Is Everything Gone?

[nan0click]

I have two hard drives, a 160GB and a 300GB, both SATA. A while back, I was reinstalling Windows, and used my an old SP0 disk I had lying around, but wasn't sure which drive to pick (they both showed up as 130GB drives), so I unplugged my big one like an idiot, and it corrupted the drive (What happend to being hot-swappable anyway). So I get back up and running, and I've been able to fill up the big one again, but I needed to reinstall Windows a second time, and so I thought I would use a slipstreamed XP with SP2. So I get the hard drive selection screen, pick the drive and start. It gets through copying and gives me a cannot read from system drive when it tries to reboot. So I unplug my 300 and try again, this time the 160 shows up as formatted but corrupted, so I do a full format on it instead of a quick one, and when thats done everything works great. I plug my 300GB back in and bang, its asking me if I want to format my 300GB.

 

What is a good software for recovering from that situation, I've tried a 3 or 4 programs and none of them have worked. I have a lot of school files on this drive so it is very important that I can at least recover those.

 

Thanks.

[Bleeble]

Take a look at ExtremeTech's article: "Fixing Windows with Knoppix"

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1918259,00.asp

 

Let me know if that helps!

[gotdamojo06]

If you just want to recover the files, get a program called handyrecovery

 

http://www.handyrecovery.com/

 

I used it when i lost all my songs on iTunes, a whopping 11.7 GB of songs! lol but i used the program and recovered them it works well, kinda weird what files you can find tho

[nan0click]

I'm trying EasyRecovery now, hopefully it works, thanks for putting me on the right track gotdamojo, I downloaded your suggestion and it worked, but I couldn't really do anything with the demo, but I found a friend who had EasyRecovery, I don't know why nothing else has worked until now, its going to take forever though, its gotta scan a 300GB drive

 

Thanks again

[gotdamojo06]

no problem

 

tell me about it, it took me along time to do my 11.7 GB of songs

 

but have you come across any files that you forgot about yet?

[nan0click]

Well the drive was just a storage drive so, I restored the whole thing and now its just a process of reorganizing stuff back to the way it was (not very organized ). But it took some music and put it out of the folders (I assume because it restored based on order on the disk, not the filesystem or something). What do you mean forgotten about, like ones that I forgot I had that I found? Because I had just put everything on there within a couple of weeks and so I still remember basically everything that's on it.