Please help me, In a right state!

tronator

indierocker85 wrote: »

It seems the main file I need is either "corrupt" or in "poor condition". I am devastated!

Did you read post 15 and 16? Maybe recovery software is not required at all and the files are just in a different location.

securityguy

Knarf44 wrote: »

I don't think it's a case of not wanting to spend £50 but more a case of ignorance and a complete lack of interest by people in educating themselves, perhaps through laziness or perhaps through convincing themselves it's far too technical to even try to understand.

Yes, that's very true. They also underestimate the chances of a bad thing happening and underestimate the value of their data and the inconvenience of losing it.

I know people whose children have lost near-completed coursework, or who have lost their business records, or who have lost photographs that can never be replaced, to hard drive failure and/or corruption. In some cases, it's happened more than once. After a while it becomes hard to be sympathetic, because these are not stupid people, nor people who have no contact with technology.

indierocker85

I_have_spoken wrote: »

How much do you want to avoid going bust?

IMHO stop tinkering with the drive using freeware and courier it to an experienced data recovery specialist and expect to pay £750 to £1,000. YOur accountant can advise on writing the cost off against tax.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4942032

Quite simply, I can't afford it!

indierocker85

securityguy wrote: »

"all my financial accounts on there for my business, countless other bits of work, as well as many GB of photos, including my wedding, honeymoon, family, holidays, etc."

You remember when people told you backups were important, and you laughed and ignored them?

The problem is, if you talk about backups before the disaster, people don't listen, and after the disaster, you're accused of rubbing people's noses in it. But seriously: a backup drive would have cost you fifty quid. So presumably, you valued the data at less than fifty quid.

You're rather unkind aren't you! I suspect you've never once made a mistake in your life. Must feel great sat on the moral high ground making me feel even worse about the situation!

indierocker85

Backbiter wrote: »

The files should be there, but they are obviously hidden in some part of the harddrive.
It appears that the OP has not yet used the free version of RECUVA to perform a deep scan.
It appears he has not yet tried to scan his computer using the software I suggested, Glary Undelete, which found many gigabytes of data on my PC after a weird error daleted the contents of the my documents folder.

OP - try not to panic, just try these two suggestions, and report back.

Just because you found an unrecoverable version of one Excel file doesn't mean everything is lost. It could just be an old temporary version of the file that was no use to you anyway, not the one you are looking to restore.

Thank you for being a bit more understanding than some!

NiftyDigits

indierocker85 wrote: »

Thank you for being a bit more understanding than some!

Why are you wasting your time with emotional responses, whilst not replying to even a single technical question?

indierocker85

closed wrote: »

explain exactly what you did, if you did a repair rather than a reinstall, something like http://www.voidtools.com/ might find the data

no point paying for recovery software, recuva (may need to run deepscan) does the same thing and is free. If you've overwritten the same portion of disk where the data was, it's gone forever. The more you use it, the less likely it is you'll get any data back


in future, backup to portable hard disk using macrium reflect free and burn your data to dvd, then you won't lose anything and have 3 copies should one fail . Moving data to an external drive as many people do carries a similar risk to having no backup.

I switched the laptop on last Thursday, it didn't boot into windows, it was simply in a boot loop.

I tried Safe Mode, Safe mode with networking, safe mode with command prompt (to run chkdsk), none of which loaded at all. I got hold of a desktop computer, hooked the laptop hard drive into it via a caddy. The drive showed 0bytes capacity, and nothing was viewable on the drive via the desktop, I just got nothing but errors. I couldn't run chkdsk on it via the desktop, as this just froze everytime.

I put the hard drive back in the laptop, with a vista disk, and did what I thought was a repair installation. Now, as I understand it, ordinarily it should leave all files in tact, in windows.old. I DEFINATELY did not format any partitions, however when the install finished, everything had gone, and none of my files coule be found anywhere.

There were around 70gb of files, and the free space and used space after the install, confirmed that the files were definately not on the drive.

indierocker85

closed wrote: »

explain exactly what you did, if you did a repair rather than a reinstall, something like http://www.voidtools.com/ might find the data

no point paying for recovery software, recuva (may need to run deepscan) does the same thing and is free. If you've overwritten the same portion of disk where the data was, it's gone forever. The more you use it, the less likely it is you'll get any data back


in future, backup to portable hard disk using macrium reflect free and burn your data to dvd, then you won't lose anything and have 3 copies should one fail . Moving data to an external drive as many people do carries a similar risk to having no backup.

I tried Void tools, it only found a few files, and not the ones I needed it to.

indierocker85

imho wrote: »

Did you see the link Closed put on here post number 6.

I just replied to it, thanks

indierocker85

NiftyDigits wrote: »

I was unaware that Recuva had any such limitation.

What size the install of Vista on your C: drive? How much space has been utilised?

You can try TestDisk

To whence will you save the 'recovered' data?

I will give this one a try now.

I bought a new drive for the laptop, and I shall recover it to there, and I intend on backing it all up to dvds and a seperate external hard drive too.