[abOfU9nJ]

going to bed when your tired.

Long story, But there's an important lesson here, for all.

My wife recently bought me a new 500GB external drive, since she's now working in the same company as me and earning a proper wage again (after 6 months of just part time work).

Unfortunately she can't drive, and as she works 30 miles away from home, I usually take her to work, and then, when I'm off work (weekdays) or on days (weekends) I pick her up at 1am,
So I get back Sunday night after a 12 hr days shift, and instead of going to bed, (like I should have), I decide that its a good idea to make a copy of my C: drive to a second faster internal drive.

My Main drive is quite slow, an old 120Gb IDE with 2mb cache and my other faster drive is a 500Gb SATA2 with 16mb cache, Now until I got the new external drive, the 500Gb was where all my programs, music, ripped dvd's, documents and precious photographs, were, All the files were cut or copied and pasted onto the external drive and then the 500Gb internal drive was partitioned and formatted, in preparation for the next step,

Which was to use Norton Ghost to create an exact copy of my 120gb to my freshly formatted and partitioned 500Gb, which is now 2x 230Gb (465Gb after formatting).

So I start the process running at 12.30am, drive and pick up the wife, and when I get back there is 11 minutes left, so As I'm sitting there with a cup of tea, waiting for things to finish, when I realise to my utter horror, that the drive I'm ghosting to is the 500gb External drive, with all my stuff on, So I instantly stopped the process, and windows then rejects the drive as unmountable and asks to format it....[cursing]

So I tried various bits of software, undelete ( and various others), but nothing works, the drive is totally unrecognisable and I do actually cry cos all of my dogs puppy photos are gone and every photograph I've ever taken on any of my camera's and any of the programs I've ever downloaded over the last 15 years and all my music etc is GONE.

[cursing][cursing][cursing][cursing][cursing][cursing]

So I searched the 'net for solutions and it looked like the only thing possible was to send the drive to a specialist company and get them to rip the data off the platters and it would cost £300.
Doh!!

Anyway, I spent 2 days looking for a solution, Then I had a ..........



I already knew that....

If you copy or "cut" and paste data from one place to another or delete stuff, then windows just marks that part of the drive as "empty", Its not really empty, its just that windows says it is (its a little more complicated than this, but thats the jist of it),

So my idea was to see if the data was still on the internal 500Gb, despite it having been partitioned and formatted, so I downloaded some trial software,

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Getdataback for NTFS.

From my google searches and some research, this seemed some pretty powerful software,

I did a scan of the 500Gb, which revealed that about 98% of the data was recoverable. [thumbup]

So I bought the software, £40 or so a small price to pay for this, and I've now recovered about 450Gb of the 465Gb of data that was lost.
And have it now backed up to the freshly formatted external drive.

So I went from being absolutely suicidal to absolutely, blissfully happy in a couple of days.

God! I really hate lifes little trials and tribulations, But as my Granny use to say ..

"These things are sent to try us".

And next time I won't be going anywhere but bed, when I finish a shift.
And I'll be buying another 500gb drive next month to do a backup and then keep the drive in storage should I ever screw up again.

[voksveta]

Glad to hear you got *most* of your data back.

I work in PC repair and I very frequently get the "I need all my data recovered, I have my whole life on the Hard drive". When I ask if they have any sort of backup, of course most say no. I mean if something is THAT important to you, wouldn't you want some sort of safeguard?

Luckily, we can usually recover data from most drives, but those few that are beyond workable can be disastrous when you break the news.

I personally have backups saved on several different external drives and between PC's. I may even build a WHS and load it up with a bunch of 1TB drives for complete system backups. You just never know and since I am around failing drives almost everyday, I have become a bit weary over the years...

And as for ghost...yes I have done the whole "OHH CRAP, I'M GHOSTING TO THE WRONG DRIVE!!!" before too. Not fun at all... [no]

It's one of those things that unless it has actually happened to you, people think their data is invincible.

[abOfU9nJ]

I guess someone else would have thought about the data on the internal 500GB, straight away, but since my brain was a little stressed out from my nightshifts and I'd just done a 12 hr day shift too, It probably seemed worse than it was.
Now I've had a decent nights sleep, I can see I shouldn't have got too worried as the data was fairly easily recoverable from the internal drive, I lost maybe 10-15Gb and that was a just some youtube videos and some other clips I'd downloaded, No great loss!
I'll be much more careful next time.

[cauddyVab]

Excellent! I can't say I have ever done anything quite like that and I hope I never do. When I do anything that results in data loss, I always read what I'm doing 3 or 4 times over. I've caught some mistakes doing this!

Hard way to learn a lesson (although you came out on top!), but I bet you NEVER do anything like that again! [thumbup]

[realfan87]

We use getdataback at work, always manage to get data off a drive with it unless there is massive hardware damage. Although in those circumstances I have had some success with a few commandline tools in Linux.

[Andoror]

have you checked your files? although they may be there in explorer they may be corrupted.

I have had recovery software recover parts of files and it passes them off as ok.

[abOfU9nJ]

Some of the files were corrupt, but I've managed to check about 90% of them and they seem to be ok, But I've got about 20,000+ photographs to go through, so it might take a while.

[JTS_tv]

Some days back a friend also contacted me on ICQ, told me that she had deleted all the photos of her last holiday by accident, and that she was really sad because all of her photos are now gone etc...
I told her to download some of those recovering-programs as well, and she managed to recover all but one of her photos!! I can tell you that she was REALLY happy...
But there are so many informations everywhere, and if she had just written "recover photos" in google, she would have been pointed right there, but a lot of people just don't know anything about those things...

But glad that you could get all your data back!! I have all my important stuff (photos) on DVDs, and I think I will mirror them to a 2nd harddrive as well, soon...so I'll have 3 "versions" in total, I think that should do the job...