Data Recovered!

I recovered the data!

Just a few hours ago I was in a state of dread at the prospect of re-doing a lot of work and losing a lot of important-to-me data (not everybody gives a Xxxt how many calories I eat every day... in fact, I only know of one person who does and she only has a mild passing interest in it).

As I cried over my broken computer I kept putting my ear to it to hear the little hard drive making small whirring noises. It wanted to work, I told myself. It had the heart. It had the soul. It just didn't have the master boot record.

I got the notebook booted on Winternals ERD Commander. But it wouldn't recognize the hard drive. It acknowledged it was there and successfully picked out the size, but wouldn't access it. Sometimes this happens because the electronics of the drive are fine and output their firmware responses of disk size but at soon as you try to get data the physical platters are busted so they fart on you.

So I used ERD's Disk Commander. It said it was able to recover files. I gave it a shot. It made me wait for about twenty minutes. And then I finally had some good luck tonight. It gave me a list of all files on the hard drive. Everything I needed was still there!

Then some bad news. ERD needed to put the files somewhere... but where? It couldn't connect to any computers on my network. I have nine other computers on the home network. Couldn't connect with a single damn one. And the notebook didn't have a floppy drive... not that I would have been happy transferring data via sneakernet at 1.44Mb per trip. I stayed stuck on this issue for a long time. Back and forth to other computers trying to figure out why ERD couldn't connect. I knew I was close because I could see the files, but I was worried that I wouldn't be able to move them off the computer. It was teasing me.

Then a brainstorm. Why not use another physical storage device? I used the 1Gb memory card I use in my camera. I have a card reader and plugged it into the USB port, hoping that ERD would recognize it. At first it didn't. But I decided to reboot.

It recognized it. And I was able to transfer the files I needed onto the card and then onto another computer!

WahoO! So happy about this.

It's slow going, but it's recovering data. But right now I've got all of the data that just a few hours earlier generated Holy Xxxt moments.

One big thing I haven't been able to get to is my Outlook file. It's 1.6Gb but the card can only do 1Gb. I'm going to look for a file splitting utility on the Winternals software. If not, there's a chance I can re-burn the Winternals boot cd but include a small dos splitting or rarring command line utility. Worth a shot.

Another idea is to get a larger USB device. Something like a USB hard drive... or a larger memory card.

I'm a happy camper!

Well, a sick camper, but one that didn't lose data today.

• 

  joe

• 

  joe hat