Sportsmanphil

I know enough about a computer to be dangerous.....and thats about it.

I got a problem im hoping someone here can answer.

Vista Home premium on a Dell Inspiron, about 1.5 years old.

No prior problems.

What happened, while looking at some Toyota videos on youtube, I get a warning that an error in the hard drive was found, 10 minutes later it just shut down.

Restarted in Safe mode automatically, I clicked to "repair start up issues", it found a problem and said it would download a fix, yet nothing happened. I could not get windows to start anymore.

I went through a few dozen repair options but nothing worked.

I ended up restarting a few days later in safe mode and restored the system to factory. As a part of this, it backed up all my data which took about 30 minutes. The backup file was too large to put on any outside source so i put it on the C drive.

Computer restarted and had windows for the first time in 3 days.

When I go to Start - Computer, I have my C drive and a new E drive called 'Recovery' The E drive is 14.6GB yet when you open it nothing shows. I have selected it to show hidden files but cannot find my back up data.

Two questions:

1, anyway to find that data on the E drive? As stated above, I have selected for it to show hidden files but still nothing shows.

2. If I back date my system to a date back in Februrary, will my stuff return?

I could care less about my virus, print drivers etc as they are easy to reload, the BIG BIG BIG problem is the years of family photos that are gone.

Any help will be appreciated.

Tofer

since you did a "restore to factory" it sounds like it might have erased your harddrive and reinstalled the OS. are you able to take the hard drive out and slave it to another working computer? you can run a program called Get Data Back and see if your able to restore anything.

Magnusian

"Recovery" partition is not your backed up data, it is the partition that Windows uses to restore your computer to factory (assuming you aren't using restore points, please dear god never use restore points, turn that crap off and delete all the points), when you bought your laptop in the manual (RTFM) it would have told you to create your recovery DVDs from this partition. These DVDs are the equivalent to the install media that would have come with laptops made before people became cheap. You can only make the DVDs from within Windows. Of course, the Recovery partition should not be showing up as empty in Windows, it shouldn't show up in the first place (except under computer management) and the fact it shows up and is empty is worrying. When doing a recovery you have two options, a repair install or to return the system to the factory default state, repair is what you should have done. The reality is your primary HDD is probably about to become a paperweight (or experienced an intermittent error that will never come up again) and you should have replaced it and attempted to back your primary up onto it after installing Windows with the Recovery media on the new disk.

As for where your data is, sorry dude, it's gone, you nuked it when you did the restore because you backed up to C:\. The only options for getting your photos back are prohibitively expensive and you won't get all (or likely even most) of them back and the ones you do will be partially corrupted.

Sportsmanphil

Well that sucks............


So if I restore my system to an early known working date, say February 10th, nothing will return?

IF the Recovery partition has 14 gigs of used space, wouldnt that hold my photos somewhere?

iamsuperbleeder

Look in the C:\ drive for a "Windows2" or "Users2" folder, or something similar. Typically, if you select the option to save your files it will usually dump them in a folder like that and you can find them. They wont be on that E:\ drive; as said, that's the recover drive. Doesn't contain any of YOUR files, just the files needed to do the system restore that you did. They wont always be visible. They weren't on an Acer laptop that I had years ago; could see the drive and get into it, but nothing showed up in it.

But I'll agree with Mag. Chances are the hard drive is shot and will need to be replaced.

Do yourself a favor though and when you put a new hard drive in it, put Windows 7 on it instead of Vista... Vista is nothing but problems

Magnusian

That would make sense, bleeder, because I was trying to figure out why on earth it would let you back up to the drive it's about to nuke; it sounds like something that Windows would complain about at the very least!

Also, upgrading to Win7 isn't entirely necessary, if you've been problem-free with Vista (Vista was always problem-free for me) stick with it but if you have the hankerin' to upgrade just get an upgrade copy of 7, install Vista (use the key on the sticker on your laptop), run the upgrade, save $100.

Tofer

the hardware should be fine.. but the OS is the issue.. i would try to see if you can run GetDataBack and try to recover the data

Sportsmanphil

All is well with the harddrive. No noises, and no more issues. I will guess there was a bum file preventing startup.

^^ where can I find this said "getdataback" jazz,,,, sounds exactly like something I could use right now.

guitarplayer360

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

kind of costly, and not a for sure recovery of your photos. Most likely your drive will need to be scanned for fragments of your old pictures. Your pictures are still on your drive, and most likely will never actually be erased...just compressed into unreadable data. These programs attempt to unfragment that data. Usually it takes some sort of professional to do this work though.

If I were you, I would wipe and get windows 7 or a linux distro. For the 1 month that I had Vista, I absolutely hated it.

good luck.

Tofer

Search for hierens boot cd... It has a couple different ones.