Data Recovery

[Ethan]

This week I had a bad hard disk failure. Something in XP messed up and damaged the directory structure. The symptoms: The machine would not boot. It would offer to go into "safe mode", but then blue screen in the middle of booting safe mode and reset. It eventually led to the complete loss of the information on the disk (I back up about once a week, so I lost approximately a week's worth of stuff - most importantly, the photos of the twin's birthday). So...

Note to self - the next time your hard disk crashes, here is what you should do:
• Do not try to go to the recovery console and use "chkdsk /r". That seemed to be the thing that totally destroyed the disk. It made things worse rather than better.
• Instead, take the damaged disk out of the machine. Put it in another XP machine. When that machine boots, it may repair the disk automatically. If so, you are done.
• If that doesn't work, download the demo version of Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS Data Recovery Software (http://www.stellarinfo.com) and see if it can decode the directory structure. If it can, you will be able to recover all the files you need.
Also, when you download photos from the camera, immediately back them up to a CD. It will only take a minute, and it will prevent this from happening again.

[locustfurnace]

Is this an advertisement for the mentioned software? If this is exactly such then please contact the Admins of Oldversion.com to properly conduct such business. The forums are no such place.

If this is just a users experience, well.. things like that happen all the time to people. There are many solutions, such as backing up, then making back-ups of the backups and storing those back-ups off-site.
Another solution is to opt for an operating system without all the quirks and problems offered by Microsoft's line of OS's. Chose something with a journaling filesystem, this greatly reduces the chances of data loss.
Again, another is to test out recovery software BEFORE you find yourself in a situation where you need to make use of such products.
Installing a recovery software products after disaster is not good practice and likely will cause even more data loss.

[The Dude]

I hope this isnt spam!!!!!!!

If its not,welcome to the site :)