I've lost half the files off my flatmates hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter haydenpie
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haydenpie

Due to issues I was having with my pc refusing to boot up, I decided
(rather foolishly looking back...) to put my hard drive in to my
flatmates pc to salvage some of my files before I reinstalled xp.

All went well, until I moved the hard drive and the IDE cable touched
the CPU fan, which stopped, the computer started beeping and then shut
down...

I removed my HDD and restarted the pc only for it to tell me NTLDR is
missing. I tried the fixmbr and whatnot thru the xp setup disc, to no
avail.

Once my pc was back up and running I connected my flatmates HDD To my
pc only to find that there were no files on it whatsoever....

I downloaded and ran two different data recovery programs, both of
which got pretty much the same results, which is about half of his
files....

My question is, is there any way to recover the rest of the files? Is
there a quick fix way to reinstate something to make it all honky dory
again or have I buggered it good and proper? As you can imagine my name
is mud right now....
 
Also:

The recovery programs did find all the file names/folders etc, but some
of the files are 0 bytes... are they lost forever?
 
Yes, 'Zero' Bytes isn't a good thing and chance of recovery isn't
likely. As for recovery, it's best to do recovery from the afflicted
drive to another physical drive or partition if at all possible.
 
I've done the recovery onto my hard drive (had to be a 160GB hard drive
I broke...) so the other drive is exactly how I left it.
 
[email protected] said:
I've done the recovery onto my hard drive (had to be a 160GB hard drive
I broke...) so the other drive is exactly how I left it.
Click to expand...
Maybe the hard drive was screwed up or something. If you lost half the files
on that hard drive, the drive could be screwed. Did you write to the drive at
all?
 
Use www.ontrack.com or a similar company. They aren't cheap.

If the lost file are BS files (downloaded music and videos) you may want to
forgo this expense. If, on the other hand, what is lost includes the last
pictures of Grandma and Grandpa before they passed away, the expense may be
well worth it.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Other than trying fixmbr, I haven't written anything to the drive at
all. If the recovery programs I used can only find half the files, and
just the names of the others, will the recovery people be able to find
anything more than this?
 
I've done the recovery onto my hard drive (had to be a 160GB hard
drive I broke...) so the other drive is exactly how I left it.
Click to expand...

Sorry, but if data recovery software won't do it (and it doesn't sound
like it will), the only way to retrieve the data is to send it to a
professional data recovery company such as Drive Savers, Seagate Data
Recovery, or Ontrack. My preference is for Drive Savers. Costs normally
start at around $500USD and go up from there. A client of mine's hard
drive died and Drive Savers got back all his files; it cost $2,700. The
job on your roommate's drive might cost less if the hard drive is
physically sound (my client's drive wasn't). Some insurance companies
are covering data recovery costs under Loss Of Intellectual Property in
the homeowner's policy so you might want to check that out.

http://www.driversavers.com

Malke
 
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