DESPERATE FOR HELP!

Klinger

The Chicago CTA guy
My computer finally ate it. I lost all my data, every game, I lost flight simulator and all its addons (inculding hard to replace payware), I lost trainz, every asset I have ever downloaded, inculding payware and personal unreleased assets

I need everyone who has ever been sent assets by me to PM me, I need all those assets back. Specifically, my scrap parts used in Timber Ridge, my 30" chama roundhouse (called roundhouse 30inch or something).

I also need the the old california zephyr, since I don't have it saved anywhere that survived.

How much are FCT's these days? I have a lot of downloading to do.

regreatably, I have also lost all the files for my CTA cars. I still have the 2400 and 2200 series cars .3ds files, but I have completly lost the 3200 series. I do have the 3200 series in Trainz, without passengers but with directional lighting.

Please, if you have any of my content, please please send it to me.
 
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Did your hard drive fry? If not you may be able to put it in a different confuser and get it back. If not, when the girlfriends hard drive died, the place she took her laptop to said they may be able to save her data. She didn't need it because she had back ups. Just maybe a hope or two. I always have everything I do backed up on another drive AND DVD's.

Sorry to hear about your troubles and good luck.

Dave......
 
With RW-DVD's...You can prevent all of this...you can rewite them unlimited amounts of times. You can re-update all your backups on a hard RW-DVD. All your personal photos, data, and other stuff can be saved to a bunch of hard RW-DVD disks. All your important stuff should be saved as a CDP on the RW-DVD.

Sorry to hear of anyone losing everything due to a PC catastropic failure...but back up's are the main important thing about PC's. Be prepared !
 
Multiple hard drives aren't expensive and if you copy your data files onto the second occasionally it's fairly simple to do backups and recover data.

I do the burn DVD thing but realistically finding the most up to date DVD for the recovery isn't easy with the number I have.

Generally speaking when your PC fails its just a few sectors on the drive. Try buying a new drive and dropping the operating system on that then have a look at the old drive as a second drive and you may be able to recover a fair number of fires.

Cheerio John
 
Two other possibilities if you are really desperate and don't want to/can't shell out big bucks.

1. Put the drive in a heavy duty plastic sack and freeze it overnight then reinstall it before it warms up too much.

2. ONLY FOR THE VERY DESPERATE. Open the case and spin the drive up by hand. Generally it will run for awhile maybe long enough to get at least some of your files off, but this is a one time only trick and doesn't always work, but it has saved my bacon on two different occasions.

These only work if the problem is mechanical and not electronic.
 
With RW-DVD's...You can prevent all of this...you can rewite them unlimited amounts of times.

Just a warning based upon personal experience: while one can re-use DVD RW's, often multiple times, I learned from personal experience that "multiple" does not necessarily mean "unlimited". In my esperience, the more times re-writable disk, whether of the CD or DVD flavor, has been re-written, the more susceptible it is to failure. For what it's worth, my back-up procedures involve three steps:

1) Backup to an external network drive;

2) duplicate back-ups to optical media, one permanent (on a non-re-writable media), and the other temporary (on a rewritable media).

Periodically, I examine my permanent archive, and if I suspect an issue with one, I'll burn a duplicate on the spot, from new media.

Blank disks are cheap.

ns
 
Good information...I was under the impression that a RW-DVD could be completely erased a million billion trillion times...and then rewritten a million billion trillion times...as long as it is not scratched.

But I quess any disc is being scribed by a laser, or some other highly sophistimacated doowhackey, and eventualy wears out ?
 
Two other possibilities if you are really desperate and don't want to/can't shell out big bucks.

1. Put the drive in a heavy duty plastic sack and freeze it overnight then reinstall it before it warms up too much.

2. ONLY FOR THE VERY DESPERATE. Open the case and spin the drive up by hand. Generally it will run for awhile maybe long enough to get at least some of your files off, but this is a one time only trick and doesn't always work, but it has saved my bacon on two different occasions.

These only work if the problem is mechanical and not electronic.

Both methods have worked here ;) on other people's PC, I hasten to add, I have a sideline repairing them.

In the case of an electronic failure, going to the local PC market, if you have one and buying a cheap identical model second hand drive and using the board off it to get the dead drive working, or borrow one off an identical drive if you have one but back it up first! If it's a chip overheating (painfull when touching it) on the circuit board the freezer method does work as well or you can use a can of freezer spray or as I did once clamp a large heatsink onto the offending chip.

Another method is to boot up the PC with a live Linux CD, sometimes Linux will read a supposedly dead drive that isn't even showing in the Bios, often it will read a windoze drive that won't boot or has a trashed unrepairable boot sector.
 
Good information...I was under the impression that a RW-DVD could be completely erased a million billion trillion times...and then rewritten a million billion trillion times...as long as it is not scratched.

But I quess any disc is being scribed by a laser, or some other highly sophistimacated doowhackey, and eventualy wears out ?

No you are changing the colour of something by shining a light at it, change it enough times and it goes unstable. Also if it gets too warm the dye bit you are aiming the laser at can evaporate or rather sublimate, means the same sort of thing but solid to vapour directly.

Cheerio John
 
I'm going to try and invest in an external hard drive. What happened is while sorting out a damaged hard drive, I had to reformat the drive. At some point I mistakenly selected my secondary drive (called C: drive in Windows because of an old windows install on that drive. The difference between my two drives, one is a 110 GB drive, and my secondary drive is 232 GB.

I accidently formated the 232 GB drive, and lost all my data. I was able to repair the bad sectors on the 110 GB drive, and reformat and install windows.

Since I never intended to format the secondary drive, I never thought to back up its data else where. So all my backups were on that drive, and lost during the accidental format.

some of the most important backups (several models, some of my music) is saved on my school laptop, so it has not been lost, but other things, inculding all my payware backups have been lost.

I'm still just reinstalling programs, that alone has been going on for 3 days, Ill have to get an FCT for Trainz, otherwise its going to take 3 or 4 months to get all the downloads I had before.
 
Hi,
Sorry to hear about your loss Klinger.

In future if you have a data loss the important thing to do is immediately switch off the computer and do not do any thing with it until you have investigated all the options available to you.
In your accident I have no idea wether you could have salvaged your data with out paying a small fortune to a specialist data recovery firm.

However in many cases the data is still on the disc but just the directory entry has been altered. There are recovery programs available but only work properly if no new files have been written to the disc.
Even if you don't save files to the disc, operating systems like windows can 'play' with the disc doing their house keeping!:confused:

Lindsay
 
I'm going to try and invest in an external hard drive. What happened is while sorting out a damaged hard drive, I had to reformat the drive. At some point I mistakenly selected my secondary drive (called C: drive in Windows because of an old windows install on that drive. The difference between my two drives, one is a 110 GB drive, and my secondary drive is 232 GB.

I accidently formated the 232 GB drive, and lost all my data. I was able to repair the bad sectors on the 110 GB drive, and reformat and install windows.

If you haven't done so already, DON'T DO ANYTHING WITH YOUR SECONDARY DRIVE, EXCEPT REMOVE IT FROM THE MACHINE (or at least disconnect it)!!! If all you did is reformat, there are commercial services which can recover your data, though I've never been able to use them (I'm never lucky enough to have simply reformatted; I generally get hit with a mechanical failure). If you use as a "recovery of formatted disk" as a search parameter in your favoite engine, the results will include listings of commercial services, and "how-to" sites which provide information on how to do it yourself, if you have the time and resources to do it.


ns
 
Wait a minute.....

Klinger, if you've only formatted the drive and nothing else, please don't panic.

Do as mjolnir suggests, but don't bother going to a commercial place to recover the data - just yet!

There are several free programs out there that can recover data from a formatted drive. Believe me, I've done it hundreds of times.

Rather than writing a whole lot of stuff for nothing, PM me and I'll guide you through it.

Re using CD's or DVD's as backups. I did this and every CD/DVD is now useless. They don't like tropical or moist climates, nor do they stand up too well to the atmosphere. I could write a book on this, but it seems that the best CD's for movies etc are the minus (-) version and the best for backups are the more robust (+) version. I backed up everything on DVD and sent it to a friend in a drier climate. Even those discs are now failing.

Re getting a card from another HD. I had a massive crash, but remembered that I'd purchased two 120 gig hard disks from a reputable supplier on the same day. I tracked down the customer I'd sold the other Western Digital disk to, and sure enough it was the next serial number. When I replaced the board, all hell broke loose. I then looked a bit deeper and found that one mother board was made in Singapore and the other in Malaysia. Even though they were one digit different in a 15 digit serial number, both mother boards were totally incompatible.
 
Sadly I have already started to reinstall programs, inculding programs on my Secondary drive. Is there still time, or is there no hope now?
 
The old saying "He who hesitates is lost" is not always true with computers. You have probably done insufferable damage by no, but who knows?

The sad fact is this: Formatting a hard disk does NOT destroy data! it's as simple as that. What does destroy data is overwriting the old stuff, especially the File allocation tables. That can happen in a flash.

I'd say you're probably too late. Had you just waited 24 hours for the entire world to see your post, things may have been a lot different. By now I guess you've pressed on even further, so you may as well carry on.

However, if you haven't gone too far, download a very free program called Recuva and install it on a hard disk or partition that doesn't contain your lost data. Recover is another great product from the makers of CCleaner. Do the deepest scan you can and see how you go. It can be very taxing and unpleasant work, but well worth it in the end.

Here's a link to the Recuvr technical page where it tells you what it can and can't do.



I'm currently using it to recover old files off hard disks that were reformated and reused to some extent five years ago. I'm having moderate success.
 
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Sadly I have already started to reinstall programs, inculding programs on my Secondary drive. Is there still time, or is there no hope now?

Depends upon how much one wishes, is willing, or is able to pay. The fact is last time I had definitive information, I was told that it was possible to recover data that had been overwritten (and formatted in the machine is basically a special form of overwriting) up to seven times. The entity from which I got this information specialized in forensic and mission critical recovery of media, and charged very high prices, which doubtless are so out of date by this point that I won't recite them. Let's just say I suspect there are (US) counties whose entire budget is smaller than the bill.

Still, it's not impossible.

ns
 
mjolnir, I've heard all this stuff before but I still have my doubts. I know that safe erasure requires up to seven overwrites, but I do question if someone can actually remove the top layer of magnetically recorded digital data to expose what was once underneath. In the case of analogue tape, recording over old stuff can create noise and to some degree this noise can be filtered to give a hint of what may have been there before, but that's analogue. Digital is a series of ones and zeros and if you copy a "one" over a "zero" it becomes a "one"

The way they get you is more in the way things are recorded and erased. If you erase an item (empty the recycle bin), it's actually still on the disk. Only the file allocation table is tagged for overwriting. Without getting too complicated, if I were to delete a 2,000 word essay, then the computer overwrote it with a 200 word one, the remaining 1,800 words could stay on my computer for years. That could be very good evidence in a court of law.

CCleaner is one of many free programs around that will actually erase those remaining 1,800 words, but how many of us go to those extremes? Fortunately for the cops, hardly anyone. I can recover those 1800 words myself, but I can't replace the stuff that's missing. It gets worse with photos and gMax files because of the way they're saved. If a bit is missing, it takes someone much smarter than I to get the remaining chunk to work. The cops are smart enough and that's how they nail terrorists and paedophiles.
 
I'd have had my doubts, too, except that I make my living as a courier, dealing in "on-call" delivery and pick-up of small packages. I got my information based upon two deliveries where I was paid to spend a good deal of time at the airport so I could take the parcels to a facility "on arrival". Each shipment was a hard drive. One was a "mission critical" hard drive, containing a significant part of the company's financial data, which had failed; the drive was to be opened in a clean room, and each platter was going to be specifically read on special equipment, and as much of the information rebuilt as possible. I don't remember the size of the drive, though this was long enough ago that it might have been a few hundred MB; the client was paying $75,000 for data recovery. The other drive was for shipped by a law enforcement agency, and the work was forensive. I don't know the size of the drive, but I was told that the fee charged would be twice that of the data recovery. Now I didn't see the bills, but I know the fellow who signed for the package was in "clean room" gear.

ns
 
I'm going back 20 years to a clean room in Australia. In those days the best they could do was fit the platters to a new drive. That cost several grand with no guarantees. Maybe, just maybe the new data is offset from the old stuff, thus the edges of a zero may poke out under the overprinted zero or one if you get my drift. If the data is offset on a different side on the next run, there could be two lots of data protruding under the new stuff. There's no guarantee that a new zero will land directly on top of the zero it's replacing so that may just work. I think I'll leave it up to them.
 
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