File recovery

[David]

I have, or maybe I should say I had, an external Firewire drive on which I kept back-up of C:, my OS, & D:, Programs.
This external drive had 2 partitions, a smallish one, F:, for folders, the other, G:, for images. I've been having a few
little but annoying quirks and wanted to restore an earlier image. The G: was filling up, however, by merging F: & G:
I'd have plenty of space. I used PartitionMagic 8 to merge them. Well that's what it started to do, then it threw a
wobbly and stopped.

Now I had a drive shown in PM 8 as ?(*)?. The drive wasn't visible in Windows. However using the browse function in PM I
could see that all the folders were there, including the images from G:. I went to the PM suupport page, found a chat
link, waited 2 hours. At length an "expert" came on line. He took the details, asked if he could control my machine, I
agreed, he flashed around through a series of obscure partiton editors. At the end of 20 minutes the folders and images
had disappeared, the drive file system was shown as RAW, and in PM the ata area was marked as BAD.

At this point the expert seemed to run out of ideas, I disconnected before he could do yet more damage. After re-booting
I had an F:, but chkdsk said the drive was not formatted. Since then I have tried Search & Recovery 3 which churned away
for about 3 hours and came up blank. Is there any chance of recovering any of this data?

David

 

[Ghostrider]

I have, or maybe I should say I had, an external Firewire drive on which I kept back-up of C:, my OS, & D:, Programs.
This external drive had 2 partitions, a smallish one, F:, for folders, the other, G:, for images. I've been having a few
little but annoying quirks and wanted to restore an earlier image. The G: was filling up, however, by merging F: & G:
I'd have plenty of space. I used PartitionMagic 8 to merge them. Well that's what it started to do, then it threw a
wobbly and stopped.

Now I had a drive shown in PM 8 as ?(*)?. The drive wasn't visible in Windows. However using the browse function in PM I
could see that all the folders were there, including the images from G:. I went to the PM suupport page, found a chat
link, waited 2 hours. At length an "expert" came on line. He took the details, asked if he could control my machine, I
agreed, he flashed around through a series of obscure partiton editors. At the end of 20 minutes the folders and images
had disappeared, the drive file system was shown as RAW, and in PM the ata area was marked as BAD.

At this point the expert seemed to run out of ideas, I disconnected before he could do yet more damage. After re-booting
I had an F:, but chkdsk said the drive was not formatted. Since then I have tried Search & Recovery 3 which churned away
for about 3 hours and came up blank. Is there any chance of recovering any of this data?

David

It will be difficult to ascertain whether recovery is
possible or not since very little is known about what the
"expert" did to the external drive. How valuable are the
images. That is, how many thousands of dollars are they
worth for a professional data recovery outfit to attempt
even a recovery? If there were no backups, then this would
be one very expensive lesson to learn about messing around
with drive partitions.

 

[David]

It will be difficult to ascertain whether recovery is
possible or not since very little is known about what the
"expert" did to the external drive. How valuable are the
images. That is, how many thousands of dollars are they
worth for a professional data recovery outfit to attempt
even a recovery? If there were no backups, then this would
be one very expensive lesson to learn about messing around
with drive partitions.

Well they are not valuable in the $ sense so I won't be spending money to recover them. There are no back-ups because
this was my back-up drive and my CD/DVD burner is not seen by XP as a burner. That I believe has something to do with
Roxio software. I was going to revert to an earlier, pre-Roxio state. It just goes to show there's no such thing as
Magic!

David

 

[Bill Blanton]

If you just want to go after the files, you could try iRecover from
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecover.htm