FAT missing?

[Guest]

Hi,

This evening media player 10 failed to find any of my tracks. When I tried
to access the second hard-drive they're stored on I discovered it was because
Windows seems to think the drive's not formatted.

I assume that the FAT has become corrupted, but I really need some of the
files stored on this drive. It's rarely used as it's solely for file backup
and storage. Cn anyone recommend something which might rescue or rebuild the
FAT or at least recover some of the files?

Thanks in advance,

 

[wxforecaster]

I wish I had fat missing....

Oh wait, off topic.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

Hi,

This evening media player 10 failed to find any of my tracks. When I tried
to access the second hard-drive they're stored on I discovered it was
because
Windows seems to think the drive's not formatted.

I assume that the FAT has become corrupted, but I really need some of the
files stored on this drive. It's rarely used as it's solely for file
backup
and storage. Cn anyone recommend something which might rescue or rebuild
the
FAT or at least recover some of the files?

Thanks in advance,

Yes, there are a number of recovery utilities. Googling "data recovery
utilities" will lead you to many.

Some utilities have a "demo" mode which doesn't actually recover files but
does tell you what it can find to recover. If it looks like it'll work,
you can then pay for it and get out of demo mode. This is a good way to
figure out where you really stand - whether you can do it yourself or if you
must send it out to professionals.

Sending the drive out to professionals can work very well, but can also be
expensive. I've seen bills for hundreds to five thousand dollars for
laptop hard disk data recovery. If the data is of high value, it can
easily be worth it. I generally use ActionFront for this service.

Note that you must recover the files to a different drive, never to the one
you're trying to recover. So, you must have enough space available; this
is critical.

I've used R-Studio with success, and there are others.
http://www.r-tt.com/

Finally, since the drive is apparently having issues, and since new drives
are not expensive, it's worth thinking about replacing it immediately. I
see 80 gig drives for CDN$53.

As well, backups are less reliable if there is only one storage point. You
should have several; for example, regularly writing to DVD or CD, verifying
them, and storing them elsewhere.

HTH
-pk