Damm PC

[mudhog]

My hard drive crashed last week what a pain in the a*** that is...and of course I haven't backed it up for ages so lost all my pictures, even one from when I went to Australia last year like I can afford to go there again.All my files everything. Now I have just been re installing every thing and trying to remember all the passwords I had saved.

Mental note.....regularly back up my PC

just thought I'd share that with you all, it makes me feel better

[Highlander1]

Hi

A computer chap came to mine when I lost photos he installed rescue pro San Disk version3.0 he got all the pictures back.

I know nothing about it so left it up to him. Maybe it would work for your's

Sorry I'm as much use as an ash tray on a motor bike when It comes to all things computerified.

Cheers JB

[hiroler]

When you say it`s crashed do you mean it went bang or you just cant get windows to start up etc. i know a place that can recover data they do forensic work when disks have been wiped etc. it might cost a bit but if they cant fix it they dont charge might be worth a try!! if its just windows you can get a USB caddie thing and try it in that.

[Cola]

thing is, if you've already reinstalled windows onto the hard drive you're not likely to get the pics back very easily - will cost a pretty pound. Windows will usually format the hard drive before installing. There are however applications that 'could' recover files - file scavenger being one of them, 'undelete' is another. Best thing to do when your hard drive goes tits up and you need to recover data off of it, is get the data off before you reinstall windows. Unless the physical hardware is $$$$ed you stand a good chance of recovering all data.

[dirtydog]

My hard drive crashed last week what a pain in the a*** that is...and of course I haven't backed it up for ages so lost all my pictures, even one from when I went to Australia last year like I can afford to go there again.All my files everything. Now I have just been re installing every thing and trying to remember all the passwords I had saved.

Mental note.....regularly back up my PC

just thought I'd share that with you all, it makes me feel better

like they say if its physical then not much you can do without paying ££$£$£$£££!
if its not then I can have a look for you if you like.

[Tallyman]

Had the same problem with mine in February. Managed to borrow a spare HD from work, loaded XP on to it and then copied the data on the old disc onto an extarnal HD. Re-installed XP on to the old drive and everything seemed OK but.... been getting further problems. Downloaded a Seagate HD test programme today which confirms my HD has at least two errors. Once it reaches that point the DOS utility, on a CD-Rom, can't make the process work any more and the whole thing grinds to a halt.

So, tomorrow or Saturday I'm off to buy a new SATA HD and transfer/load it all again. Good job all my photo's and vids are on one of the external IDE HD's.

By the way, for anyone computer literate (Marky??) what's the difference between SATA and PATA and will a PATA HD work with a motherboard configured for SATA (7 pin cable) or is there a different connector? Seen something which suggests PATA uses a 40 pin connector but the info on the sellers website was a bit confusing.

[da SLUG man]

erm... www.natta.co.uk ???


(been working for them this week!)

[marky]

Hello, thats a very good question.
PATA stands for parrallel ATA and SATA stands for Serial ATA. Parallel ATA drives use your older IDE ribbon cables to hook up to your motherboard. With PATA drives, you need to set the jumper settings to either master or slave depending on your mobo configuration. SATA are newer hard drives today. They use smaller slimmer cables. There's no need to set jumper settings with a SATA hard drive like on the PATA one. SATA hard drives can also be set in RAID arrays, to do a veriety of things with your data. The only issue one may run into with SATA hard drives is compatibiility, such as when you load different operating systems, you may need to manually install or slipstream drivers. Hope this helped and good luck.

[marky]

Look for a free Undelete programme that recovers files accidently Deleted'
It works as well. If you have put Windows on from scratch & formatted the drive you may have lost it for good.
If anyone wants a copy its about 760K i will email it to you.

[andycook]

the first thing i always do with a corrupted drive, e.g. windows wont boot,
is install it as a second drive on a computer, boot with a primary good drive,
then check out the dodgy drive once windows has booted

[dieselboy]

My hard drive crashed last week what a pain in the a*** that is...and of course I haven't backed it up for ages so lost all my pictures, even one from when I went to Australia last year like I can afford to go there again.All my files everything. Now I have just been re installing every thing and trying to remember all the passwords I had saved.

Mental note.....regularly back up my PC

just thought I'd share that with you all, it makes me feel better

explain how its crashed.
eg, does it just click and do nothing when powered on? or does it make windows keep looping, or do you get invalid system disk or disk error message?
i have a tool that repairs bad sectors on the disk nearly every time ive used the program it will let me use the hard drive as a secondary drive and then i can copy the files over to my new hard drive or usb drive.
all you will usually need is c:/documents and settings/*your name/my documents , desktop, favorites. the rest you will have to install again like programs.
whilst you have the hard drive, dont try to install anything on it or change the info on it in anyway. once its gone its gone.
also if i give you this program and you run it, and it says 'no hard drives connected' even though you know you have connected it good and the hard drive has been clicking its most probably got a bad read/write arm. i cure this by dropping the hard drive onto the floor from about a foot or two height.

[mudhog]

It wouldn't load up windows just kept looping round through the different safe mode but would not go past the log on page. Have no had it looked at and this is the diagnosis....The power supply unit is f***ed and so caused an imbalance of volts going into the HD causing it to fuse it self to the motherboard, They said that the data was un recoverable and have fitted a new PSU and a new hard drive. It now all works fine.

I do still have the old hard drive and can't see any obvious damage but what would i know. I don't really give a s**t about most of it just the pictures really. If anyone thinks they may be able to help that would be grate.

[dieselboy]

sounds like they have sold you a psu without you actually needing one. when a psu goes - it goes. this means nothing will work.
what you can try doing is installing the old hard drive yourself in your pc as a secondary. then if windows sees it, you can drag and drop you pictures from the c:/documents and settings/ folder accross to your desktop or my documents etc.
if windows does not see it then its most likely shafted, but if you can hear it spin up when it powers up, and it doesnt click every second (eg badly -ive managed to retrieve data off HD that click every few minutes or so) then i have a piece of software you run that will repair bad sectors and make the disk see-able again. ive had one drive so bad that i ran the software to repair it, then booted windows and copied most of his files, then the damaged drive was not seeable in my computer. so i ran the software again and i was able to get the rest of what the user needed.
after i posted the message the other day i had a call for a laptop with a bad hard drive. but this time it was making a grinding noise. i think the arm was touching the disk. no amount of tapping, dropping or banging of the disk would free the arm. so i couldnt get anything off that one.
where is the old psu? how did they come to that conclusion? hard drives do have a life-span and some are worse than others. at work there is a hp/compaq laptop model nc6000. hard drives go on these every other week.
did they use a multimeter to test each output of the psu? if it were faulty i would expect to see your 'voltage sensitive' motherboard fried first. but i may be wrong...
let me know how you get on with your hard drive.

[dieselboy]

It wouldn't load up windows just kept looping round through the different safe mode but would not go past the log on page.

this just sounds like the windows files are corrupt.
if the hard drive is not making any funny noises, and also before when the pc was working fine, as long as when making new folders or moving files the pc didnt do this-> hang and the hard drive light stay on constantly and the pc do nothing for a while. then a re-format and install of windows would most likely of been fine.
did safe mode work?

[mark g8awo]

A very simple way of getting files back if you are using a new drive now is to set the old drive as a slave then using explorer copy and paste the data files you require onto the new drive... Then you can reformat the drive and hopefully reuse it as a storage drive. The biggest problem is that windows allways starts the drive up in the same place on the disk so errors can occur