shut down in the middle of reformat

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fbiguy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 17, 2004
Messages
168
Alright, so i was not paying attention, and while my laptop was in the middle of a (quick) reformat, i decided to use a different OS, and held down the power button to shut it off.

Yes, idiotic i know.

Anyway, now I'm faced with Windows XP Pro saying there is no hard drive. I also booted into knoppix and attempted to format it, but it did not detect anything.

Did i screw myself over?

My next step is to create a bootable CD with DOS on it and just try to reformat it old school method.

Suggestions welcomed.
 
When all else fails, go old school on it's ass. Your drive is no longer a mountable volume, thus the results you mentioned. Repartition & reformat (which you were already doing anyway, just go low-level this time).
 
I'm assuming you weren't formatting the system (OS) drive, and therefore just aborted a format of a 2ndary drive. You should be fine. I'd start over with FDISK or a similiar utility to repartition it, then go ahead and format it. 20 dollars US says the drive is just fine.
 
xenotype said:
the drive is just fine.
Click to expand...

Yeah. A format operation does software stuff within a partition. An aborted format can easily screw up the format to the point the volume isn't recognized, but the partition and the drive are just fine. Wiping the partition gives you a clean start and will fix this issue very nearly always. (Also, yes, FDISK - I assumed you knew that, but shouldn't have!)
 
Thanks for the replies. I was going to create a DOS boot CD and use FDISK, but for whatever reason Vista was able to clear/use the partition. Not sure why but whatever.

My new problem is idiocity of epic perportions. (and i'll start a new thread on it in due time) But along the way of reformatting his hard drive, i managed to reformat and install windows on my external USB hard drive. Which contained all the backup stuff from the laptop i was working on, as well as a bunch of my own stuff. I'm such a special computer tech. :cool:

Thus far i've been able to recover about 45% of the data, but its all in sectors and somewhat fragmented. :-/
 
fbiguy said:
Thanks for the replies. I was going to create a DOS boot CD and use FDISK, but for whatever reason Vista was able to clear/use the partition. Not sure why but whatever.

My new problem is idiocity of epic perportions. (and i'll start a new thread on it in due time) But along the way of reformatting his hard drive, i managed to reformat and install windows on my external USB hard drive. Which contained all the backup stuff from the laptop i was working on, as well as a bunch of my own stuff. I'm such a special computer tech. :cool:

Thus far i've been able to recover about 45% of the data, but its all in sectors and somewhat fragmented. :-/
Click to expand...

Unless I read you wrong, there is no need to post new thread, you can use Acronis, the shareware version will let you clone drives, and there are many, many other freeware / trialware utilities that will let you clone the drive. Good Luck :D
 
The reason i'd start a new thread is because its a different hard drive and a new issue. The laptop is good now. :)

I've currently used Handy Recovery v1 (using http://www.ubcd4win.com) - it was able to pull all the available sectors onto the laptops hard drive, but each file is just a sector (or a group of sectors maybe?) and they each have part of a file in them or a part of multiple files...

i'm now using a demo version of handy Recovery 3.0 to see if it can restructure the data. If that doesn't work i will move on to recoverer2000

These are the times that train you to be paranoid in every day computer fixage situations.
 
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