Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Octavius on December 19, 2002, 11:31:11 PM
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I just pulled one of THE biggest bone-headed f*ck ups in my entire life. Where to start...
I have two hard drives: an 80GB and an 8GB.
The last two days my computer has been doing some very strange things. I wont get into it because it really doesnt matter now... things reached that overall weirdness state where I decided to do a clean format of the HD and start fresh. So I begin by moving all the important stuff that I want to keep onto the smaller, unused hard drive... things like 4 GB worth of music, stored family pictures/albums, game(s) info (Aces High sounds, settings, mods and toejam from other games (you know how many individual user made Addons I had for OFP?), important documents I used for school, tax information, you name it, I had it on there.
So I'm thinking, "Cool, this'll be a snap, I've done this many times before." I throw in the Win XP CD, boot off of that, and blow away the wrong friggin harddrive. I have no clue HOW it happened, I did NOT notice til WinXP was already installed, and I am a complete MORON for doing so. After all hell broke lose in my household, I decided to come here and explain my story.
I know there are things that un-format drives recently formated (i think... there MUST be) ... I have never had to actually use one. Please, tell me these things exist and that they WORK so that I might not hang myself in the morning.
I put my eggs all in one basket and I'm forever going to be slapping myself for this horrible horrible mistake. I need your help! Guide me!
Thanks,
octavius, the extremely rattled.
[PS: The only GOOD thing that came about is that I found out my ethernet connection via motherboard WASN'T hosed after all this time (no more cable modem => usb connection for me)]
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I have to ask, did ya wipe the 80GB drive too? If not you can always just send the info back to the 8GB drive and reformat the 80. However if you cleaned both drives then you are in a bad situation. I know that there are ways to restore a drive but I think you ahve to send the HD into the manufacture or something drastic like that. I would email the drive manufacture and ask them.
Booky
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Damn Oct, that sucks. You may be hosed. So, to be clear, you formatted the drive, then installed XP on that drive? If so, whatever data that was in the sectors that XP now resides in is gone forever, and anything else would only be recoverable by a data recovery place for LARGE amounts of cash, since your FAT has been replaced.
I'm fairly certain of this, but hopefully somebody will tell me I'm wrong.
SOB
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No, I only formatted the smaller 8GB drive. I had originally planned to send the stuff to the 8GB, format the 80GB, then shoot it back to the 80 once finished. I formated the 8GB somehow.
I did install XP. There *was* 4GB worth of music, so I'm there's a greater chance that the XP installation wrote over the music instead.
Are there any utilities you know of that can help me out? I had a floppy program that worked to recover files from DOS on my old 486 years ago...
edit: SOB, does it make a difference that the drive was NTFS?
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There are a lot of things that will say wether its impossible or not.
First... did you re-format the drive before installing XP?
What filesystem did you format it with?
If you used NTFS and formatted the whole drive, you are screwed.
BTW... did you delete the files from the 80gig drive already?
AKDejaVu
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Originally posted by AKDejaVu
There are a lot of things that will say wether its impossible or not.
First... did you re-format the drive before installing XP?
What filesystem did you format it with?
If you used NTFS and formatted the whole drive, you are screwed.
BTW... did you delete the files from the 80gig drive already?
AKDejaVu
Yes, I reformated, then installed XP unknowingly.
It was NTFS before, and I formated with NTFS. :(
I did not copy the files from the 80gb to the 8gb, I stupidly moved them. Do the moved files leave a footprint on the 80gb from where they were moved?
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I think he stated he "moved" the files from the 80 to the 8 then hosed the 8
did you do anything else to the 80? format? delete?
if he hasn't and has just "moved" the files, isn't that just a copy & delete? shouldn't he be able to undelete the files on the 80, given he didn't copy something else into the space on the 80 where the info was???
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hey! i never thought of that eagler. THERE IS HOPE.
(nothing has been done to the 80gb)
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have you flushed the recycle bin on the 80 since you moved the files?
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No.
When ya move files, you said its just copy and delete. I never saw any files that I have moved before end up in the trash. How exactly does undelete work?
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what about this?
http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
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maybe or Norton Utilities
if you install something, do it on the 8gig drive as anything you put on the 80 may/will overwrite the files you are trying to recover
ps
I have never done this, so this is just an educated guess on my part
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ok, I'll put everything on the 8gb drive then. Can I safely say that all is lost on the 8gb after formating?
I downloaded the File Scavenger demo... so far its amazing.. I'm seeing files I remember deleting awhile ago. For example, the files that I did not *move*, I deleted manually (such as the Aces High Folder). I did that because I figured I was formatting it anyway, so what the heck. I dont know how to check for the files that were moved (copied and deleted).
When something is copied and deleted, where are the deleted files sent? Not to the recycling bin... i think. Blah i wish i knew more
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Might be worth the $40 just to find out for the rest of us who do stupid things from time to time. I recently did exactly what you did only I lost 13GB from one drive and 40GB of images, website work and music from my 80GB drive. The only real difference was that I went from FAT32 on the 80GB to NTFS...no hope there. Fortunately I did save some of the stuff to CDR and CDRW but not nearly enough to start over where I stopped at.
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I think the files don't "go" anywhere. They are just flagged differently so the computer knows it can write new info on that spot.
but I aint an expert - just a guess
if it makes you feel better, I lost about 4 months of digital pictures when I got tired of trying to install a video card, said heck with it and reformatted - totally forgetting about the pictures as I hadn't had the camera that long .... I now burn to CD bout once every three weeks - just in case :)
good luck Oct
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sigh. Time to venture into the unknown. Thanks for all your help on such short notice.
I haaaaaaaaaaaaate screwing up like this. The files (that may or may not be recovered) were not replaceable. It feels like losing a child or something. the computer was my baby :D I must nurse it back to health.
Thanks again... here i go
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Man. I did it.
Its ALL back (cept for the music, maybe half of it is back).
whew
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Try going here http://www.execsoft.com/downloads/menu.asp (http://www.execsoft.com/downloads/menu.asp) they have a free utility to tell you what files you have that can be recovered with their software. Go to the utility called
Deleted File Analysis Utility Freeware
. Good luck.
Heh you must have posted while I was replying. Congratulations. :)
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glad it turned out well for you
next time just copy the files :)
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Glad it all worked out for you Oct... I shudder when I think about losing my hard drive. And there's nothing really "important" on it.
For future reference, you mind sharing your secrets? What worked?
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I used Disk Scavenger (http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm). I found out now that there might be other free programs that also scan the disk... but I was desperate and this prog seems to work pretty damn good. It has a defunct HD type search. I found bits and pieces of files I deleted months ago. It kinda feels like going on an archeological dig :D
I made sure to disconnect the HD with the info I needed. Any applications run on that HD could possibly have further overwritten the valuable information. It did just that with some of my music files. I only have 800mb out of 4gb worth of music left, but the file names (titles) are still intact... so re-downloading them will be a breeze.
I have made major screw ups like this in the past, and every single time it is a major learning experience. I know a ton more about HDs and their functions now. So I'm down 40 bucks and a few hours lost for playing AH, but I have the stuff that really matters back, a nifty program I can use anytime I wish, and experience you can't learn in a classroom.
oct out.
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Octavius,
now that you have the files back you *DO* have a backup of them, right?:D
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Never are. Unless. They are overwritten with new data. When you hit the delete key in windows or even type del in DOS, the files are not actually removed from the HD. All you are really doing is flagging those blocks of the media with a descriptor that tells the computer. "Yeah, it's okay to write new data there." This means that sensitive data, be it credit card numbers, tax information or that porn you didn't want your SO finding is still there for someone who knows how to search for it.
There are programs out there that will wipe the data from a hard drive permanently. They do this by writing 1's & 0's to the surface multiple times, in effect overwriting the entire surface of the platters with new data.
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You guys are right. To delete a file Windows simply sets the first few bits to '0's, which essentially mark it as ok to overwrite.
(If any of you were wondering, this is also the difference between a "Quick Erase" and "Full Erase" when formatting a drive.)