When it rains it pours

[wsherrick]

I had an interesting day yesterday. While at work we had a derailment and put the engine and 3 cars on the ground and ripped up the track in the process. After assessing the damage and describing it with colorful language, we had to walk in the rain several miles back to our vehicles. Upon arriving at home I discovered that my computer had crashed and totally wiped out everything on it. I mean everything. I have spent the past day or fixing this. I lost a lot of important written material, photos and music which I'll never find again, but I'll live. They say everything comes in three's so I wonder what's next.

[Hawk]

Maybe you'll get lucky and it will stop at two.

Are you sure you lost everything on your hard drive? There might be a way to recover it, although it will cost some money.

[thegrindre]

I'm sittin' on number two right now and looking at number three so, you might be right, wsherrick.

[wsherrick]

Maybe you'll get lucky and it will stop at two.

Are you sure you lost everything on your hard drive? There might be a way to recover it, although it will cost some money.

I've heard that everything remains on your hard drive even if you can't find it. How do you do it?

[ostlandr]

Basically you send it out to a computer expert with a hard drive repair lab, pay from $100 to $500, and they transfer your recovered files to CD/DVD or to a replacement hard drive.
If you know somebody in the computer biz that you trust, ask them for a reccomendation. Good luck!

Maybe you'll get lucky and it will stop at two.

Are you sure you lost everything on your hard drive? There might be a way to recover it, although it will cost some money.

I've heard that everything remains on your hard drive even if you can't find it. How do you do it?

[Hawk]

Even when you delete a file it isn't really deleted. It's basically just renamed into a format that isn't readily recognized by the OS but it's still there. That's how the police catch people like kiddie porn folks. They may think they have deleted a file but there's programs available that can retrieve those files.
There's also programs that can wipe a file and then it's much, much harder to retrieve but a lot of the time, with the right software, even those wiped files can be retrieved.

[Wolverine@MSU]

There's a wonderful program called "testdisk" that you can get here:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It can search for and recover lost partitions, and, if the data have not been written over, can recover files, even when other recovery software doesn't see them. Best of all it's free. I used it quite a bit when my system got fudged up by Norton Ghost. I used the windows version, having reinstalled Win XP on a different drive, and was able to get to previously unreadable data. There's lot's of documentation and help files for its use out there. Just Google "testdisk". Hope it works for you.

[wsherrick]

Thanks Wolverine. Once I get over the terror of ruining my computer I will give this a try.

[djf01]

... Upon arriving at home I discovered that my computer had crashed and totally wiped out everything on it. I mean everything. I have spent the past day or fixing this. I lost a lot of important written material, photos and music which I'll never find again, but I'll live. They say everything comes in three's so I wonder what's next.

wsherrick,

What work has been done on the dead computer?

In most cases it's possible to recover at least some data from dead systems, using the methods described here, plus a few others. (I used to do this stuff professionally). But ... (and I hope this is not bad news for you), if you just re-install Windows on your system, that invariably destroys any ability to recover what was there before (not always, but usually).

So this is just a tip for anyone, if you *think* you've permanently lost all your data, get professional advice regarding data recovery *before* you give up on it.

Also, don't just assume a computer shop will be all that careful with your data. They are notorious for just re-installing and blatting everything to fix the most basic of problems.

[wsherrick]

Yes, I reinstalled the Windows XP, put all of the virus protection back on it, reinstalled RRT3 and made a new file for it and all of the extra content. One bright spot in this whole drama is I have a new map that I sent to one of our dear members for testing. It is the last scenario in the Age Of Steam series and I have spent countless hours on it. Well, my copy of the map got destroyed with the rest, but he had the copy I sent him and so I got it back. I still lost all the various test versions I had of it though. I haven't put any photos or music back in yet so I don't know if these files are retrievable or not.

[Hawk]

If you've already reinstalled the OS then forget about it. You've lost everything. I doubt you'd be able to retrieve anything now.
The retrieval work needs to be done before anything is done with the hard drive. Installing the OS pretty much will overwrite anything that was on the hard drive.

[phred]

One of my remaining daughters works for BestBuy, Geek Squad City. They recover some stuff even after the o/s has been reinstalled. AND they ain't too expensive.
Give them a try if nothing else works

[Hawk]

I didn't think that could be done. That's good to know.