Hi, I'd like some advice on a laptop problem.
Basically my machine wouldn't boot up today and displayed a message "missing windows/system file" or something similar like. So I inserted the recovery disk and it started to load windows up again. It started reloading something but then asked me to inster the XP service pack disk which I doidn't have. So I just reverted into MS DOS mode. I had a little look around in the drives and now I can't find any of my files as I may have accidentally reinstalled windows and its formatted my hard drive. What makes it worse is that I don't have any backups.
I can see the old libraries but none of the files, most importantly my JPG's and music (to a lesser extent). Its only about 4GB or so of data, not much by todays standards.
Is there any way I can recover the data? I have all my photos from the past 10 years so you can imagine how devastated I feel.
I am planning on taking it in to a repair centre but I was wondering if anyone can just tell me plain straight the likelihood I will get back my old files. AS I said, I COULD NOT find a thing when it booted in MS DOS. I still can't get it to complate the windows installation. Is it possible to recover data after formatting?
Would appreciate any advice…apologies for sounding a complete dummy about it.
Your plan of taking the machine to a repair center makes sense.
Be aware that DATA Recovery "can" be a very expensive proposition.
On the otherhand, There are a variety of free and paid Software Data Recovery tools.
There are a couple of factors that argue in favor of you doing the work for yourself.
1. Not a very large amount of Data to recover
2. Probably not a very complex Folder/File structure to deal with.
There are a couple of factors that argue against you doing the work yourself.
1. It's a laptop.
2. It's a laptop.
3. Data Recovery should never be done using the same hard drive for the recovery application, where the Data is actually located. (doing so can "overwrite" some of your valuable data, making the recovery process even harder.
4. You would need a second machine with a separate hard drive or an external hard drive with a "bootable" recovery application (like BartPE for instance)
5. Laptop Hard Drives are a different physical size from Desktop Hard Drives, so to install your Laptop Hard Drive into a second computer, you would need and IDE adapter cord.
6. From your post (no offense meant) your level of computer knowledge/skill may not be up to the task.
7. The major obstacles are pretty much summed up in #1 and #2 above.
Comments:
1. If you decide you want to do the work yourself, and have a second machine or external Hard Drive and a bootable CD environment, I'm pretty sure that folks here could help with some of the steps. I'd sure offer my assistance. But we would suffer the handicap of not being able to "see" the work in progress, so might not notice details if you got into trouble.
2. In response to your question: You have a "very high" likelihood of recovering "all" of your documents, media, pictures, etc.
3. DO NOT be using this machine for other tasks or for further attempts to re-boot etc. because every time the machine "writes" to the Hard Drive, you risk "over-writing" and reduce you chances of retrieving your valuable files.
Best Regards.
Thanks for the tip/link pacman!
Turns out that Bob Rankin has been a Computer Science professor at local colleges in my hometown for many years. I actually was acquainted with him, maybe 20 years ago.
I'm going to subscribe to his News Letter and maybe pick up on old times, though I doubt that he would remember me.
Thanks again.
Doug
