PC help needed (Page 1 of 2)

contact Doug Smith and his brother Devon and ask Jerome all of them are PC guys good luck Phill

thanks russ.

hi doug,  i managed to get it going in safe mode, and ran system restore several times, then when i got to the end of my tether, i put in the windows disk and let it run....when it finished there was a blank canvass, just the basic windows stuff. i've had to down load the programs i already had on there, but as i said my songs, poems and stories have gone. i did download a program from c-net (cant remember what it was called) but it only found 2 windows programs. i'm hoping someone knows of a better program they can recommend?

i had avast running at the time, so i dont understand how it got in, piggy back maybe?

phill

Doug, what about taking that drive out and looking at it externally while not booting from it?  Would he see anything different in his file system?  Phill, any chance that you backed up your data to a different partition on the drive?  Sometimes that is an option, if your drive is big enough (although not a good choice, because the entire hard drive could fail).  When I say, a different partition, I mean look for a D or E drive... generally windows is installed on C.  If you have another drive that's not your usb's or dvd drive, that could POSSIBLY have a backup of files on it. 

I do have to warn you Phill... I am grasping at strings here.  I think Doug is likely on the money and the reinstall wiped your files.  I know how important they are to you, and trying to think of anything I possibly can.  In the future... you could have likely gotten the files off the drive by connecting it externally... saving them elsewhere... then doing the full install.  An extra computer would have been necessary for that (and an external hard drive bay).  I know telling you this now does you no good... but it's good to know if it happens again for some unknown reason and you haven't had a chance to back up yet.

I am sorry!  I hope a miracle happens for you!

Amy, That's a good thought and would have been an option if Phill had not reinstalled windows.  There is a slim chance that putting Windows back on the drive did not do a full format, and only erased the directory (quick format). Then the files would still be on the drive, but the locations would be lost and some data could theoretically be recovered forensically.  That however is time consuming and frightfully expensive... you send off the drive and it is dismantled down to the "spinning rust" and examined bit by bit.

The other scenario I was expecting was that the drive would not boot.  In which case you could pull it out and dock it. boot the system from an external drive and OS, read the directory and extract the files you wanted to save to other media and move it back afterwards.  Even a failing drive can usually be persuaded to give things back with patience in this manner.

Phill, as for your portable drive... don't format that puppy yet!  Like Amy suggested, most of your stuff MAY still be on there in one of the older backups.  search it for the most recent backup you have and browse through that.  Depending on it's age, the bulk of your data may be resident and that stuff you can surely get back!

Good Luck;
Doug

thanks again for the advice, hi kap me too, i muddle through pressing everything until it either works or tells me to walk away in jerking motions! (hope that's not too specific, but i've been frustrated by this thing for hours) i've finally found the drivers for the wireless router, after downloading god knows how many "free" fixes. why do they say it's free when they want to charge X amount to fix stuff. they should put the cost at the start not when you've downloaded and run through everything. enough of the rant.

as advised, i shall hook the external drive to an old XP laptop and see if there's anything there.

thanks phill

I hope somehow it will all work out for you Phill. I do feel your pain. Been there done that.

hi nela, it wouldn't work with the misses, she follows the plastic bill like a hawk. anyway, got the laptop un-crashed, and went through my X-HD and deleted everything but what songs, stories and music that were left on it. it looks like it hasn't been backing up those files for quite a while as everything was a few years old, none of the new stuff! i've got hard copies of all my songs, but the stories are all gone. ah well, we tried.

thanks again doug and all that tried to help, it's much appreciated.

phill

If you do buy a reconditioned unit, buy it from a store... not some yahoo selling them from their garage.  Personal experience. 

thanks for the advice, but i find buying new with a guarantee is usually the best way to go, i've found some 1 and 2 TB HD's for less than 100 pounds, that looks good to me, i quite fancy a samsung, i'm still looking and comparing, i'm a little afraid to hook up the old one in case it kills my PC again. it's a packard bell and i've tried getting on their site but end up running round like a head-less chicken. info is hard to come by it seems.

did you say Packard bell??? Man thats an old puter! my very first desk top was a packard bell with a  get this, 1gig hard drive!
They got bought by HP a long time ago. no wonder you cant find any support. 

Like Jerome said a cloud server is great, an no matter the size of teh HD in my puter,, I always run an external and store all my must keep stuff on it.  HD crashes, it wont take you external.

I would absolutely recommend dropbox.  It's easy to use, it simply shows up as another drive in your Window's explorer, and it doesn't bombard you with advertising or trojan horses.   Google Drive is also very good, as is Box.Net.   I use all three.

hi jerome, i'm still dubious with on-line back-ups as i have some sensitive stuff on there. my brother got caught with identity thieves so i'm really dubious with certain details, so what i'm asking is, how secure are they and would you trust them?

hi beamer is WD Mybook a make of external hard drive? as i've not heard of them. but i'll check them out on-line.

phill