I have, like you had my more than fair share of crashing hard drives and even what I thought was a "no way" situation. Let's face it, I can't stand when my hard drive goes on the fritz. Who has time to deal with it? Not that I do, but I have to, and I make a few dollars fixing others. For many of us, it is an easy undertaking. Seriously, you load some software and whallah, suddenly your files reappear. Getting around that problem is simply to have a backup. However, just like a "mechanics car is the least kept," so do some of us not really make backups. In my case, I don't because I keep my system squeaky clean.

I only once lost data because I used a dialer by accident, and ended up with a virus and a big phone bill. That hurt.

So what happened recently. Backing up two years ago, my friends Presario which was probably 5 years old as it had Windows 2k or something on it, had a major hard drive failure. It was a 256 Meg memory and 1 GHz unit. I don't remember it all. It had the crappy hard drive that came with it, and I don't remember which, but it was shaped funny.

Anywho... I got the data back with the freebee software out there, and put in a new 30Gig Maxtor. Not the top hard drive, but she hardly pushed the unit that much. For two years it was fine until helping a friend she let stay there for a while, was using the computer. He ran it too hard, and put a bunch of junk on it. So what right? Wrong. A month later after his abuse, it failed. He hooked it to another computer and said it was toast. Long story, my friend was upset, and he was a little pain in the ass who should have bought some software and fixed it.

This guy is all talk, so she comes back to me. It took me less time than normal to fix. Ultimately, no Demo or Freebee software would work, as it said the MBR was toast. I ended up finding a great MBR package that scanned the drive and told me exactly what to do for my situation. I ended up zeroing out the MBR, and resetting it. That was great, but now I had hard drive with a Windows system that could not be found. The partition was all jacked up. The FAT was already chewed.. Get it?

So I picked up another nifty piece of software that did not recover the files as there were too many errors. However, it did detect the Partition and allowed me to give it a Drive Letter. Without this, I could never get to the files. In fact, I could not partition the space because then I would likely lose the data. Some may argue that, but I found nothing saying, and my experience says, repartition = no more data. Well, it may still be there, but I am not taking a risk on some elses life! Yes, her life was on that computer.

Once I got the drive letter assigned, I then rebooted. XP took over and recognized it now. It then proceeded to do a CHKDSK on it, and fixed all the errors it could, deleted orphan files, and saved the day. So I got the data back, even thought the OS, XP, was destroyed. Life goes on.

Read below for the software i used.

• Bootmaster Partition Recovery: http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz/index.html
  • I bought this as it was a DOS interface and I really only wanted it for the MBR repair.
• Active@ Partition Recovery for Windows: http://www.partition-recovery.com
  • I bought this because it had a windows interface and allowed me to assign a drive letter and see that the folders and files were there.
• I used this file, mbrdisk.zip from this site. It was not able to help me, but it may help YOU. It is a boot up disk that is for Linux and Win98, but would not work on XP. So I rewrote part of it so it would work on XP. Maybe it will help you.
• I also like this registry viewer. It is free, :o), but also it works in DOS and you can export only what you want to. You don't have to export everything. It is not command line. Make sure you use ALT-D to change to the directory where the .DAT file is, and then you use ENTER and - or + to move throughout the keys etc. Here is the file link: Registry Viewer 4.2. The page is in Russian, so here is the link in English to the page itself: Registry Viewer 4.2 Page.