"my 5 months old child's pics..my music collection(years of collecting)..my videos.. please tell me i can get them back.." Hi all. I put together a system about a year ago.AMD 64 6000+(duo),m2n sli deluxe asus mo,2 gb of ram.no floppy.no cd burner(2 external(USB)dvd burners).nvidia geforce 8500gt..NOT using RAID..2 HDs,main one is a WDC 500 gb SATA and the other is a Maxtor 320 gb IDE.OS xp home edition...worked awesome...'till last week.. after a power failure due to a storm in my area,computer won't boot."Detect drives done no any drive found",then it freezes..tried a bunch of things..rebuild/add/scan/chkdsk/fixmbr/fixboot/.... the xp console did not help at all..it says a damaged/missing file is stopping the fix,and won't proceed..then i started seeing more messages "bad partition table"..and more...reinstalling windows on same drive was not an option.anyway,i bought a new 80gb sata drive installed xp on it..system started.i can see the other drives but i can't access them..tried demos of "Recover My Files" "Partition Table Doctor" "data doctor recovery" even "restorer 2000 pro"..and some others,they detected some of the files but not all and i never finished the process anyway as in some cases you gotta buy the software to retrieve(and you can't tell what are you retrieving!!)and in other cases i was not sure how to proceed(restorer 2000 pro).. i've removed viruses before,solved some minor computer issues,but not being able to access 800gb of data on 2 drives on my machine!never had that before!i never thought a power failure could cause damage this severe to a hd,i always thought the mo will shut down the computer to prevent such damage. I'd love to at least get my son's pics back(you can imagine how his mother in nagging now...especially that she's been asking me for the last 2 months how can we develop those pics on paper!!lol). can someone please help ? thanks..
If I were you I would use "testdisk" it's a free hard drive repair and recovery program. Just download it and you can run it from windows. The program doesn't get installed it runs from the exe file. When you download it/unrar it and the program is in the "win" folder. To use it just doubleclick on the exe file. There are 2 files "testdisk" and "photorec", "photorec" is the recovery program. Usually doing a "chkdsk c:/f" will fix data corruption cause by an improper shutdown especially if your file system is NTFS, but since you tried that already, maybe your only option is to recover as much as possible. Did the "chkdsk" you performed complete with all errors fixed? I think you can probably still get it to boot, but at least recover as much data as possible before doing any more repairs. All the errors you show are file corruption and that can usually be fixed. I've encountered power failures (improper shutdowns) and expierence the same problems you have, I was always able to fix it. As long as your hard drive can be read, the data is safe. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
thanks jony218 for your prompt reply and your help.. the "chkdsk c:/f" never completed,can't remember the exact message but it never ran. prb solved though ,well,partially...THANKS TO "GeneralP" from the thread right next to mine!!...i should have looked for similar problems at this great forum..i recovered my sons pics and my music ..but the thing is that,i don't have room now to recover the full drive,i wish it could be fixed so i can keep 'em there..i'm not sure if i should use the second program to fix the partition but maybe it'll delete all...but fair enough, i got the most important files. THANK YOU GUYS.
If you have your windows xp installation cd, you can make a bartpe. It sounds hard but I made one in less than 30 minutes. The bartpe bootcd will let you bootup your computer. from there you can use the command prompt to type in "chkdsk c:/f". That's how I fixed my last corrupt system hard drive. The chkdsk completed and the drive booted up perfectly. I would try and get a good chkdsk on that drive before giving up on it.
thanks again jony218. i have windows cd and i tried..i don't have a floppy on my computer,and i could't make a bootcd..anyway,i bought a new large drive and recovered all to new drive. then formatted the corrupt ones..so i'm good now. thanks again for your help.
