Please help me - Windows not loading

debitcardmayhem

KiKi wrote: »

Ew on the girlfriend!!!

I don't care about making it better, I'm happy to dump the HDD once I get the data off if I can't fix it.

But thank you for the message of hope - I do know what I'm looking for, as I know exactly what's on there, and even if I just get my work files off that's good enough for me for now.

A friend of mine is a programmer and v good with computers - although he doesn't do them in 'bits' - so I might do it at his place so he can follow the instructions and help me with the things I don't understand. I've got a back up of most stuff, so as long as I can get the recent stuff since November that would be amazing.

I'll review that link at the weekend and have a go.

KiKi

It will work I hope, put the disk in the caddy and take it to your friends, someone will be around at the weekend (and evenings @spud :cool:) The download is very small and it works under Windows (run as administrator) I would imagine Testdisk will work first time assuming it can find the backup bs failing that it use Photorec

spud17

@dcm
I really should write things down, especially if they work.

Once I was satisfied that I had as much data as I could hope for, I ran Testdisk, sticking with the defaults and the backup mbr, (!!!!!!, energy saving bulb in kitchen just went bang and the lights have tripped out, . :eek:).
I let Testdisk rewrite the partition table and everything was again visible to Windows.

@KiKi
Good luck, take your time over it.

Toxteth_OGrady

As mentioned earlier it might be worth booting off a live distro and having a looksee with Gparted. Might point to what's wrong and iirc gparted allows repair of the partition table. But I would do data recovery first in case PT repair goes horribly wrong.

TOG

KiKi

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

As mentioned earlier it might be worth booting off a live distro and having a looksee with Gparted. Might point to what's wrong and iirc gparted allows repair of the partition table. But I would do data recovery first in case PT repair goes horribly wrong.

TOG

Data recovery with the Testdisk thing?

Thank you for the info - unfortunately I have no idea what I'm looking for in terms of what's wrong; I have absolutely no knowledge of HDDs, partitions, MBRs, how things work - completely clueless. It's like reading another language!

As long as I can get my data, any HDD 'fix' is an absolute bonus!

Thank you for replying.
KiKi

debitcardmayhem

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

As mentioned earlier it might be worth booting off a live distro and having a looksee with Gparted. Might point to what's wrong and iirc gparted allows repair of the partition table. But I would do data recovery first in case PT repair goes horribly wrong.

TOG

Hi TOG, that's where I found the link to Testdisk, it's the data recovery part of Gparted, but it also runs under Windows too

spud17

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Hi TOG, that's where I found the link to Testdisk, it's the data recovery part of Gparted, but it also runs under Windows too

Well I've learned something else, I knew Gparted had a recovery bit, but had never investigated.

The link in dcm's post #40 is the one to use for step by step partition table recovery.