Toshiba Laptop - Disk Read Error

closed

c or d, however if it works, you need somewhere to copy them, ie a usb hard disk or flash drive

-F*Dragonfly-

does it matter if I do c or d? should I do c?

i have a USB stick with 955MB space

would this be enough?

Or I do have another usb stick with 7.45GB space but would need to clear that first if the top one wasn't enough.

closed

depends how much data you need to get off it.

try both c and d

-F*Dragonfly-

oh on the c drive there is more than any of my usb sticks. I do have a external hard drive if it would do it to that without messing that up? If it would put it in a neat little file on there safely? I don't want to mess up my external hard drive, I'd die on the spot.

i clicked the c drive one and have to pick from:

sources
System Volume Information
boot.sdi

?


on the d drive option I have:

Recycle bin
HDD Recovery
System Volume Information
~MSSETUP.T
R10233EN.tag



?


I have no clue which contains my data I want to recover? sorry for asking so much.

closed

if you'd die on the spot, because you have data on there that you don't want to lose, and have it nowhere else, it's a dangerous game, as you've found out, disks can fail at any time - always keep at least two copies on different media.

it's possible neither of those partitions contain your data, and the one that does is corrupt - can you see how big they are?

-F*Dragonfly-

I know and after this is sorted I'm doing six backups of everything, it's making me a nervous wreck.

I can't see the sizes unless I copy something to the clipboard but don't know what to pick.

closed

where you go from here depends on if you have anything important you need to recover from the laptop, and if so how much (£100's) you are willing to pay to get it back

the gap in the middle of the numbers, and the lack of files

c:\ (NTFS, 0 on disk 0) (WinRE)
\ (NTFS, 2 on Disk 0) (Data)


suggests there is a missing partition, probably where your data is/was, and the ones working are your recovery/data partitions

if there's nothing important on your laptop, you may as well use the pcw warranty that you've paid for.

-F*Dragonfly-

I would have liked the data off the laptop but not enough to pay £100s that we don't have no.

should i try anything in the d:\ file or is it not worth it?

closed

you could browse the directories to see if theres any data, but it looks like a recovery/data partition, not windows.

A clutch at straws possibility - there are some fix boot problems options on the paragon disk, you could try them, but don't get your hopes up.

if you have the windows cd, you could boot from it, and try chkdsk on the c: drive, probably won't work

after that, you could try a factory restore, but again, it may fail if the disk has a physical error


in the future..

the best place for the master copy of your data is on the internal hard disk of a laptop/desktop and copied to other laptops/desktops

then

important files should be backed up to many places. (that includes external hard disks, flash drives, dvd's)
windows recovery discs should be created for each machine
and I would recommend using macrium reflect free to create disk image backups of every machine you own, and create the macrium recovery cd - It is important you don't use the clone backup option, as that will overwrite the contents of the external drive, it's the disk image option you need. If there is sufficient space on the external hard disk, you can create many different backups at different times, and of different machines using this method

if you'd had a macrium backup of this faulty machine beforehand, you could plug in a new £40 drive, boot from the macrium cd, and recover a fully working machine and data and programs/settings in an hour or less.

in the meantime copy (don't move) anything important from the external drive to your other machine if you have space.

-F*Dragonfly-

thank you I won't try the data recovery thing anymore. i will get to making recovery disc for my other laptop as soon as my headache goes.

on the paragon thing there's a boot corrector option, should i give that a go and if nothing then I'll go away, leave you alone and go bother pc world?

the options are:

Search for windows installations to correct
correct the master boot record (MBR)
correct the partition boot record
correct boot parameters (boot.ini, BCD)
modify partition parameters

?