Chris_924s

Brett951

I've had good luck with EasyRecovery Pro (http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/). I've even used it to recover pictures on a compact flash card that my camera hosed. I have NOT used it on RAID volumes however. And I have always used it on a stable system drive recoverying a failed drive installed into the system (though not "mounted" by the OS, the software works on unmounted drives). They also have a boot floppy option too, but I don't trust fixing on the same drive, by running from a good drive and letting it recover files from failed drives to a known good drive, it will actually not write any bits to the bad drive, so you keep other options open.

Good luck, I know how you feel, I've been there too often (so I have used this on multiple hard drives as well as the compact flash card, I just think that's an interesting example). When my compact flash card died, it was about full of vacation (Crater Lake, OR) and wedding pictures, so I was really pissed, actually punched the side of my truck and left a dent I was so upset. The dent is now there to remind me to not panic - since everything was recovered. I was lucky! hopefully you will be too!

-Brett

TheCooler

Also update the bios.

NeedPorscheSpeed

I'm really sorry to hear about your bad luck, 944T4ME. It made me realize that I have so much data on my computer that I haven't backed up. Your misfortune has provided the impetus for me to do just that (I've put it off for a year now.) If I lost it, whew, I'd be devastated. Best of luck in your recovery efforts.

944T4ME

Update:

Both drives have bad sectors. After bring the computer over to a friends house who is a tech, we tried out his version of ghost, which is 1 year newer. Got an error, but I actually got to the point where it asks if I wanted to do a sector copy cause the disk is damaged. woohoo! Ghost didn't freeze. So we start to do the sector copy. The very first few hundred sectors were damaged. As some of you know, that is where the MBR along with all partition and fat information is stored. Try accessing a disk with THAT. We watched it for a bit, and once it got past the bad sectors, it started copying FILES. yeayyy files. There was some numbers in front of them, which is not normal for ghost, but who cares, there are files going on to a single IDE disk. I knew once I had that, the rest is money. We watch it for a bit, and it hits 51% copied, and more bad sectors.

At this point it is getting late, and he had to go to bed. He later tells me that there were more bad sectors, and there were some right at the end of the disk (where the other fat information is kept, as "backup"), where the copy failed. Oh well, will just have to do some basic data recovery on it.

Went to buy ANOTHER 250gb drive in which to extract the files to, and thats where I'm at now. I need to borrow an IDE controller card, as I converted mine to a fasttrak100, and the dell only has one on the board. I'll ask my buddy if he has one, or just buy one.

So thats it. Now that I have everything on a good drive with no bad sectors, it is recognizeable in windows and all the recovery programs, so I just have to run one on it for a few hours and then Im done. Sort through all the info for a little while. Looks like Im getting my files, including all my pics!!! (minus a few mbs from the bad sectors, who cares)

Chris_924s

So, now it's off to fdisk and recover the bad sectors if possible once the files are resurrected..

Congrats!

944T4ME

Nah, Im just going to send the drives in to maxtor. Bad sectors are covered under warranty, no receipt needed. All drives are stamped with the date on them. Plus, XP doesn't use fdisk per se anymore.