Christmas Miracle Needed

12/23 | Heartlander

[Heartlander]

A Christmas miracle is needed… I have a spare hard drive and copied all my files over to it prior to reformatting my C: drive.

Now that I have finished and am trying to copy the files back over the drive shows up as my spare but none of my files are showing up. It claims that there are no files on this drive.

The drive is a Matrox 30 gb, model number 33073U4.

Is there something I haven’t done?

It shows up as a slave drive but no files are listed.

[Heartlander]

I did all that when I initially implemented the spare drive and after a fdisk and reformat.

Then after rebooting windows assigned it a drive letter in this case D: drive.

That's when I copied the info over. Great advice thank you.

[tacticalogic]

Doesn't sound good. The only thing I can think of to try would be to make a boot diskette, jumper the spare drive as the master, and put it in by itself. Run your bios setup, and make sure it's detected right, then boot to the diskette and see if you get any directory information.

[Nocturno]

maybe when you f-disked you got formatted in fat 16, instead of fat32.

Then you won't be able to transfer your files. try downloading data lifeguard from the western digital site,

http://ctweb01.wdc.com/datalifeguard/lifeguardextend.asp?destination=http://www.wdc.com/support/download/dlg/dlgmaker.exe

and save it to floppy,(1354kb,small file size).

Then reboot from the floppy, and follow instructions for fomatting to fat32.

After you finish it will ask you if you want to install your OS. Then when you are fresh, shut off the PC and re-connect your second drive.

You can try dragging all the files back over, if they show up. Next time, spend 75 bucks and buy a cdrw drive and use that for back up. Also there are freeware versions of backup magic available online to manage your restoration, when you go back and forth.

[Heartlander]

Thank you. Its one of those things, I have a CD Burner and for one reason or another you try things without backing up first. Then try and recover afterwards. One day maybe I will learn, but then again, maybe I won't. LOL

Thank you for your advice.

Happy Holidays!!!

[runningbear]

....LOL.. I went through something like that Thursday. I am 90% recovered in programs. I did something different then you though.

[rainingred]

Great! If you Fdisked the spare, you got it made. Just take out the new drive. Jumping the pins etc. Than copy all the info from drive C to drive D on the spare. When you re-make the spare the slave you will be able to read the info on drive E or F or....

[rainingred]

If you have a burner, my advice still holds. Take out the new drive. Make the spare the primary. The info should still be there. Burn the info. Then re-install the new drive.

[AngrySpud]

Didn't you post earlier today that your brother-in-law was an Air Force computer expert?

[Heartlander]

Busted... We are currently trying to fix his computer and I told him if he needed an answer - this is where to go. I actually do computer repair on the side and cannot fix this...

[Bogey78O]

Western Digital? I tried to use their crappy HD tools and it wouldn't pan out. I went out and put down the money for a hard drive utility that worked way better.

[LoveThyCountry]

Didn't you post earlier today that your brother-in-law was an Air Force computer expert?

There is truly no such thing as a computer expert. I've been working with computers for over 10 years and am still messing things up and learning.

Thank you all for helping when called up. You guys are great.

Thank you.

[supercat]

First of all, I would advise that you not do anything to write to a drive you think 'should' have data on it but doesn't. Go to another computer.

Next, I would suggest you go to www.ontrack.com; you can download the demo version of EasyRecovery from there (download it to a computer that you aren't wanting to recover data from). This program has a function to make an "emergency-boot" floppy; use this to boot your other computer. Then look at each of the two drives to see what EasyRevocery sees.

The "demo" version of EasyRecovery won't let you actually recover files (it just shows you what the "real" version 'would' recover) but it should give you a clue as to where you stand. I don't know that I'd recommend the real version of EasyRecovery (it's over $100) but the demo may be useful for appraising your situation.

One caveat: if you exit to "DOS", hard drives won't show up right. I don't know why they appear within the program but not in DR-DOS, but that's the way it is; don't get freaked out by that.

[Nocturno]

I got the E-Z drive, E-Z bios disk with a hard drive
I bought. It worked OK to copy the old drive to the new drive,
and I used it to format and partition a drive
on another PC. No problems. I still use the e-z bios on
my desktop....to each their own.

I noticed WD discontinued the E-Z programs and call it a data lifeguard suite of utility tools.