recovery (if it will, which after all this activity on a laptop sized hard drive which probably only has a relatively small capacity & is therefore more likely to have been overwritten by any re-install) oh & then put it all back together in a working state.
The solution would appear to be more work than 're-doing' !
My point is that 'we' generally are skilled hands, what may be appropriate for any of 'us' to try, really is quite different from what you ought to be advising someone without 'expertise' to be undertaking ...
Now you can take that as a flame if you feel so inclined, but I'd suggest you were just thinking about how YOU might achieve this, not someone who had to ask about it all in the first place ... :)
Hello -ed! No, I don't take your remarks as a flame, just your opinion, and all of us got one. What I like about GDB is 1. you do not have to pull a drive to use it. The network recovery works just as well, albeit much more slowly. 2. before you buy it you can open and read the files it says it can recover to see it they are worth the price. Sure, some of the recovered files will be trash, but most of the recent files will be just fine. Even if they have been overwritten. No, you can't just save the recovered files or edit them without buying the program, but you can examine them and make an informed decision, so what's wrong with that? 3. the software is simple to use, on screen instructions are clear, online help is excellent, phone support is superb. This is not just software for experts.
Yes, no matter how you slice this, data recovery entails a fair ammount of time and effort, but you and I can't decide if all of it is worth it to someone else. I have seen people break down and cry over hard drive crashes because thought they had lost years (of course they had no backup) of genealogy research and family photos. Don't know what Molly had on her drive and don't really care about the specifics. I just want her to know that her data is almost certainly recoverable at a reasonable cost, without sending the machine to the shop, and without being a professional computer tech.
Well, back again. Sorry. Just in case I have failed to make this clear, the real programs installed on the machine performing the recovery with GDB can read the recoverable files generated by the free version, before you pay for it. You just can't save or edit them. This applies to any files, not just the formats for which GDB has native viewers. If you buy the software and then save the recovered files, you will still be able to open them with their native application. No smoke and mirrors. I use this program frequently, and it really does just what it says.
Network recovery - you are assuming slgrieb they have the ability to network.....
Either way molly, I hope you wanted to learn about all this!!
Ok, found out the hard drive was having some issues and parts of it was bad. After reading the stuff on the Getdataback site, it said that if the HD is bad, then then it can't get recover the data. I'm still upset about that, but decided that my energies were best figuring out how to salvage what was left of it.
I returned the Compaq laptop to Best Buy. They verified the HD was bad and allowed me to either get another Compaq laptop or get something else. I ended up getting a Sony Vaio. The desktop we have has been pretty good, so hope the laptop will be good.
Thanks to all for all their suggestions & help. You guys are great!!!!