Hard Drive Gone

D

Delber

Registered User
Messages
33
Morning

Sorry for this long post but not sure whats gone wrong.

Last evening the PC had a message on the screen something like this "C:\Windows\system32\config" is damaged and to fix it try and install original disk that came with PC by pressing "R" on the first screen.

The PC wouldnt start and only went as far as this screen. When I loaded the CD and ran the program it reloaded XP Home but now there are 2 drives "C" & "E". E has the basic windows programs but C has nothing. All of our information has gone as well as all our programs. Is there anyway of retrieving this info or have i lost it all forever.

Thanks
 
The information is more than likely still available on the disk, i.e. it hasn't physically been overwritten yet. You could try a free or commercial disk recovery program and see what results you get. A commercial one worked a lot better for me than any of the free ones, VirtualLab from BinaryBiz.

Alternatively, if you're not too comfortable doing that yourself you can bring it to a recovery specialist. I believe there's a number of them around Dublin and many operate on a no find/no fee basis. Not sure of pricing but I'd say upwards of €100.
 
argolis said:
The information is more than likely still available on the disk, i.e. it hasn't physically been overwritten yet. You could try a free or commercial disk recovery program and see what results you get. A commercial one worked a lot better for me than any of the free ones, VirtualLab from BinaryBiz.
Click to expand...
Or just boot off a live/bootable CD (e.g. Ultimate Boot CD, Bart-PE, Kanotix, Ubuntu etc.) and see if you can retrieve the data onto an external USB drive or something like that.
 
I didn't know that was possible - if the drives have been formatted won't they be reported as empty on any OS? I thought a recovery program would be needed to salvage file pointer locations and so on.

Or is this in the case of where it hasn't been formatted, i.e. a non-OS containing hard drive and may just not be correctly read by XP home?

O.P. - there's a lot of info on previous threads on AAM, boards and the web in general on steps you can take for recovery.
 
Sorry - I missed the bit about the drives seemingly having been reformatted so ignore my advice above and stick to a recovery program as you suggested.
 
GetDataBack(NTFS/FAT32) will do the job. I've had to use it twice on 2 320GB drives, worked fine. Got all my data back without a 'scratch'!
 
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