Good luck Malc! Hope you get it sorted Am sure with one of these expert people looking at it you will be ok!
I spent two weeks (work time) surveying our warehouse, just finished got back into the office booted PC and hard drive popped... They said I would have to go back out and do it again, I said that I would resign, they sent hard drive to one of these expert recovery firms who took the drive apart & recovered the file... Mind you it cost a few quid tho! Hope you manage to recover everything... Robo...
^^^whs Just remember to back up & then back up again in future. I back up all my important files to DVD on a regular basis, photos I back up to DVD & every so often make a new disc in case the original is damaged.
When this happens at work, our IT guru has a cable that connects the damaged hard drive to a piggyback PC, this powers up and also reads whats on the hard drive as you would a portable storage device & this seems quite effective!
Unless the hard drive has suffered a hardware failure 99% of the time the drive can be recovered. Where abouts in the country are you?
Ohhh noooo T least you still have your laptop so someone must be able to retrieve some or hopefully all of it for you!? I got mine robbed! lifetime of pics/videos... Years of uni work pooof just gone! I now have an external hard drive to back everything up on x and all pics fo on facebook or photobucket which is good... But really sorry about your book, so much time and effort... Fingers well and truly crossed you can get it back x
That's why I keep a lot of stuff on the cloud, emailed to myself, on DVDs, on usb's. Something I've learnt from years or working with computers........ BACK UP BACK UP BACK UP I've got the first half dozen chapters remember.
I really am gutted tbh, about a year ago bodyrock sent me a rough dradt of my witterings which prompted me to finally sit down and write my vw /life story, since then each morning after my shift i rushed home and wrote for a few hours -every single day, then after i had slept i spent a hour or so editing the previous mornings work - every day for the past year, it was almost ready to go to a publisher for refusal !
jeez buddy! hope you retrieve it. as most have said, there are people a lot cleverer than us out there that sort this sort of thing for kicks! keep the faith buddy!
as I so often say - back up and back up and back that up too ..... Malc - this wont help now .... but in future keep a copy on something like DropBox too .... Then if your PC dies - you have a copy online too. Backing up has to become a routine you do ...
Also, self publish. You get a better return. And make it an ebook, minimal cost. I did plenty of research back then.
Thanks all , it does look like i may have to start again , it isn't the end of the world it just feels like it right now ! The computer guy will be over some time next week to have a butchers but says it is costly and not guaranteed , he does think i may have damaged some of the files by installing the dodgy copy , i will start again when i get over the shock of losing it all if he gives me the thumbs down . Thank you all for the kind words . Malc
I've used photorec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec with a good level of success in the past, it doesn't just recover photos but all sorts of file types, what it basically does is scan the disk and look for file headers it understands then recovers them. I think it relies on the file being contiguous on the the disk, which is likely for word docs and the like. You'll stand more chance on the flash drive if youve already installed xp over the top of your PC hard disk. Good Luck
Poo! I hope the fella who's coming to look can sort it out malc, I too use Zeds method when retrieving info from a dead or dying HDD, it may be possible to go get an external drive with the same size (physical) and drive type (ide etc) as is in your pc swap them and do as Zed says. But anyway fingers crossed its still there.
