LOOOOOSSTTT!!! ALLLLL GONE!

Aragorn - look into a USB port CD burner. That's what I used to back up my laptop. Not too expensive and worth the investment.

That absolutely sucks.

I bet a lot of that data is still accessible even if it's in NTFS (assuming it was even a Windows laptop). You might try some of the recovery suggestions before you do anything with the drive.

For the future, may I suggest:
Norton's Ghost. It's nearly unheard of but the best money you can spend for your PC and your sanity. It can back up your entire hard drive over just about any wire you can plug into it, onto nearly anything on the other end. (including over Ethernet to another machine that's better equipped).

Restoring your computer takes probably 5 minutes (depending on gigs of files) and you'll find everything INCLUDING pagefile space is perfectly defragged.

It'll back up a Linux partition at the same time if you want it to.

[edit] That reminds me... I've got to back my machine up.

Ugh...bad news.
If you are running some flavor of NT go to this site and check out their tools: http://www.sysinternals.com/

I have used some of their software to recover data and admin password at work. Worth a look.

If the drive physically died, there are outfits that these guys have mentioned that may be able to help. If you're going to do this, DON'T DO ANYTHING to the drive. Trying to run a recovery software program will likely make it worse. If you don't want the expense of a recovery outfit, might as well try some of the software things these guys have mentioned, you've got nothing to lose.

I do feel your pain. On some of the systems we have we run 2 independent nightly backups (different hardware), and I'm still nervous.

Ghost! Ghost is still good even though it's a Norton product! (I'm betting they bought it, and haven't had a chance to break it yet. ) One trick with Ghost is to split your system up into an OS partition, say 4 GB or so, and install all the software and data onto another partition. That way you can use a straight backup for the data/program partition, and make a Ghost CD for the bootable partition. Makes recovery very fast, and backup simple. (If you do this, remember to move your paging file from the boot partition to the larger data partition.)

That's right . My laptop crashed and schoolwork, pics, emails - everything was lost. Music and all that I will recover but a half a year of schoolwork went down the tubes when I needed it most . I have yet to discover if this will be an issue- if it is then I expect to pay a good few thousand bucks for another years worth of work . But as always I will remian optimistic and hope for the best . JTYMWTK

yikes, I think I'll schedule a backup for tonight of my own machine in memory of yours!

Have you ever used one of those drive salvager places? I've not used them personally but have sent crashed drives out to different places and always had very good results. They return as much of your data as you want, or that they can get on CDR's. Thats if you haven't already reformatted it...

Sorry I can't recommend a company specifically, it's been a few years since I've thought about it, but a few minutes in the back of your favorite computer magazine will reveal several adds. It may cost you several hundred bucks to get it back, but surely thats better than loosing a years work!

Good luck,

Ouch! Sorry to hear it.

My work laptop was STOLEN 2 weeks ago out of my locked office... Lost a lot of data and information.... Not good. My backups were partially corrupt, but I recovered everything from 1 month prior, so at least I'm not starting from scratch.

Let both of these incidents be a lesson to everyone else out there! Always backup your data!

Thats what guts me- I never COULD back it up even if i had wanted to. All this thing came with was a cdrom no way to back it up

Ouch quickbeam, you had it worse than me really am sorry for your loss .

Sorry to hear about your misfortune...

Reformated is what I did - Its gone all of it!

Quickbeam I will Take your sugestion. Thanks.

This has happened to me twice in the last 2 years and I also was not very prepared with backups because I just didn't have a good backup medium. I mean, I totally knew better, but it is easy to procrastinate backups especially when your harddrive is new and should have a lot of good life left in it (Phooey!). Well, I now have a new attitude about backups and it is Priority One. My current computer came with a CD burner, so I am using that as a backup device with good results. If it didn't, I'd spend the $100 or whatever for a decent backup device and use it religiously (or automatically) and consider it very cheap insurance. Thanks for the reminder.

One more tip: store your backup records, or at least one recent revision of them, in a location away from your computer. That way, if the building burns down, you still have your data in a separate location.

Losing important data can evoke powerful feelings best understood by those who've been there. I plead guilty and I'm now a compulsive backer-upper. Pain is a great teacher!

I'm using Iomega 250 for backup. My new Dell will arrive (hopefully in a few days) and I will later have a second hard drive installed for back up.

Lurker's idea about remote backup location is a good one as long as it's safe/secure

Brightnorm

I feel your pain guys. I have been using a Zip and cheap Iomega CD burner to back up data for almost 2 years now. It works well and now I might just reap the rewards of my work. My hard drive seems to be aging badly now. I am just hoping to complete and back up some webs I created for an animal rescue and adoption group before something really bad happens to my pc. Once I get the webs done and copied, I think I am going to reformat the drive and start again. Being a compuslive backer upper is good but I have definately got way too many disks, CDs, and Zip disks laying around now.

too bad you did that.
you would be surprised what can be recovered.
even from a format!
that is if you have not overwritten the drive with a new windows install.

Originally posted by Aragorn:
Reformated is what I did - Its gone all of it!

Quickbeam I will Take your sugestion. Thanks.

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">

I keep several hardrives in all my computers, in removable bays that can be swapped from computer to computer, and just backup to the hardrives on the other computers on the network. Computer A backs up to spare hardrive on computer B, B backs up to spare on computer C, etc. It work out well. Also what Lurker said, keep a copy of mission critical stuff offsite as well. Portable hard drives work well for that, or CD's.

stingray, I think we're on the same wavelength.

It's hard to express my sympathy for a disastrous system crash such as a corrupted or dead hard drive.

This may sound nuts, but after my mac, pc, or whatever would software-crash or have a hardware failure whenever it was being heavily used, meaning when I needed it most, meaning near the end of almost every single semester when I had term projects and things due and couldn't afford to take the time to recover the drive that I got angry enough to dedicate a work machine set up this way:

0. NO GAMES on this machine!!!
1. Leave parity on for the RAM, even though it's slower.
2. SCSI RAID 5 (hardware-driven), even though it's slower and eats drive space.
3. Back up with Ghost to CD-R's.
4. UPS power/surge protection on every single wire including the LAN (don't want to lose CPF connectivity y'know ).

Oh yes, and mostly use RedHat (recently upped to version 8) with as few extraneous things loaded as possible, which just never crashes or freezes, unlike that other OS on the now-neglected partition.

It's now 1.5 years old (so it's a dinosaur, right?) and after its first few weeks of settling in it has NEVER had a problem even though it's on for at least 12 hrs/day every single day.

Admittedly, this is truly a machine for the paranoid, and there are still ways it could snag me up, but it's just so very nice not to have that nagging feeling that total failure lurks so very close by.

Binky, that sounds like a fairly bulletproof method. I leave parity on too. Every machine is UPS power/surge protected. Lately I've been having good luck with Tripp Lite Isotel's. I use Partition Magic alot, as opposed to Ghost, which I have also. I keep every hard drive partitioned with a system, data, utils, backup, and system backup partition. Whenever I load up a new OS and all the programs and drivers etc. I immediately make an exact copy of that OS partition in case the primary one fails or gets corrupted. One machine has 3 different OS's on separate partitions. The data partions get backed up on different hard drives as well as on a different partition on the drive they reside on. All the data backups are automatic via simple nightly straight copy batch files. Utils are spread around, and can be easily downloaded again from the net. Utils also includes copies of all the cab files and drivers for all the hardware, just to make things easy. I've been running Win 2000 Professional for a couple of years and have had good luck. My computers are left on all the time and rarely need rebooting or reformatting and reloading. Agreed, Red Hat is much more bulletproof, overall. And a raid hardware setup onboard is great, and will definitely be on the next round of upgrades for me. I'm still running P3's on ASUS boards with no failures so far. When they get too slow, I'll upgrade.

Originally posted by binky:

This may sound nuts, but after my mac, pc, or whatever would software-crash or have a hardware failure whenever it was being heavily used, meaning when I needed it most, meaning near the end of almost every single semester when I had term projects and things due and couldn't afford to take the time to recover the drive that I got angry enough to dedicate a work machine set up this way:

0. NO GAMES on this machine!!!
1. Leave parity on for the RAM, even though it's slower.
2. SCSI RAID 5 (hardware-driven), even though it's slower and eats drive space.
3. Back up with Ghost to CD-R's.
4. UPS power/surge protection on every single wire including the LAN (don't want to lose CPF connectivity y'know

).

[/QB]

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">That's not nuts. In any decent corporate setup it's SOP, with the addition of nightly rotated tape backups, and those rotated off site. Pretty much as you have it, too. On production systems, we ghost the OS partition before and after and software changes, and keep both copies. Oh, and add virus scanning software with an automatic update, a standalone firewall, and intrusion detection and you're all set.

We've had two different RAID-5 systems experience double drive failures within the last year. (This is a non-recoverable failure of RAID-5.) In one case, the drives failed *at the same time*. Still don't know why. In the other case, one drive failed before the hot spare came on line and finished replicating. In both cases we had to re-ghost or re-install, and restore from tape backup.

Last December we had a aystem fail and the primary backup tape from the night before would not read. It's a system I do 2 backups on each night, on different hardware. The second copy worked fine. Backups have, in my experience over the years with various systems, about a 95% chance of restoring, IF you verify each backup, maintain the equipment, and clean the drives regularly. This still give you a 1 in 20 chance of not getting your stuff back from the first tape. If you don't verify the backups (which some software doesn't do by default), you're looking at probably not being able to restore. CD-R's and ZIP's are more reliable than tapes, but you should still be doing a verify.