SERIOUS problem, lost partition

[Mr Cherry]

Well I was defragging late one night. I turned into bed and left my computer happily chugging away. When I woke I found an error message that described that SpeedDisk had crashed and there was an error on my partition. I rebooted to find my second drive having some problems. Now one of my partions (1 of 2) is gone. It shows up as 'G: Local Disk' but I can't scan it or get any information from it. PLEASE, PLEASE help me. Is there a way I can get the data back from the drive? It has my music collection that I just CAN'T loose it.

And tomorrow is my birhtday too.

[superjohnny]

Well thank goodness for frequent backups, huh?

Sorry, that was mean.

Sounds to me like your hosed.

[Nemesys]

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[Mr Cherry]

Thank you, you are a godsend! After superjohnny's post I was about to commit hari-kari.

[sunkenstate]

Wow, that's cool. A happy ending. I was curious to see how this problem would get resolved...

I never knew you could recover data like this if the event of a crashed drive where to ever take place. When I first read it, I thought for sure this software had to be installed on your computer first in order to save the data. Amazing stuff.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to back up important stuff like music on CD-R or DVD-R. It takes roughly 7 CD-R's to back up my music collection. If you had a DVD-RW drive, it'd probably only take two. If I ever lost all my music, the only pain I'd have is going back through all of my CD albums and ripping them to my hard drive. Peh, that's like a week long job.

Congrats on the saved data.

[Mr Cherry]

Originally posted by sunkenstate
Wow, that's cool. A happy ending. I was curious to see how this problem would get resolved...

I never knew you could recover data like this if the event of a crashed drive where to ever take place. When I first read it, I thought for sure this software had to be installed on your computer first in order to save the data. Amazing stuff.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to back up important stuff like music on CD-R or DVD-R. It takes roughly 7 CD-R's to back up my music collection. If you had a DVD-RW drive, it'd probably only take two. If I ever lost all my music, the only pain I'd have is going back through all of my CD albums and ripping them to my hard drive. Peh, that's like a week long job.

Congrats on the saved data.

25GB is a lot of CDRs.

[posthumous_GRIN]

Before paying some company, have you checked the boot.ini setup under msconfig? It might be obvious there is a problem from their...

As well, try EasyRecovery first, maybe it[fosi] will help.

[pugdog13]

Try plugging the drive in as a slave on another computer. See iof it gets picked up.

[sunkenstate]

25GB is a lot of CDRs.

Holy Hell! You're better off just transfering your music to an external HD and storing it away somewhere safe. That's alot of freakin' music. I'd assume it's all recorded in 320kbs. Either way, that's alot of freakin' music. Cheers!

[bluesfusion]

He he. I've got a 32GB partition for my music and its spilling over into my other partitions. The way I back it up is image the whole partition onto a second hard drive. (Most of it is 128 kpbs on average or VBR.)

I feel sorry for you, Cherry. Losing the collection is my biggest nightmare. Spent so much time encoding the stuff! Looks like your drive may be recoverable. All it'll need is restoration of the file allocation table. Have a look around on the net - there are 2-3 programs which will let you do recovery from unreadable disks as long as there is no physical problem.

[Mr Cherry]

Originally posted by bluesfusion
He he. I've got a 32GB partition for my music and its spilling over into my other partitions. The way I back it up is image the whole partition onto a second hard drive. (Most of it is 128 kpbs on average or VBR.)

I feel sorry for you, Cherry. Losing the collection is my biggest nightmare. Spent so much time encoding the stuff! Looks like your drive may be recoverable. All it'll need is restoration of the file allocation table. Have a look around on the net - there are 2-3 programs which will let you do recovery from unreadable disks as long as there is no physical problem.

Special Thanks for Posthumorous_GRIN, I'm using EasyRecovery and it seems to be working. It took all night to search the drive, and it doesn't look like it got ALL my files, but definitely most of them. Now it's many hours of copying from one drive to the other (it estimates 15 hours but that keeps going up every few minutes ) Looks like I won't be using my computer yet another day, but at least I'm getting my collection back.

Bluefusion, yeah I would hate to have to encode all those mp3s again. Not only is it my collection, but I've borrowed and ripped friends CDs and it would be a pain to try and get them back. Now my biggest problem seems to be having to rename all the stuff. EasyRecovery is labelling everything as file01.mp3, file02.mp3, file03.mp3, etc. I'm going to be using a program like MIR (http://mp3renamer.de/) so it won't be completely horrible. If anyone knows of a better one please let me know.

Thanks for all your help. I'm having a pretty crappy week with computers. Fried my parents installing a processor, fried my MP3 partition, and just yesterday I installed scanner drivers for my computer at work and it rebooted itself after installing and I can't get past the damn grey apple screen. I really need a vacation, thankfully I'm going to Vegas in July.