Recovering files from an accidentally formatted remote HD. Urgent advice pls.

Very sorry to hear Mike. My advice for now is not to touch it, waiting on advice

 

Mike

Sounds like a hardware failure of some sort, although it could be something as simple as a loose graphics card/ram. If it's not the drive, it's simple to recover everything by pulling the harddrive out of the machine, and connecting it to a different machine.

If it is the hard drive that's failed, it depends on what's failed.

Does the blue screen of death (BSoD) stay up long enough to take a picture, or for you see the error codes? That might give some clues as to the problem?

 

recorded a video of blue screen on my camera and i think it says unmountable_boot_volume.

i think there are 2 partitions, 1st one has my data 2nd has as far as i can tell windows...

i personnely think the drive has some corrupt windows files but hard to check

 

I would use a live Linux cd (fedora is a good start) and then attempt to mount the drive from there. I've recovered loads of drives this way that Windows wouldn't even sniff at, let alone read.

 

that went straight over the top of my head sorry lol.

found a vista recovery disk on torrent site so downloading that on another laptop at the moment

 

Go here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Use the middle option (Try it from a CD or USB stick).

Follow the instructions.

I wouldn't use the recovery disc as it will probably wipe your drive.

 

Little bit worried about fthaimike, with his last post being over a week ago on this thread [:^(]

The amount of stuff he must have had saved down, I just hope it's recoverable

 

You guys need to upgrade to Windows 7 at least, if you insist on being anti-mac.

At least then there is some specific backup software thats idiot proof built into it. Separate external drive, weekly backups. Jobs a good un.

But there are plenty of free backup utilities for Vista and XP too.

 

I'm on XP now, at last.

Beats the machine I've had for weeks/months, but it's still throwing the odd curveball as it's a home build, akin to rounding off nuts and stripping threads when you haven't a clue!

Bit of a downgrade in Internet Explorer functionality + picture preview + Start menu, but I'll see how it goes.

 

You can install IE8 with XP Chris

 

Oops, I meant Windows Explorer - the functionality of it definitely a step back, eg recent files.

I was going to put IE9 on, but saw the highest avail in XP was IE8 so installed that

 

got the laptop working, installed vista again from copy on internet and used our id from label on laptop and updates work fine, old copy and data of windows not deleted and still on hd automatically put in seperate folder which was handy as i can look in there to see what i had installed before and get at saved documents, hd seems to be ok and slowly reinstalling programs. going to back some stuff up when i get a chance now. cheers mike