I feel like crying and cussing at the same time

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
I think I just lost my HD....system went totally unresposive and even my boot/recovery utility CD can not read C drive. Which means I lost my installs of CFS2 and my FS9, a great number of paint templates, all the work I had done on NCGent's F-91 and Northrop Alpha and a good number of other FS9 aircraft....along with tons and tons of work for CFS2.

Anyone have a clue as to how to get into a HD that is dead so I can try to recover some of this work?

OBIO
 
Ouch, been there and felt that. But there is hope. My HD burned up a little over a year ago due to dust build up and the heat therein created. I took the deceased to Best Buy and for a nominal fee they will recover all the files/folders they can and put them on discs. I got back all my aircraft, add on scenery, documents, etc, but seem to remember a weird thing about sounds not coming back. I may be wrong on that last one. They explained that their success was largely dependent on knowing the directories by name, that they couldn't really go in and just get everything. I had a good memory of where things were and they got most all of it back.
Since then I have put a dust filter on my tower cabinet air intakes, upgraded my surge protection, added an external HD with all back-up FS stuff on it, and made some screen shots of the directory trees. Don't want to go through that again. Give them a call and start trying to remember where things are. Good luck.
 
one thing to try, if you have a spare pc then hook the hard drive up and explore it, you might be lucky and its only the OS thats had it
 
Just placed a Newegg order for a new 250 gig HD...$49.99 with free shipping. I have already called a local PC repair shop and spoke with them...for $10 they will go in a attempt to recover files....luckily I have a well defined system of file management for my sim files.

C:\MOTOR: contains all my sound packs
C:\Programs\Microsoft Games:

Flight SImulator 9
Prop Test: My CFS2 prop planes
Jet Test: My CFS2 jets
Photoshop Files: All of my repaint templates, insignia and markings collections, panel collections

Flight Sim 9 I am not too worried about recovering since it is a new install (just got it for Christmas) and everything is freeware which can be downloaded again. The two CFS2 installs....I have most of it on CD/DVD back up other than the last 5 months worth of work...which is pretty substantial.

The Photoshop Files directory...now that I dread losing. I have maybe 75% of it backed up on DVD...but the 25% that is not backed up is a huge loss.

THe C:\Motor directory...not a big loss as I have most of it on DVD and can redownload most of the rest. Some of it is "new" sound packs I have put together using Lawdog's work...taking single engine packs and reworking the sound.cfg for twin and quad engine uses....not great loss, just some time involved in recreating it.

OBIO
 
stiz

That is a good idea....will yank the HD and stick it in my nephew's system (which I am using right now) and give the disk a looking at...maybe I can recover my files...I HOPE I HOPE I HOPE!

OBIO
 
Check the cables also OBIO, I had a hard drive that kept doing that on me and I would move the cable around and boom there she was again. I ended up changing out the cable and no further trouble.

Chris:typing:
 
YUP...Sata cables get hot and can come loose at times....

But plugging into a different computer will give access to your files....
 
The HD is now in my nephew's system as a slave....it is running but it shows as an unformatted HD....I lost my FAT files most likely. I keep up on virus scans (which as we all now are not 100%) and keep an eye on registry errors since I download, erase and move so many files around in relation to my sim addiction. Things happen! Got the new 250gig HD on the way and will take this HD out to the pc shop and see if he can recover any of the files....if all that can be recovered are my Photoshop files, I would be extremely happy.

OBIO
 
Hang in there, Obio...I am currently in the process of re-building my ENTIRE hard drive as a result of a fatal crash two days ago. I had my sim running extraordinarily well....then decided to try out a little program from RealityXP....a Garmin 530 with WAAS....worked well for one flight...then.....weel, the rest is history. And I managed to trace it to a stackhash error caused by my fancy new purchase. It disabled all executables on my system, which rendered me dead in the water. Couldn't do anything but boot up in safe mode (which allowed me use of my recovery discs). Hope you get all of your data recovered....I use a Seagate 250Gig external to back up all of my stuff....and do so religiously. Good luck!
 
I decided to bite the bullet and chalk the files up to history....I can always redo the work...just take some time...and may end up with better results the second time around. I am currently reformatting the HD to see if I can get XP reinstalled. I have 80 some percent of the files on CD and DVD, so I'm not loosing everything. Looking at this from the positive perspective......I previously had so many projects underway that I felt swamped with them....now I have NO projects underway. Now I can start with one project, get it totally done, them move on to the next. Sure, in reality I lost many many hours worth of work..but in the grand scheme of things that is a small thing to lose when there are people who are facing lossing their homes, their cars, their jobs (2 out of 3 for me...job and cars gone).

OBIO

As an added plus....I no longer have 3 folders worth of aircraft files that need installed. That will be a huge savings in HD space and speed. Some of those planes have been waiting to be installed for over a year....I doubt they were really the kind of planes I wanted installed any how.
 
Sorry to hear of your loss. I've been there a few times myself. Once in a while you get lucky and can use it as the second drive to pull the data off. But if the FAT table (that's redundant I know) is gone so is everything else. And it's typically not worth the bucks to take it to a data recovery place. Cheer up. It's Friday. There's a new Mirage in town.
:ernae:
 
I can feel your pain, I've been there too.
Now, I have external HD's everywhere, with double backups...and still things get lost...
 
Been there.. Horrible loss..

Like Jankee's, I too now have external drives everywhere.. (well internal HD's that I have links, boxes, and sockets for).


I was going to say, for those that the HD surface is still good, you can try;
* Tapping the unit on the top (large flat area with pressed metal cover) and that will sometimes unsieze a frozen, heat damaged motor. (after it has cooled down).
* Second, is locate the same HD in Ebay, get it, take the two apart and swap the discs. This is extremely dangerous for data and is a last resort and can usually 'not' work, but some have saved their data.

Note; One piece of dust, one single scratch can ruin a HD disc, so its strongly recommended to not go that route.



Bill
 
The HD is formatted and XP is reinstalled....have a ton of updating and patching to do over the next couple days. Antivirus to get going, a ton of utilities to download and reinstall. My 250gig HD will be here from Newegg in a few days, and it will be my Flight Sim HD...no more will my sim files share a HD with anything with Windows in the title.

Yeah, I may have lost some work....I can always redo it. It could have been worse...like young man working the check out line at Krogers. Got up early this morning to go to work, it was butt cold (around 14 below 0) and his heater would not turn on. Losing some files for "cartoon planes", as my wife calls them, is not as bad as not having heat in your car during a really long really cold snap.

OBIO
 
yeah, hate it when that happens. I've had the same occur twice. Once a 6 mth old Seagate seized, then a virus killed another drive by wiping the boot files. For the former I was told if you put the drive in a freezer then plug it in a few hours later it will run for a few minutes at a time, maybe enough to rescue critical data. The latter - tough tittie... get better virus protection. Needless to say I did, and now avoid Seagate drives. I lost paint templates for many repaints in the first instance but the most important lesson - back up everything on DVD/external HDD, whatever. The second crash - lost nothing at all.

LPXO
 
Does anyone have a RAID mirror set-up? Seems like that would be good insurance against an HD crash.

And you don't have to worry about backing up anything!

- H52
 
hawkeye52 said:
Does anyone have a RAID mirror set-up? Seems like that would be good insurance against an HD crash.

And you don't have to worry about backing up anything!

- H52
Click to expand...

RAID is good, but not a total replacement for external, hideable, securable backups. One, the chance of a drive failure statistically doubles... sure you have mirrored drives and so the bytes are secure, but something like a bad power spike can still kill two; and two, RAID does nothing to prevent loss if the comp is stolen, cooked, drowned. I usually take the backup drive over to the kid's place when we go away on a long trip (until he gives me FTP access to one of his storage drives :whistle:) RAID1 just gives you the security that most of the time you are not stopped dead in your tracks.

Best example of that was a friend's business.. they were faithful about doing weekly backs to tape overnight... and it was only a weeks' loss of data when the thieves broke in, stole the computers.. with the tapes in the drives.:faint:

(BTW< Tomorrow I go buy the matched drives for my new RAID array )

Rob
 
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