RonEnix

For the past week I’ve been in a constant state of panic and desparation recovering my work from my corrupted hard drive. First of all I would like to explained what happend.

It was simply out of the blue. First I thought it was one of the programs causing it to all freeze, which I’ve never experienced for a while. Also note that I’ve had my PC running for a long time, could be the cause but I don’t know. After a reset I received the horrific disk drive not found error. After restarting again, I was able to, somehow, get past that and go into the safe mode and try a system restore. During that time system restore gave me a BSOD (the blue screen people don’t like to see).

Next I decided to try if I can do a windows restoration process and restore the windows files. After doing so the recovery console I ran showed that I had no windows installation on my hard drive. The partition that I had windows in was read as unknown, and I wasn’t able to restore the partition table with FIXBOOT command in the console. At this point I was in utter panic mode.

As a desparate attempt I stripped the drive from my external hard drive and connected it to my pc, reformat and installed windows on it. With that done I tried a CHDSK (check disk) on the broken hard drive, where I received a “Corrupted Master File Table”. I’ve never come across this message before but I sounded deadly, and after looking it up on the net I was pretty much gonna freak out. If you google the error message, what I means is that your done for and you’ll have to last restort solution is to reinstall everything, i.e. partitioning etc.

I tried what the guy did here: http://www.ctunion.com/node/38 but I wasn’t as succesful has he is. I used so many partition recovery tools and MBR recovery tools but with no success either. I didn’t know what else to do from here so I decided if I can try and restore the files from my NTFS hard drive if I can. I found this life saver tool: http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm which scanned the NTFS hard drive and showed all the files on it whether its corrupted or not. I got the demo version and went and copied all the important files from my hard drive. Took me an hour or two.

Okay so it was the first sign of relief, but it ain’t over yet. After recovering the files I checked SOME of them out. That leads to some consequences on my behalf. I went and reformated the partition where my windows was and reinstalled everything. Took more than 2 hours to do this. After getting everything up I tried to run my AGT work especially and I had missing files errors. I checked these files as they where unreadable. I panicked once more and checked all the files I restored. I found that almost 3/4 of them were corrupted. I was swearing like hell at this point as I’ve wasted all that time.

So I have at the moment a none running version of my AGT and importantly my Level 3 work. I have some of the files in its complete but I would have to re-coded some of the other corrupted source and header codes. I e-mailed my supervisor about this to check if he has a copy of my Level 3 work. As for AGT I do have a copy on SVN but I’ve made so much changes from the last update. So now I’m having to code up alot of my AGT work and hoping if my supervisor has a copy of my level 3 work.

I tried again today and re-scanned the NTFS drive after the partition since I know windows formatting doesnt literally clear everything on the drive. I found these files and checked them out again, and yes they were corrupted. So I can’t do anything about it.

For me it seemed like all hell broke loose during this easter holiday and it wasn’t what I wanted to spend the rest on. I’ve decided to purchase a new internal HDD just in case and store all my work on and have the OS on a different hard drive. So there’ll be no updates on AGT for a while so I can sort things out.