Begging for advice...

[Fragpoet]

I have a 40Gb IBM deskstar drive set up as my D: drive.

Last night, I started getting the odd error about being "Unable to save information for 'blah' and it could be a device error or a network problem" (A serious error as it was accompanied by the Red circle/white cross icon).

So I rebooted.

BAM. "Drive D: is not formatted, would you like to format it now".

There was no catastrophic crash as far as I can tell. No scraping of heads on platters. I would assume that the partition table has become corrupt.

I can boot off my other, smaller drive which is 'C:'.

But I REALLY need the information on that drive. It contains about three months of work on game engine I've been doing for my final uni project.

I'm banking on the data being intact and that I can somehow access the drive to recover the contents. Are there any tools I can use for this... if so what are the best?

You have my thanks in advance and I am willing to accept the "Serves you bloody right for not backing-up" lectures in good grace.

Please help. Please. *sniff, sob*

--
Poet
...If you can read this, I can hit my brakes and sue you.

 

[HammerBot]

I have used Tiramisu and PowerQuest Lost & Found twice with great success some years ago. Each tool is non-intrusive, i.e. they dont modify the drive but only recovers to another drive. Tiramisu is now called Ontrack Easyrecover data recovery and PQ Lost&found is permanently discontinued.

There may be better tools than the above today, but as long as they dont modify the source there is no harm trying different tools (e.g. demo versions) to see which works the best.

Easyrecovery professional is available in a free demo version: <A HREF="http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery/" target="_new">http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery/</A>

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by HammerBot on 09/26/02 06:04 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Fragpoet]

Thanks for your responses. They were overwhelming!

j/k. Good call with the 'OnTrack' software. I looked at OnTrack and used their demo 'Advisor' software to diagnose the fault.
Apparently the MBR has become corrupt.

After a little searching, I discovered that most IDE drives keep a backup of the MBR 6 sectors behind the original.

I then used a freeware editor to copy the backup MBR from sector 60 to the original in sector 63.

BAM. 1x 40Gb drive restored.
Tonights task - back up 40 Gigs of data. Zoinks!

Thanks for your help.

--
Poet
...If you can read this, I can hit my brakes and sue you.

 

[HammerBot]

Cool! Congrats.