Massive data loss...help me please

T

twyztyr

Gawd
Joined
Jun 7, 2004
Messages
984
I just had one of my drives spontaneously corrupt itself. One of the partitions is in tact, albeit empty, the other partition seems to have completely dusappeared...with ~100GB worth of data, including a lot of stuff I'll probably never be able to get back. Some of it was backed up to CDs, but a lot of it (lots of video files) are probably completely lost.

I'm running Windows 2000 and it was an NTFS partition. I was trying to run DVD Shrink, the system spontaneously rebooted, I switched to DVD Decrypter, it ripped the files fine, then as soon as I tried to actually burn them, Nero told me the partition was inaccessible. I went through Windows Explorer trying to figure out what's happening, and everytime I click on the drive, it tells me it's unpartitioned and needs to be formatted.

Does anyone have any ideas how to recover something, or is this a total loss?
 
direct sector scan for recovery
need somewhere to write it to
recommend FileScavenger

for an attempted repair
DIY Datarecovery Disk Patch

as to what caused the corruption there are alot of suspects
Corruption 101

as long as the drive is recognized and accessible all the data should be sitting right there for recovery, just with the metadata corrupted (partition ID MFT ect)

of course if your memory has gone bad, well then recovery itself is problematic
a not totally improbable senerio could be a little too high an ambient temperature
heavy CPU power draw, static disk access but a spinup draw on the optical and bam a near worsecase power draw where the higher ambient has decreased the capacity of the PSU, maybe tyhrow in a brownout VAC sag because its summer and the utilities are under a heavy load from all the ACs, or your AC or fridge started up on the house circuit
heavy motors\compressors are a leading cause of sags in the house

one of many senerios you need to rule out
the reason I mentioned that one is that its summer and you crashed
 
Thanks for the info.

My apartment complex has pretty good power, I've been able to check it with the power conditioner I have in my amplifier rig. There aren't any spikes or dips to speak of.

The memory has no problems that I'm aware of, though this evening I'm going to run memtest through it and see what I get.

Temps aren't a problem, I'm never running above 44C on the CPU, most of the time I've got the AC on and so everything is a good bit cooler. I've also got plenty of power with a TT 430W PSU.

I've been doing some research and found at least three other people that had the exact same problem while running DVD Shrink 3.2. Apparently, it's just about deadly if something goes wrong. In theory, I should be able to get stuff back, just a matter of figuring out how.
 
Ice linked me a great program

PC Inspector and Recovery

i used it, copied all lost files, pasted them, and it showed up..........

now, i have no clue how to return my mp3's back to normal, so i ended up deleting all 32 gigs of clusters i found, i kept pics i saw i wanted, thats about it

easy to use program

soulsaver_8229
 
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