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I think i just lost my hard drive

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
Was on the A2A Simulations site, checking out some videoon their partnership with the C97 Project, then pulled up Yahoo to check my e-mail and while typing in my login name...my keyboard went floopie. I had to do a hard restart to get out of it...and now when my system tries to reboot, it gets to the point where Windows XP should begin loading and all I get is a blinking white line on the screen. I used my boot recovery utility CD to get in to the system and C drive is not being recognized by it at all.

Looks like I have once again lost all my most recent sim work....not just for CFS2 but also for FS9 now. Will be down for a while until I can get a new HD into the system.

OBIO
 
I don't know anything about the Hard Drive...

I feel for you....I'm still rebuilding all of my " CFS2's "..from an error.
 
The amount of work I lost in this crash surpasses all my other crashes put together. The number of conversions that were done and just waiting to be uploaded was staggering. AlphaSim B-57, Swift, Mig-25, Mirage, A-90, Berkut, Turbo Mentor. Piglet's F-5 series. Lionheart's Fairchild 24W with the Bubble Cowl. I had totally redone the Alpha Sim Hawker Hunter with new skins, a revised Panel set with full VC gauges. VC gauges added to a lot of the AlphaOldies planes (F-4, F-5, F-8, Mig-17, A-4s). The Early Mustang Collection was close to being done in terms of all new skins with vastly improved panel lines and details that fit the A models. A full conversion of a Mig-29 and nearly a dozen skins for it.

Add in the work I had done for FS9. NCGent's Fairchild F-91 had been shined and had 15 new skins, I had just put the finishing touches on the third new skin for his Northrop Alpha.

I have most of my CFS2 planes on Cd and DVD....along with most of my repaint templates...up through August at any rate. But the last 5 months have seen a lot of projects started, tons on new paint templates done.

I was planning on picking up a new HD to add to the system so that I could move all my sim stuff away from the Windows drive. I hate having my sim on the same drive as the OS....and this is why!

OBIO
 
Oh my gosh, OBIO!!

I'm SO SORRY to hear this! I hope everything works out for you!
 
That's real annoying, sorry Obio.

BTW, does the Bios see the HD? If you still have an HD from your old comp, you could make that the master, load up an OS and make your busted C: a slave. If the Bios sees it, getting into the OS on a different HD, you may be able to mess about with the computer management or something. If it is seen by the bios, is it seen in DOS? If it is, you may be able to rescue stuff by copying the files across in DOS to another HD?

Jamie
 
Man,

....it's always a bummer. 'Nuf said. :kilroy:

I suppose that if I want that bare-metal for the F-104, I'd better get my juvenile paint set out of storage. :faint:
 
The HD could not be read at all. I hooked it up as a slave drive in my nephew's system and it was like looking at a blank CD...Total Space was shown as 0 and Free space was shown as 0. Any utility I tried running on the drive said that it was either non-existant or not formatted.

I formatted the drive, and have XP reinstalled. Have a ton of updating to do over the next few days. Will not be installing any flight sim stuff until the new 250 gig HD arrives from Newegg and is installed.

Tango,

I am 99% sure that I have the F-104 paint template stored on CD/DVD. If not, it will not take more than an hour to redo the template and have the bare metal treatment done. Just give me a few days to get this system back up to snuff.

OBIO
 
You...

OBIO said:
I am 99% sure that I have the F-104 paint template stored on CD/DVD. If not, it will not take more than an hour to redo the template and have the bare metal treatment done. Just give me a few days to get this system back up to snuff.OBIO
Click to expand...

....have no idea what a relief that is! :kiss:

The prospect of me painting anything is enough to make brave men cringe. :eek:
 
......bummer OB but it happens to lots of peeps

........but just for the record if this happens to anyone else
........windows has an annoying way of just "losing" the MBR(which is the boot record of a harddrive and so it can appear that there are no working partitions on the drive
........but you CAN find your partitions AGAIN with proggies (some even free)

as long as you DONT TRY TO WRITE, OR COPY TO THE DRIVE and of course DONT REFORMAT or reinstall the opsys (do this and the drive instantly reformats itself and considers what youve written as the only thing on the drive and unfortunately all other files are "gone fer good" unless you send your drive away to a magnetic retreival lab)

howto varies but here is one scenario
.......eg load the software on a working machine and use your original hardrive as a slave and do what JDT said
........the MBR is actually copied a few times on an NTFS drive so these great little proggies find em quite easy and allow you to extract the files you need
...........so KEEP YER COOL and SAVE YER FILES
try this one (and GOOGLE others)
http://findandmount.com

GOOD LUCK
 
Are you saying that you reformatted this HD without at least taking it to a Computer Repair shop to see if they could get your files off?:banghead::banghead::banghead::jawdrop::faint:.I would have tried anything before I reformated it.Why reformat it? Would you trust this thing again with some more of your files?My old hard drive that died is sitting around here in a box somewhere. Luckily I had most of my stuff backed up.Sorry you had this happen guy.Maybe the magnetic retrevial thing could be looked into.


BLONDI:cost1:
 
The drive is fine...I'm pretty sure. I blew the FAT files due to my rabid downloading, checking, erasing, installing of stuff to FS2004. YOu know the whole "kid with a new toy" thing. In just a couple weeks, my free space went from 97 gig free to less than 80 gig free.....and that does not include all the files I downloaded, checked out, and erased. In two weeks I probably burnt up more band width than the average person uses in a year. I called three repair shops (two that I have a lot of faith in) and discussed the situation with them...and they all said that the FAT files most likely got corrupt with all the file moving and erasing and that the drive would be fine after a format and reinstall.

I opted not to try to retrieve the data for two reasons.....the likelihood of retrieving much of it was slim and would not justify the expense involved and, quite honestly, loosing the files turned out to be a good way to relieve the "got too many irons in the fire" situation that I have had going on for far too long. Now, I have a clean slate in terms of projects, and can start over with one project, work it to completion, upload, and start a new project. The stress level of trying to keep track of a hundred on-going projects at one time was just insane.

The new HD will be here in a few days, will be installed and will be used for my sim files. C drive will be used just for the OS and to install programs and utilities on. CFS2 and FS2004 and my Photoshop files will be on the new SATA drive.

OBIO
 
Not to sound like an authority on pc issues such as this however I learned of a trick long ago that for some reason has worked twice for me in the past. When the hard drive goes down take the offending drive out of the pc, wrap in in airtight plastic, ziploc works well, and put it in the freezer. I was able to put in a new drive and OS and after an overnite arctic adventure (or two) for said drive I was able to read and remove all pertinent files and transfer onto the new drive. Said offensive drives "recovered" but were only used as back up for the back up drive meaning they were not running constantly ands only started to use sparingly. I never trusted them again is what I mean.

Like I said I am far from an expert but maybe this trick could help someone else in the future. Maybe someone here could even explain why this trick works or under what conditions this works. It's amazing though, when this happens, what a personal loss is felt. But like we all have heard for years...back-up, back-up, back-up....

Take good care my friends.

p.s. thank you folks for ALL the great files and tutorials at Sim-Outhouse that you let me just have over the years too!
 
I think it has to do with the reader arms getting twisted a bit and jamming up between the disks or the disks warping from heat. When you freeze the HD, everything shrinks and allows just enough minute space to allow the disks to spin again.

I would also not trust the HD again and would scoop all of the data off to the new. I would then format it, fdisk it and dismount it and mount it and reformat it a couple more times before i drove a nail through it and put it in the trash.
 
Oh, and BTW, I am ordering the hardware and HDs one for my PC and one for the laptop so that I have a second HD in both for backups, just in case........
 
The new HD arrived today....have to get out to the tech store to pick up a control cable and a power cable converter thingie. Once I get those, the 250gig SATA drive will become home to CFS2 and FS2004 and all my paint templates.

The original HD is running well and will remain in the system and home to the none critical stuff...XP, Office and all the little utilities that I can download from the net for free. In time, when the funds are available, I will be replacing it...but for now it has to stay in use.

OBIO
 
I feel your pain,my external hard drive just failed and took about 150 Gigs of downloads with it.And that is a hard failure with no chance of reboot or format,in other words it will make a good place to set my drink.:typing:
 
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