Niko *^_^* Niko

Thank you GetDataBack!!! I don’t care how cliché it sounds, I’m much too relieved to care… After a whole day of unsuccessful scans and various freeware restoration data programs (both Windows and DOS based) failing to recover anything, I came across this little piece of software, which had generally very good feedback wherever I looked. After another 5 hour scan – yes, 5 hours!! – which clocks up about 16 hours worth of scanning overall, from last night to today, not to mention the time spent browsing and the time it’s taking to recover the data right now – GetDataBack found 3,165 directories with 52,009 files on the corrupt drive. A total of 19,740MB of data, not all of which I actually need to recover, but the point is it uprooted near enough the whole damn disk, all ordered and structured how I had left it!! The only thing I’ve noticed up to now is that some of the music files have become corrupt, but it’s only about 6 or 7 tracks that I’ll actually have to re-download sometime. Hopefully that will be the extent of the damage…

So right now I’ve become the cumbersome but oh-so-relieving task of copying the lost files back to my C: drive, which will take a while, because it won’t all fit without a few CD-burning sessions. I believe it was a corrupted boot sector that caused the problem. Windows wouldn’t recognise the disk or read it, and neither would the DOS bootup disk I created to try to read it. GetDataBack also confirmed that the disk was unbootable upon analysis. I’m going to try and fix the disk by running a MBR (Master Boot Record) fix and boot sector fix which Doug recommended trying after I know the data is safe, and if that fails, I’ll have to reformat it.

But I’ve got my data back!!! W00t!! I’ll make sure to write it to CD very soon for a more permanent backup.