A BIG OOPS!! Please Help!

[Motero]

I had the assignment of giving my uncle a 20 gb hard drive and reloading windows on the drive...all I really had to do was save 3 folders from the old drive. the windows install went great and so did the copying of the files...after I was finished he said he wanted the 20 gb drive in 2 partitions...so i got out my trusty partition magic disk and put it in...made the partition sizes and let it run. Well, it locked up half way...the only thing to do is reboot...Now windows gets a stop error and if i put the other drive in and try to read from that 20 gb drive, it says it's damaged or corrupted. I tried doing a repair on Windows and it tells me its damaged and won't do any repairs...

Now the data I had to keep, is potentially lost...I need that data!!! Any help on how to get it back would be greatly appreciated!!!!!!

Thanks.

 

[snidy1]

If you have one, try and load the OS on a differant drive, then put the drive with the files you need as slave, grad the files you need and put then on a disk. then reformat and start over.

 

[Motero]

I did that...but it tells me I cannot access the drive because is damaged or corrupt.

 

[helpmeout]

Sory about the problem. Exactly the same thing happened to me when I was using 98SE a few years ago, and I lost my files. Since then I burn my files.

 

[snidy1]

Originally posted by: Motero
I did that...but it tells me I cannot access the drive because is damaged or corrupt.

did you try booting with a start up disk and running scan disk?

 

[PolskiKrol]

What you are experiencing is a corrupt file allocation table. The data would still be there but is not accessible since the system has no idea where the files / directories are. There is third party software such as "Get Data Back" that will actually analyze your hard disk and rebuild the allocation tables. This would allow you to snag and copy over the needed data files to another hard disk. This operation would require 2 hard drives and the purchase of the aforementioned software. There is also more powerful dos based software such as Media Tools but that is too expensive for a one time recovery.

 

[kursplat]

I had the assignment of giving my uncle a 20 gb hard drive and reloading windows on the drive...all I really had to do was save 3 folders from the old drive.

Now the data I had to keep, is potentially lost...I need that data!!! Any help on how to get it back would be greatly appreciated!!!!!!

so you MOVED the data from the old drive and didn't just COPY it ? if you haven't messed with the old drive yet you should just be able to reinstall on the 20gig and then move the files you need over , IF you left them on the old drive.
as a side note , has anyone EVER had a good experiance with partition magic ? seems like there is always a recent post about someones rig wacked by that program.
good luck

 

[PolskiKrol]

kursplat: I have had numerous systems hammered by partition magic... the only magic with this program is making data disappear! Hopefully now that PowerQuest was bought out by Symantec it will see some improvements come the next version release. I would expect it to be possibly bundled with some special version of Norton Utilities.

 

[Motero]

kursplat:
I copied the files over but I had to reformat the drive asap because of possibly viruses.

PolskiKrol:
Thanks for the info...i'm dowloading it now...we'll give it a try...

 

[runzwithsizorz]

Just a thought. we had exactly the same problem with a corrupted hard drive Had pictures we wanted. set up the bad drive as a slave and then transferred picture files IN DOS. the only way to access the corrupted HD was in DOS, NOT windows. (My OS is Win 98se)

 

[Motero]

Anyone ever use R-Studio for data recovery? That is $40 cheaper than GetDataBack, which appears to do the same thing...

 

[Motero]

Anyone?

 

[altonb1]

Originally posted by: kursplat

I had the assignment of giving my uncle a 20 gb hard drive and reloading windows on the drive...all I really had to do was save 3 folders from the old drive.

Now the data I had to keep, is potentially lost...I need that data!!! Any help on how to get it back would be greatly appreciated!!!!!!

so you MOVED the data from the old drive and didn't just COPY it ? if you haven't messed with the old drive yet you should just be able to reinstall on the 20gig and then move the files you need over , IF you left them on the old drive. as a side note , has anyone EVER had a good experiance with partition magic ? seems like there is always a recent post about someones rig wacked by that program. good luck

OT: Not exactly the same, but I was using Norton Ghost to try to back up my data onto a CD. (I always put it off) I ran the program from Windows (I'm very familiar with the command based app, but firgured I'd try the GUI version) and it said it needed to configure things to allow the data to write correctly, then it told me it needed to reboot. It shut down and resulted in: NO OPERATING SYSTEM FOUND. I was very irritated and spent a couple of hours trying to get into my NTFS drives to fix things. Finally had to boot to XP CD like a new install, delete the added partition it created (probably with Partition Magic or similar technology) and reinstall XP on top the existing install. I was not happy.