trashed partition :-( (1 Viewer)

[mba]

Hi

I'm very very frustrated.... windows or whatever just trashed the boot partition of my htpc an hour ago. Bang! Gone...
Had some troubles with the naming of a channel in MP, in order for the EPG data to match the channel name I shutdown MP and started up the config tool through VNC, all the sudden I didn't get a response in VNC anymore I could move the mouse around but I was unable to interact with windows. Went into my living-room where my htpc is located and immediately noticed excessive HD activity, thought "oh what the hay!" waited 10 min. pressed reset... then bios message unable to find boot record. EEEKS!
Threw in xp install, tried recovery console FIXMBR, FIXBOOT - nothing.
Downloaded SystemRescueCd with testdisk on it, which of course was unable to locate anything resembling a ntfs partition.
Our photos where on this disk, and I just recently finished transferring all our audio cds to it.... Damn! What can you learn from this - BACKUP!

If anybody has experience with this kind of situation please give me an advice... Any advice will be much appreciated other than: reformat, reinstall, re-transfer cd's and take some new photos ...

kind regards
Martin

 

[Marcusb]

I would experiment with different recovery apps.

I use Easy Recover, from the company that used to make easy CD creator a million years ago.

It can recover data from all sorts of disasters. It can also repair Zip, DOC, MDB, XLS,etc files.

I downloaded mine from Kazaa a long time ago, but it's such a good program I would recommend buying it if you find it.

Can you also try putting the drive in a new PC as a slave and then trying to recover the data that way?
You didn't encrypt the data did you? That will make things a LOT more complicated.

 

[Furetto]

Have a look on google for Hirem Bootdisk 8.9

It is a bootdisk which loads several applications into RamDisk. It contains a lot of useful tools, including undelete etc. Since some of them are not totally 'free or open source', I will not comment too much on it...

 

[mba]

Thank you both for replying...

Marcusb: No thankfully nothing was encrypted
Furetto: No hirens bootcd doesn't look too legal - but what the hay maybe it can salvage some of the photos, downloading it now.

Luckily I found an old backup disk which contained most of our photos, didn't even remember I had made it, and my girlfriend pointed out that maybe our photos from a vacation to Tunis last year was still on the digi-camera (thankfully I'm too lazy to empty it )
And finally now I have the opportunity to transfer our music collection to flac instead of 224kbps mp3 it was stored in already.
But still its a pain in the arse... I had finally gotten my hptc quite stable, MP was running fine, EPG was working perfectly and everything was dandy.

Best regards
Martin B. Andersen

 

[mba]

thats one powerful bootdisk!!!
I'm so ecstatic right now I could kiss you Furetto! I used the testdisk yesterday and got it to write a new MBR, but this wasn't able to boot anything, just a cursor blinking in the left corner of my telly. Then I booted the Hiren Bootdisc, ran through some of the tools, which showed me that there actually was data on the partition and the folder and file structure was intact, then I ran Boot Magic, had no idea what it was, but it sounded like something I needed ... voila! Now it boots into my windows, and MP is loading up fine.

thank you SOOOO much

Best regards
Martin

 

[wishywashy]

Back up now!!

 

[mba]

way ahead of you

I have made a backup strategy for our computers since yesterday, got rsync servers installed, syncing our data between multiple computers and taking backups of the rsync-, music- and photo-folders. But I'm still going to flac my audio cd's, I never was very satisfied when I encoded them in mp3.

have been using rsync on Linux, but found a cygwin project with rsync for windows,
cwrsync:
http://www.itefix.no/phpws/index.ph...ser_op=view_page&PAGE_id=6&MMN_position=23:23

regards
Martin