Has anyone got data recovery software?

[michaelmorris]

Don't you just love computers!

Last Friday morning I spent two hours imaging a rare grazing occultation of Saturn by the Moon. I ended up with five 3.5 GB AVIs on my hard disk of the computer in my observatory. I then realised that these were so large, short of chopping them up in to lots of small files, I had no way of moving such large files on the much more powerful PC in my study for processing. So on Friday evening I ordered a 4GB flash drive. On Saturday night, I took another 20GB of AVI files with my Toucam. On Tuesday morning my Flashdrive arrives and Tuesday night I start copying the files. By this morning (Wednesday) I've got copies of the first half of the eclipse on my study computer. This evening I got home form work and turn on the computer in the observatory and there is a horrible grinding-type noise and the computer won't boot.

To cut a long story short my hard drive is fried and I've lost all my images of the occultation and of the second half of the eclipse - GUTTED!

Here are my questions:

1) Does anyone know the address of the person who made my hard disk? If yes, do you know of any reliable paid assassins?

2) Has anyone (in the UK) got access to any data recovery

software?

On Saturday I'm off to buy a new hard disk and a DVD writer so that, in future, I can have a permenant back up of all the images I capture.

[fmeireso]

You could try to mount you bad HDD as second drive in your office computer (mind the jumpers on the HDD). Possible that some files may be still accessible, it al depends the state of the failing HDD....i would give it a try and i sure have recovered many data this way...Of course if the HDD is a total loss this will not work but most of the time it are only some bad sectors (and often the boot sector)

[Dangermouse]

I have not had to use it but pc inspector is supposed to be good and its free to download, good luck.

[lunator]

Michael

All may not be lost.

I had a hard drive failure before and my local computer shop was able to retrieve the data.

It is worth a shot.

Cheers

Ian

[Astropub]

When you say the computer won't boot what error message are you getting (if any) can you go into setup (usually hold down del during boot) and see if the bios is reporting the disc drive as present it is just as likely you have had a power supply failure as a hard disc failure (grinding noises are usually a stalled fan or fan bearings) sometimes even the hard disc bearing become tight I have had one i had to tap to get to spin up. Was it cold true warming it up (bring indoors no blow torch required) leave for a few hours and try to boot again)

however if all to no avail sticking in another box is a good suggestion (assuming it spins up)

I hope this might help

Alistair

[michaelmorris]

When you say the computer won't boot what error message are you getting

- Verifying DMI Data pool ........ then 'cannot find NLTDR' or something.

can you go into setup (usually hold down del during boot) and see if the bios is reporting the disc drive as present

- The BIOS sees it fine

Was it cold?

. No.

[proflight2000]

sorry i didnt read the message clearly

[daz]

The NTLDR and NTLDR.com are two essential system files. You can get these back following these instructions:

- Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.

- When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.

- Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows.

- Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter.

- You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.

- Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter "E". This letter may be different on your computer.

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\

copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

- Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.

Give this a go. If this doesn't work, report back!

[Astropub]

another thing to check does your machine have more than one disc drive? has the bios settings been altered to boot from the wrong disc unlikely i know but something has changed

[michaelmorris]

another thing to check does your machine have more than one disc drive? has the bios settings been altered to boot from the wrong disc unlikely i know but something has changed

Yes it has a second disk drive. Even it was looking in the wrong drive, the c: drive would still be working fine if I boot from floppies. However when I get to the c: drive and use the DIR command I get a string of rubbish. Chkdsk says it's damaged, and I believe it!

[GazOC]

Michael,

I have a few programs I could send you, how much can your Hotmail account hold? I think theres about 20 meg or so. If thats a problem I could just send you the 'best' one thats just over 5 meg.

Gaz

[daz]

Michael

What is the string of rubbish you get?

A string of rubbish to one man is the key to the door for another

[ZOG]

How about putting windows on a spare drive and using that as boot, designate your original drive as "D" and using something like Recover My Files (excellent) on it ?