data recovery

Lee H

hi

just recently lost the whole partition on my 40gb hard disc, it has 2 years worth of pictures of my 2 children, i am desperate to get them back, i have tried a few data recovery progs but none of the work. one prog has found 22 gig of jpg's and when i restore them to another drive they just say no preview available.

does anyone know why the partition gets dropped

does anyone know of any way to get them pics back

please help

lee h

Sie

Ok, im assuming its a XP machine?? Laptop or desktop?
Does chkdsk bring up any errors?

Has it been lost completley (IE: booting into DOS etc) ?

You could try booting with a Knoppix CD (i would avoid installing an additional OS on the machine to avoid overwritting data) and mounting the drive though im not sure knoppix supports NTFS. Cant find my copy around here to check for you.

Theres http://www.partition-recovery.com/ but thats £££

Have you tried googling for "data recovery" and if you dont want to pay adding "freeware"

TheShadow

You really have not given enough background information to really help. Not knowing the configuration, I too suggest booting a Knoppix CD, it should be a standard tool in every techs kit. It does do read only NTFS earlier versions also did writes but the author decided some things were dangerous and disabled the feature.

Often when someone says the partition is missing it is simply the drive letter has been moved and not noticed by the user. This is normally because NT/2K/XP storage manager gets confused from disk additions and removals caused by timing problems. USB disks are thought to be the cause of this.

The files that you recovered which say no preview available; did you try to open them? The thumbnail file would probably screw up a preview.

sprkymrk

I have had some success with this:
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

It's free. You may have to install on another PC and put the bad drive in as a secondary.

RussS

Spend a few dollars dude - you will be grateful you did. One of the easier programs to use is the Ontrack Eazy Recovery Professional - I bought an early version and I upgrade it regularly.

sprkymrk

RussS wrote:

Spend a few dollars dude - you will be grateful you did. One of the easier programs to use is the Ontrack Eazy Recovery Professional - I bought an early version and I upgrade it regularly.

Hmm. Mileage must vary. I also had a retail version of ontrack and it never did squat for me - 3 different occasions for 3 different customers failed. That was about 2 years ago, whatever version I don't remember. On 2 other occasions within the last year the free product I mentioned worked. I know that's not a scientific test because the circumstances of the data loss in each case could be vastly different, but it was enough to convinve me to quit paying for ontrack.

Lee H

hi

apologies if anyone misunderstood my issue, just to further explain

drive is c and has xp pro, also have a drive d which was vista, one day drive would not start so i connected a different drive and installed xp, i then connected the said c drive to the pc using my icybox and later also using ide. soon as i connected it up came the initialize new drive wizard, i then knew that the drive had dropped its partition, the drive did not initialize as i could not use the option to format so i figured it stalled during the initilization, i have a few data recovery progs but to no avail, i did have drive c dual booting to vista which i have also lost.

does that explain it better, if anyone can help i have loads of pics i really need to recover.

someone mention about the pics, if i recover the files with no file structure and then tick the box for jpg extension they copy to my new c drive but they have no thumbnail and preview is unavailable

lee h

Sie

Would still say try a LIVE CD/DVD *nix distro.

Just a thought, if you run fdisk or partition magic or the like does it show the other partition? :

Also have you booted from XP CD and run Recovery Console and seen what that brings up? Maybe the datas still there your just have an inactive partition or its become hidden?!?

Sprkymrk / Russ , i think its the same for many things something work for some people in some situations and some dont, i think thats what makes the IT field interesting because it never goes how it should!

KGhaleon

I've never used Knoppix for data recovery, so I may have to try it out tomorrow at work. The company I'm with does a little bit of data recovery, but nothing to the point of having to physically open the drive(clean room, platters, etc). Is this the only hard drive in your computer?

Generally the first thing you should do is take the panel off your computer and boot the machine while holding the drive to make sure it's receiving power. If it is, then I would try some file recovery software like the one mentioned above(assuming you have another working hard drive that you could use as a Master).
If worse comes to worse, it might just be a problem with your logic board. I've never used Windows vista so I'm not sure what sort of file system it uses.

KG