Everything on my hard drive got destroyed

May 28 2004

[dennisw]

60 gigabytes. Never had problems with it. Yesterday Windows XP froze a few times. Then the computer refused to boot up again. Boot sector wiped out? I can deal with that! I then installed this drive as a slave and it wasn't recognized... was invisible.

With Partition Magic this hard drive shows up as 60 gig of (exact words) unallocated space. It had 3 partitions which are now all gone.

I used the Western Digital Utilities and the hard drive checks out as being in good shape. No errors.

I was using Norton Anti Virus. Using a firewall on a cable connection.

I don't see any references on internet to hard drives being killed all at once.

The hard drive was 50% backed up.I will consider a data recovery company if the price is reasonable.

[Petronski]

Wrong post. I meant to address my 'definitely sounds like spyware' poste to leroy s. mort.

[Oberon]

Ping for later reading.

[e_castillo]

If the computer BIOS recognizes the drive then it very likley is not a hardware failure.

Make sure that the BIOS is using the correct paramaters for your drive. Since we don't know if the computer is "fully" compatible with your drive then it could be possible that it won't see the full capacity of the drive.

If the drive needed whats called a "drive overlay" then this could also be your problem. Some Virus write themselves into the boot sector and move the overlay when they write. If the overlay was moved then you won't see the partitions or data and it won't boot.

[e_castillo]

Thats a classic. I had lost it back some time ago. thx for posting the link...

[TxBec]

My son is going to type what he does:

When my comp crashes and when I reboot it says there isn't a hdd, all I do is unplug the A: Drive and my comp ends up working again. If it crashes again and says there is no hdd again, I plug the A: Drive back in. Then for some reason even when it is plugged back in it says there is no A: Drive, but my comp works. BUT IF EVERY THING ELSE FAILS, I just use Norton Ghost to restore my hdd back to normal(No messing with the A: Drive anymore)until it crashes again.(Which it will probably do in another month or so.)

[dennisw]

Try GetDataBack to recover the data.
http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm
_______________________________

More details. I did a quick run through (took 37 minutes) and this program saw many of my files. Some can be recovered. Some have a line right through them meaning they are beyond recovery........ by this program at least.

I will do a more studious run through. Will take an hour. See EXACTLY what is recoverable. Then decide to pay to register the program. Which then makes the program fully functional.

[dennisw]

After this I'm going to buy a USB/Firewire hard drive enclosure and back up all vital stuff that way

[pollywog]

well I suppose it can't hurt to try them!!! *Grin*
........after I lose my 35 lbs!!

[Edgewood Pilot]

One of my computer guru friends stuck his hard drive into a freezer and cold soaked it under the premise that the bearing was acting up. After several hours he took it out. It spun up and he was able to recover his data.

My hard drive was making strange sounds for a long time. When it died, I cold soaked it too. Unfortuately, it failed to boot up. I popped the cover off the hard drive and looked in.

One of six read/write heads had come off.

[First_Salute]

This webpage may also be helpful in the future:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=119467

[antiRepublicrat]

Knoppix is Linux only?

Knoppix is Linux. It boots off a CD and doesn't write to your hard drive by itself. When you run it you'll see an icon for you hard drive that you can click to open an explorer-like file browser. Then you can do whatever you want.

[dennisw]

Many thanks and I'm digesting your e-mail too.

[Born Conservative]

bttt

[davek-uk]

Thanks very very much for this tip. After unsuccessfully downloading half a dozen prospective "disk recovery" programs I was just about to give up and reformat my data hard drive. Then I came across your posting and was encouraged because you specifically mentioned NTFS drives. I downloaded the File Scavenger demo and it immediately found my "missing" hard drive and all the files on it!! No other program got close.

I had to pay for a File Scavenger license to get it to recover them but it was $40 very well spent. All files now safely transferred onto my other drive. Phew !!

Highly recommended !!!

[Proud_texan]

Great, glad it worked out for you. I think it's a wonderful program as well, really top notch programming that you don't see too often anymore.

[jwh_Denver]

"Please note my drive is Western Digital too."

I had the exact same problems with Maxtor a few years ago. Wished I would have known about that hammer thing.

[Proud_texan]

Oh, I should mention for those that might be interested that I first found it in a review here:

http://www.pcnet-online.com/content/utilities/filescavenger.html

Found some quality reviews and downloads on that site and nary a bit of spyware/malware.

[jwh_Denver]

"Most likely urban fiction."

Most likely. Decades ago a very wealthy woman ask for the recipe for the Blackstone's cheese cake and was charged 1 grand for it. She paid the bill without a fuss and it ended up in a popular cooking magazine at the time. I don't even know if this is true.

Somehow cooking and computers are similiar.

[SlowBoat407]

Thank you! I now have a new tagline! (for now)

[RightWhale]

My HP has eaten two hard disks in its short lifetime. Everything gone, start over, no way to recover. They'll give you a new disk, but that isn't the point. I have a USB hard disk now for data backup since the chassis won't accept a second disk.