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[Nickbat]

Hi all.

Had a disastrous weekend. Been very busy during September with work and I noticed last week that the PC seemed to be running slower. Checked out my hard drives on Friday night and found that my second HDD was "at risk". Followed TB's advice and tried to copy all my important stuff over to C. Got some over and, I thought, all my September work in hand. Whilst copying other stuff got the old blue screen of death ("preparing to dump physical memory"), which I hadn't seen for a long time. Anyway tried to reboot and it wouldn't recognise the main HDD! I thought that maybe the I/O system was failing, so I didn't try again. Instead I got a new processor, mobo & HDD and rebuilt the PC. Managed to access the old C drive only to find that the copying process had not worked for my September stuff.

I cannot access my old second drive. The BIOS shows it's there and Win2K's device manager shows it's there but I can't get access to it through Explorer.

I DESPERATELY need these work files. I guess the only way is to take the HDD to one of those
arm-and-a-leg recovery places. That may be the only option.

I'm currently trying a software program called "Recover My Files", which I bought yesterday, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm in deep doodoo. The clients want their work completed.

[sounds2k]

there's also a program called "r studio" which is pretty good, works on drives that have been reformatted (as long as you haven't written to them subsequently) - only thing is it doesn't write to the drive so it will only restore data from the drive being worked on to another ...

[Kevin Wood]

If the drive can physically be "read from" the best approach to recovering it is to take an image of what's currently on it, put the drive back on the shelf and use tools to recover data from the image. This will not put the failing drive under any more stress than necessary and it avoids the risk of writing to it and doing more damage. I would not run tools, especially unknown programs downloaded from the internet, on your only copy of the data.

The above approach will need some specialist tools and will take a little time, but if you've got valuable data on the drive it's worth doing this than to risk doing more damage, IMHO. I could talk you through the above on a Linux box but am not familiar with the tools to do it under Windows  :-/

I used a data recovery guy local to me to get out of a sticky situation about a year ago and yes, it was expensive, but in this case the data he recovered was worth it. It's worth having a chat with someone even if you don't go the whole hog as they will be able to make some useful suggestions. This was a complex job involving a failed RAID 5 array. He came and collected the drives and 36 hours later delivered a USB hard drive containing all of the recovered files. He appologised that it took so long but said the main issue was the time it took him to image all the drives before starting the recovery.

Have a look at http://www.contentengineer.com. Give them a call and speak to Rob. He was very helpful although you might be better off using a guy local to you.

I hope you get it sorted.

Kevin

[Bo Bo]

I had similar last year & downloaded a free file recovery program (sorry can't remember which at the moment) & it recovered everything including things I'd deleted up to the last restore point.....

[Jimbob]

it may be the disk needs 'adding' to windows...

Control Panel
Admin Tools
Computer Management

Then Disk Management

From there you should be able to see the disk, tell windows it can use it, cant remember exactly how, but it is in there
it should then get a drive letter, which you can either copy off if all ok, or use your recover program.
I have used GetDataBack with good success before now - that was from Master File Table corruption.

[Nickbat]

Thanks for all your input.  

I've had some success. I downloaded the "EASUS Data Recovery Wizard" demo program and it read the data HDD, so I bought the full program for £41. It restored 35,000 files in 14 minutes!  

I haven't been able to get anything off my old C drive, but that's off less importance right now. Main thing is I have my client's data back.  

Not totally happy yet, but getting there....

[Nickbat]

Damned computers.

Dowloaded Adobe PostScript driver, which I needed and it tells me there's not enough space to upack and install on Drive C "Please free up 13.42Mb of space", it says.

Drive C has 35.9Gb used and 92Gb free. WTF?  

[Kevin Wood]

Sounds like it wasn't coded in anticipation of a disk that large.  

Kevin

[TheBoy]

now that you've recovered important data, let it be a timely reminder about backs!

[Nickbat]

now that you've recovered important data, let it be a timely reminder about backs!

I read your reply to my post on Friday night and immediately started backing up when the system went south! But, you're right. Won't let it happen again, this has been a nightmare...

[TheBoy]

now that you've recovered important data, let it be a timely reminder about backs!

I read your reply to my post on Friday night and immediately started backing up when the system went south! But, you're right. Won't let it happen again, this has been a nightmare...

well some good has come if it makes you more proactive in back regime

Imagine OOF members reaction if we didn't have working backups - there'd be mutiny

[cem_devecioglu]

The blue dump screen means inconsistency with the data from the ram or if it was the virtual memory (paging file -accepted as ram)  from the disk...As an experience in these kind of crashes if the drives are at the same age C disk is the one who collapses
first.

once upon a time norton software was famous with recoveries now is too many..But better get proffesional help if data is critical..

ps: also try to recover C drive .There may be important files that you saved and forgot from before..

[alan2450]

Glad you have had some success, can the system read the drive at DOS level?  If so you could copy files to a new directory from DOS, labour intensive but if needs must?

[TheBoy]

The blue dump screen means inconsistency with the data from the ram or if it was the virtual memory (paging file -accepted as ram)  from the disk...As an experience in these kind of crashes if the drives are at the same age C disk is the one who collapses
first.

once upon a time norton software was famous with recoveries now is too many..But better get proffesional help if data is critical..

ps: also try to recover C drive .There may be important files that you saved and forgot from before..

BSOD happens when the kernel cannot recover from an unexpected error, which may or may not be related to vm.  Failing system disks, and the one hold the pagefile (if different) is a common cause though

[cem_devecioglu]

god knows how many times I've seen blue screens.Before when the L2 caches were apart from cpu (historical) mostly they were erroneous (oem) and they were a real headache..Another common reason was memory parity error..

Also when you overclock the cpu and the ram timings are flying.(because of wrong multipliers)

Even seen occasions with faulty power supplies which result in the blue dump screen..

General meaning is that at one point system running privileged code  (not user code) faced some serious hardware error and decides to shut down the system with memory hex dump..