Can't believe it ! Hard disk crash

[~J~]

I'm "BEGGING" for help here!

My PC has just crashed, and upon rebooting, my datadrive with customers work on is saying "F:\is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

I've rebooted a few times. Nothing.

Right clicking and selected properties shows it has 0bytes of used space, 0bytes of free space and 0bytes capacity.

However, going into Disk Management in the administration tools clearly shows it as a 149Gb drive, 149Gb free space, 100% but has the diagonal lines in the partition view.

Has anyone any tips I can try that won't destroy the data or harm it. I can't reveal obviously the price, but the work on it is worth a LOT of money.

I feel sick with worry.

 

[~J~]

Cheers for the responses.

Totally agree with the first one, I 'should' leave it and sne dit to data recovery, but not having £500 to hand and the customer needing the program by Tuesday next week, it's not an option.

Been looking most of the night for some software, found one called GetDataBack NTFS which when run is clearly showing all my files. Left it running over night to to a total sector check, and at 3am when I went to bed it had found over 16,000 files so the data 'is' there, it's just how much is recoverable. Only problem is I had a power cut at 6.30am and lost the progress!! Will have to run it again tonight. The GetDataBack software doesn't write to the disk so hopefully it's not adding to the problem when it's running.

Spinrite looks good too, if I have no joy recovering, then I'll try that one, other than that I'm gona find a darkened room and a bottle of booze.

Cheers for the help, REALLY appreciate it.

 

[~J~]

Well if it works, I want your addresses to send the pints down to

 

[~J~]

I would agree, but surely the more important question, is why the hell weren't you backing up such critical data?

That's the kick in the nadgers. I was backing customers work to CD to give them today when it happened, Nero hung, reset machine, and whumpf!

 

[~J~]

Quick update if anyone's interested...

Spent ALL day with GetDataBack. Had bits of success, VERY VERY slow running, system would sometimes hang, more resets, etc, and lots of frustration.

Was starting to think I'd made matters worse as on some resets the drives wasn't even showing at all, even in the BIOS, so a huge panic was setting in me.

Removed SATA cables again, blew on connectors, waggled leads, etc, etc.

In the end, as a desperate attempt to try 'anything' I swapped the cables from one SATA to the 'broken' one and booted up.

GetDataBack sailed through the checks. What 'was' taking about 4 hours to get to anything like 80% and a hell of a lot of errors, went from 0% to 100% in 35mins with no errors.

Saw the 'checking files', 'compiling list', 'sorting lost files' and all other messages as final checks were done and then finally...

Was presented with an Explorer-style view of my datadrive and all it's directories and files (including ones that had been deleted WEEKS ago!) asking what I'd like to restore and where.

Wondering if this was all too good to be true, I selected the files and clicked the "copy" button to confirm the restoration.

Final result...

100% restored

So only to find out, if possible, as to why it all happened in the first place! I'm going to run a check on the 'naughty' drive, so anyone have any tips on a good disk checking program as I'd like to use it again (it's a relatively new drive).

I know perhaps not the right forum, but based on the fact that a waggle, clean and insert of different cables, anyone think the SATA cables could be at fault? (I have a SN25P shuttle and read a few people saying the SATA cables are not the best, or is this just talk?), any recommendations on an alternative brand of cable?

IF it helps point to what the problem may have been, I've been having a few issues this last week with my drives, but thought the drive was just getting slower because of the amount of data that was going on. The harddrive activity light would be on for minutes at a time, constantly - no flickering, and every now and then my mouse would just 'lock' for a second or two the more activity there was. Again, apologies if it's in the wrong forum, but rather than start a new thread, thought I'd add to this.

Anyway, thanks again for the tips folks, rest assured I'll be investing in a longer UPS (mine only last 14mins) and I may look at an alternative backup solution rather than DVD.

Thanks again.