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View Full Version : Calling all computer ge...er...EXPERTS!



Jason Roehl
05-24-2005, 8:06 AM
Okay, I thought I had all the important stuff off my second hard drive (fairly old), but it turns out that's where my Quicken data file was (Premier Home & Business, I had forgotten that's where it was). Being an old HD (7-8 years), I knew it was on borrowed time, but it's been working fine up until this last weekend when it got a bunch slimmer--that is, it lost its FAT32. Why, I don't know. Anyway, from the trial versions of recovery programs that I've downloaded, it seems that overall the data is relatively intact. The problem is, of course, that all these programs I've found are shareware, so they'll find the files, but not recover them until I cough up some dough. I'll certainly do that if necessary, up to a point, but I thought I would ask here first. Does anyone know of/have any FREE data recovery tools that I could get online? All I really need off this HD is the one file, so I'd hate to have to spend $50 if you guys knew of a cheaper way that I haven't found.

Chuck Wintle
05-24-2005, 9:00 AM
There is a small free program called "test disk" that may help you. If the part that is corrupted is the partition table then this program will rebuild it thus allowing you to access the data on the drive. google "test disk and you will find it
or look here www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.html

Dennis Peacock
05-24-2005, 9:06 AM
$50 for data recovery? The cheapest I know of through our work is $7K for complete data recovery services. But then again, maybe it's because it a business wanting data recovered. I'll have to get more info on this Jason if you go that route.

Jason Roehl
05-24-2005, 9:24 AM
Thanks, Charles, I'll have to look into that later...that definitely looks promising.

Dennis, if I'm not inclined to spend $50....$7k is even more tools I can't buy, and I'd use it for target practice before I spent that on fixing it. But, I think you're right about that price being for a company. The one I found for $46 is Davory, and it has different pricing for different types of licenses, personal being the cheapest, of course. It's also probably not as powerful as your $7k programs.

Basically, the HD in question is reading as "RAW" (unformatted) under WinXP Home right now. It was a FAT32 drive just a few days ago. My boot drive (NTFS) is unaffected.

Jason Roehl
05-25-2005, 8:30 AM
Charles, YOU ROCK!!!

The boot sector was the whole problem. I downloaded that program, and in five minutes had it figured out and the boot sector rebuilt. So far, it looks like a total recovery of that HD.

Thanks again!!

Ken Fitzgerald
05-25-2005, 9:16 AM
Jason....burn some backups! Glad you were able to recover!

Jason Roehl
05-25-2005, 12:30 PM
Jason....burn some backups! Glad you were able to recover!

I did...sort of. I had the entire C drive backed up. The problem was that I had forgotten all my Quicken data was on the D drive, and I thought I had everything important off that drive. Both the original data file and the backup were pointed to the D drive, something I had just overlooked. So I hadn't noticed until the boot sector self-destructed, which I didn't notice until I went into Quicken, Quicken asked me if I was a new user, my first indication there was real trouble. All this wouldn't have been a problem if, when I installed the current C drive, the file transfer utility had worked properly, which it didn't. So I had to manually re-install everything, and I guess I just missed some data files in the process.

Anyone else notice how bloated programming is these days? The number of program and attendant files on my computer is just plain ridiculous...