Hard disk tools... After blue screen of D!

disneyjoe7

In view of pass events Father in-law in all, when I lost my 250g drive with NTFS file system I'm a bit lost at pulling anything off it. So since this was an old issue I since redo drive I lost lots of pictures which I could kick myself now for. The trouble is I don't have boot-able disk that sees this file type, so I'm a bit lost at this point if I see it. Is there link or file someone can send me so I don't have this issue in the future?

disneyjoe7

I may have answered my own question Google is my friend, but if anyone knows any tricks please share.

McLoki

NTFS4DOS can be a pain to work with, but I have used it successfully in the past. Good luck.

Michael

unc2701

I keep a SLAX thumbdrive around just for this sort of thing.
http://www.slax.org/

It's an idiot-proof stripped down linux distribution. Just unzip it to a thumbdrive, follow the directions to make it bootable and set your motherboard to boot off USB. Works every time. Once you copy all your files over the network (or over to the thumbdrive), you can nuke the harddrive and start over.

Kex

A few months ago, during a difficult time for my family (very similar to your own issues, actually) I accidentally dropped my laptop on the floor. It seemed to still be working, but when it rebooted all sorts of errors started until it would not even boot at all. It was just one more thing I did not want to have to deal with then.

I did a lot of research and came accross this piece of software, recommended by some very geeky types. It is good because you do not have to remove the hard drive from your machine. It is also good because it does not matter if the O.S. boots or not. It's biggest inconvenience factor is that it can take days, or weeks to complete the job if damage is severe. A healthy disc only takes about two hours or so, so you might get lucky with two or three days only. You must have a floppy drive or bootable CD drive to use it (it cannot be run from the same drive as the O.S.).

In my case, it took several weeks. The drive must be spinning (and mine was) for it to work, but in my case it detected a lot of severe surface damage from the head crashing onto the disc. Still, it repaired so much of the data that the O.S. even booted in the end. To retrieve the data, I was able to simply remove the recovered hard drive and install it in an external enclosure. I recovered all of my data except for two e-mails. Even those, I was able to read, but they could not be copied. The hard drive is toast, of course, and new damage occured almost immediately (from bits of metal flying around inside, I am told) but a replacement cost a whopping $20 , so the laptop is not (toast, that is).

http://www.grc.com/cs/prepurch.htm

If you have time to wait, I highly recommend it. It costs $90 and can be downloaded in less than one minute. Just find a quiet, preferably cool, spot somewhere to leave your system to work without being disturbed or knocked accidentally.

disneyjoe7

McLoki wrote: »

NTFS4DOS can be a pain to work with, but I have used it successfully in the past. Good luck.

Michael

I like yours its small and looks "Floppable", but not all computers have floppy drives today.

disneyjoe7

unc2701 wrote: »

I keep a SLAX thumbdrive around just for this sort of thing.
http://www.slax.org/

It's an idiot-proof stripped down linux distribution. Just unzip it to a thumbdrive, follow the directions to make it bootable and set your motherboard to boot off USB. Works every time. Once you copy all your files over the network (or over to the thumbdrive), you can nuke the harddrive and start over.

Your's looks really sweet, but not a floppy thing but...............




Kex, I understand what you did, but not what I was looking for.

unc2701

You can also throw Slax on a CD; most computers starting around 2000 will boot from CD and most from the last few years will boot from USB, too. Just hit F1 (or whatever your computers says immediately after you turn it on) to enter the BIOS menu and set the boot order to check CD or USB first.

ben62670

Is there data you need to retrieve?

disneyjoe7

Ok if I used this at the time to boot up and remove anything I wish pictures or what not. The problem at that time even if I use 2 hard drives a sata 250g and a small 6 gig which I hold some old tax records but too small to move the 10g of pictures I had. I since reformatted, and rebuilt it with a 80g second drive too help in this propose. So would I be able to format a drive with that as the 80g was used in a Tivo and wasn't Fat32 or NTFS.

But that is light years ahead of what I had at the time. NTFS seems solid, but when it fails its ugly and quick.

disneyjoe7

ben62670 wrote: »

Is there data you need to retrieve?

No Ben, this is the computer which died on me a few months ago and I lost those picture but since redid I think they are gone gone gone. Just looking for some ideas in the future if I needed to recovery data again.

Just with a death in the family some old pictures came to mind which are gone for good. Just hate to have to relive that over again.

John30_30

disneyjoe7 wrote: »

No Ben, this is the computer which died on me a few months ago and I lost those picture but since redid I think they are gone gone gone. Just looking for some ideas in the future if I needed to recovery data again.

Just with a death in the family some old pictures came to mind which are gone for good. Just hate to have to relive that over again.

They're never gone,gone, gone unless your new install actually wrote data over them. There are some excellent data-recovery tools for around $40-50, and once in a great while, this site features a freebie version of the best one I've played with: http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

the app I'm referring to is this one- http://www.easeus.com/, and it is very fast and efficient.

Kex

disneyjoe7 wrote: »

No Ben, this is the computer which died on me a few months ago and I lost those picture but since redid I think they are gone gone gone. Just looking for some ideas in the future if I needed to recovery data again.

Just with a death in the family some old pictures came to mind which are gone for good. Just hate to have to relive that over again.

A neighbor of mine used this free software. He said he recovered everything he had accidentally lost. You should know pretty quickly what it will let you retrieve ...

I haven't tried it, so I can't tell you how good it really is, but he thought it was amazing.

PC Inspector:
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1

disneyjoe7

Kex wrote: »

A neighbor of mine used this free software. He said he recovered everything he had accidentally lost. You should know pretty quickly what it will let you retrieve ...

I haven't tried it, so I can't tell you how good it really is, but he thought it was amazing.

PC Inspector:
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1

Well that software is short of Amazing. And what I can say about my lost drive redone with the pictures. It was the pictures which were part of the problem took like a day or so to rescan drive for lost files, but I happy to report some 30-50% of the pictures where saved. Names and file size is wrong as all report 1.43mb it found every pictures some IE files I'm sure but 15K photos with the name clusterxxxxx.jpg

It will be slow, but some lived. Thank you for the tip.

Kex

disneyjoe7 wrote: »

Well that software is short of Amazing. And what I can say about my lost drive redone with the pictures. ... Thank you for the tip.

Glad it worked out ... especially for free!

John30_30

disneyjoe7 wrote: »

Well that software is short of Amazing. And what I can say about my lost drive redone with the pictures. It was the pictures which were part of the problem took like a day or so to rescan drive for lost files, but I happy to report some 30-50% of the pictures where saved. Names and file size is wrong as all report 1.43mb it found every pictures some IE files I'm sure but 15K photos with the name clusterxxxxx.jpg

It will be slow, but some lived. Thank you for the tip.

Nice.