A message from Dave

[Vermin_King]

I had a computer hard drive shoot craps on me once. I had already moved my work related files to a new one, but all my creations for The Sims game were gone except what were on CDs given to others. Photos, a song I wrote, and lots of 'little' things of great importance to me were plain flat gone. The replies on here sound hopeful for you. We definitely wish you the best.

[sgoti]

Originally Posted by barry

You need a guy who is a specialist "Disk Doctor" but check up with an authority before giving it to anyone. Formatting does not usually destroy files. If you are running a full antivirus program check with them to see if they copy the essential file position data.

Hope it all turns out well. Send Zathros an email !

I like this suggestion better than my earlier one.

[mchale]

nooooo
now that i got that out of my system
i feel sorry for your loss i hope you can recover most or all of what you lost just keep your head above water and dont forget to breath

[Ron Caudillo]

Hi Dave,
Yes, don"t despair (yet anyway).

In my case, I was trying to restore a Windows installation and this resulted in reformatting AND reinstalling Windows.

Fortunately, I had purchased a program called 'Zero Assumption Recovery' (only $24.00 USD when I bought it) that I had been using to recover data from notebook drives. I was able to recover 85% on the data, even after a format and reinstallation of Windows!

Good luck, I'm looking forward to hearing your success!

By the way, recovering the hard drive cost me about 124 dollars, 24 for the program and 100 to fix the wall that I kicked in!

Best Regards,

[marco1971]

Hello, do not despair, nothing is impossible. I have a friend who loses every 2 months all data from hard disks, but using EasyRecovery Professional recovers all. The program is very easy but you have another hard drive that is used to retrieve all the data that is equal to or greater than what you have.
Marco

[JT Fox]

Sorry to hear of your troubles Dave.

Good luck getting it sorted.

Cheers JTF

[rbeach84]

Dave, it sounds like there is hope to recover some if not the majority of your data. It probably won't be pretty but at the very least it would be better than having to start everything from scratch!

I am glad you can come to the forum for support. It sounds like the 'guys' here have some experience in this kind of event, so I am optimistic for your recovery efforts.

I hope this is a lesson for us all - all harddrives will 'die' whether by accident or otherwise so keep the backups cooking! I work on a help desk where I am constantly harping on my customers to backup their databases. Of course, I am as guilty as the next person - my last key data backup at home was probably four months ago. Guess I know what I'm doing tonight... I wonder if I should get another backup drive so I have two drives to protect me?

Wishing a speedy recovery for you, pal.

[Gixergs]

So sorry to hear this,it does sound hopeful though which is the good thing about digital data,I hope you successfully recover everything. Good luck and best wishes Phil.

[Zathros]

Dave, don't run any program on either drive. take it to a professional and pay the bucks. They will remove the drive storage discs and run them separately in a machine designed for that. It will cost but there is a really good change you will get almost everything back. If you run any other software, you will more than likely corrupt the structure and either make it unrecoverable, or a lot harder. Call around and find someone who specializes in this. I am so sorry for your loss!

On the drive that died, sometimes, if you have an identical drive that is working, you can swap the electronics, but when you open up a hard drive outside of a clean room, all kind of problems can happen. The software Ron Caudillo recommends could work, but you must be very careful that it does not write to that hard drive.

The Formatted drive may still have the data if it was a "soft" format. If you did a Hard Format ( you would know because it would take a long time) it is probably gone, but still,not necessarily. You really need an expert of data recovery on this.

These are the big boys on the block:

http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/

http://www.diskdoctors.com/hard-drive-recovery.asp Your problem falls under "Logic crash" (human error)

[opalmox]

Dave... All is not lost. As long as you haven't added anything to the disk drive, you should be able to recover everything. Follow the advise above, and get a professional to help you, and I don't mean the Geek Squad.

Having done computer security as part of a few different jobs that I've had, I know that the data is still there. It takes a lot of re-writing, and re-formatting a hard drive to wipe out all the data. So there is hope that you can get your data back.